How did Taijiquan, now ubiquitous, establish itself in Southern China? What about the other northern Shaolin systems? I would think that the lion’s share of the credit must go to the Jingwu Association which introduced and popularized several systems throughout the 1920s. Still, the institutional structure of the modernist Jingwu Association tended to absorb sets from various arts rather than presenting them as distinct, self-contained, lineages. The other actor, frequently noted in this equation, is the Guoshu (National Arts) movement.
Guangdong province established its own branch of this national organization relatively early on. I recently heard the assertion that all of the “traditional” practices of southern China could be classified into three categories. First, one had the local Cantonese arts (Hung Gar, Choy Li Fut, etc..), next there were the Hakka styles (White Eyebrow, Dragon) and finally there are the northern arts (Taijiquan, Northern Shaolin). The argument went that it was ultimately the Central Guoshu Association, and their program to promote national unity through martial arts training, that should receive the credit for disseminating these styles to the south.
This particular assertion was made much too quickly, and the author was speedily on to other topics. Still, I think it would be worth our time to go back and parse these events more carefully. Guoshu, as both a term, idea and a historical movement, seems to be enjoying a mini-renaissance at the moment. Speculation as to why this is, and what it ultimately suggests about contemporary Chinese martial arts culture, will need to wait for a separate blog post. Yet, at least in the case of Southern China, it is interesting to note that many of the organization’s greatest contributions to martial culture are rooted in its institutional failures, rather than success. The following meditation on these questions is based largely on research conducted for my co-authored volume (with Jon Nielson) on the social history of the Southern Chinese martial arts. If you are interested in chasing down a more complete account of Guoshu in the Pearl River Delta (or my footnotes) take a look at chapter three.
In a certain sense the prior assertion by the unnamed author is absolutely correct. Even if the Jingwu Association whetted the public’s appetite, the Guoshu movement was directly responsible for the export of many important styles and lineages to the south. Still, if we succumb to a type of easy romanticism about this process, we risk misunderstanding both the nature of the Southern Chinese martial culture and the severity of the challenge that it posed to a program consciously designed to displace regional traditions with a more universal set of practices and identities. Yes, national reformers were able to use the martial arts to shape debates about what the “New China” should be. Yet local society could also turn to these practices in launching their own broadsides against outside forces.
A group photo of organizers and athletes at the 1928 National Guoshu Examination.
A Governor Goes North
The first common misconception that casual readers might have is that the Guoshu organization was truly national in scope. Andrew Morris has noted that the movement’s pretensions to universality and sectoral dominance never materialized in real life. Indeed, it would have been practically impossible for any organization to fully integrate itself into Chinese life, in both the city and the countryside, in only a few years during the turbulent 1930s. China was just too large and complex for this to happen. Further, many of the specific challenges that Guoshu faced stemmed from the group’s unapologetically partisan nature.
Unlike the Jingwu Association, the Central Guoshu Institute was not dedicated to vague notions of Chinese nationalism. Its goals were much more statist in orientation. While encouraging patriotism was important, the group received enthusiastic government backing as it also sought to indoctrinate its practitioners with loyalty to the KMT, and to Chiang Kai-shek in particular. This became an issue as, his victory in the Northern Campaign notwithstanding, not all of the KMT’s notoriously independent cliques and generals were equally enthusiastic about aligning themselves with Chiang and his program. As such, many regions of China actually resisted the spread of the Guoshu. Or, to be more precise, while they may have enthusiastically embraced the name Guoshu, and certain philosophical notions about national strengthening through the reform of the martial arts, they were not about to turn local “paramilitary” assets over to Chiang and his allies.
Morris asks us to consider the case of Shanxi Province in the 1930s. Long a stronghold of traditional boxing, readers may be surprised to learn that it had no official Guoshu chapter. This fact may not at first be evident. The province actually boasted over 500 registered martial arts societies in the 1930s, and many of them using the term Guoshu in their names (evidence of the fashionable nature of the word). Yet the entire area was administered by the independent warlord Yan Xishan who carefully avoided any contact with a program that was (quite correctly) perceived as a tool of Chaing Kai-shek’s close backers.
A very similar pattern could be seen in Fujian and Guangdong. Both provinces were formally administered by the KMT, yet in the post-1927 era their leadership was sometimes protective of their local autonomy. This institutional weakness within the KMT impeded the expansive vision of the Guoshu Institute.
That is not to say that the new movement didn’t have important allies. In October of 1928, General Li Jinshen (governor of Guangdong and an important military figure at the time) visited the first national martial arts examination hosted by the newly organized Central Guoshu Institute in Nanjing. He was so impressed with what he saw that he decided to commit substantial resources to promoting the Guoshu program in Guangxi and Guangdong. He invited Wan Lai Sheng (a Six Harmonies and Shaolin Master) and Li Xian Wu (Taijiquan and a native of Guangdong), to return with him to Guangzhou.
Li quickly drew up plans that were approved by the local government. Wan Lai Sheng was formally appointed the head of the new provincial organization by General Li’s Eighth Army. Given the ambitious nature of Li’s plans, Wan then went about recruiting a number of high-profile instructors. These included Fu Zhensong, Li Xian Wu, Wan Laimin and Gu Ru Zhang (who many readers will already be familiar with). Gu would go on to become the central figure in the promotion of Bak Shaolin (Northern Shaolin) in Guangdong province. These instructors, and Wan, were known in the press as the “The Five Southbound Tigers.”
Li’s Lianguang Guoshu Institute first opened its doors in March of 1929, hosting three sets of two-hour classes a day. The organization had an initial enrollment of 140 students, which quickly increased to close to 500. Still, a closer examination revealed something odd. Rather than filling its ranks with local martial artists looking to get on board with the new national program, almost all of these students were low ranking civil service personal. Still, there was enough “official” demand to both expand the class structure and to begin to offer off-campus instruction at any business or office which could meet the financial requirements and guarantee at least 20 students. Chinese sources note that, once again, it was government offices that dominated the off-campus study program.
Despite these initial struggles to penetrate the local martial arts sub-culture, or perhaps because of them, Governor Li pressed ahead with an ambitious agenda for the Lianguang Guoshu Institute. This was aided through the efforts of the local government. First, an ordinance was passed mandating registration and licensing of all martial arts organizations or schools in the province. Second, the creation of any new martial arts school or organization not administered by the institute’s (mostly Northern) staff was banned. Finally, money was set aside for the creation of a regional publication dedicated to advancing the nationalist and pro-KMT “Guoshu philosophy.”
Backed by the full might of the Eighth Army, the provincial government, and an enthusiastic governor, such a set of reforms could have had stifled Southern China’s vibrant martial culture. Indeed, that seems to have been precisely the goal of their effort. General Li Jishen was quite sincere in his desire to bring the local martial arts community to heel, effectively transforming it into a tool to be exploited by the state. While it remains unclear to me whether these sorts of orders could have been enforced in the countryside, their impact on urban Choy Li Fut or Hung Gar schools would have been disastrous. Deep pools of local knowledge and experience were about to be sacrificed on the altars of “national unity.”
It is interesting to speculate on whether, and how successfully, the local martial arts sector would have resisted these efforts. Fortunately, historians have no answer to that question as Li’s ambitious plans fell apart almost immediately. Indeed, the great weakness of Guoshu’s rapid expansion was that its success depended not so much on popular demand as the political calculations of often unpredictable leaders.
In May of 1929, General Li Jishen took the spectacular step of resigning as governor and traveling to Nanjing with the intention of mediating a truce between Chiang Kai-shek and the “New Guangxi Clique.” This was, to say the least, a serious strategic miscalculation. Negotiations went badly and Chiang (quite predictably) was furious. He had General Li arrested and held until his eventual release in 1931, after which he drifted towards the Communist Party. This left Guangdong in need of a new governor. They received one in the form of Chen Jitang, who is still remembered for his social reforms (the creation of a very basic social safety net) and building programs (he paved the streets of Guangzhou).
One of Chen’s first acts upon taking office was to disband the Guoshu Institute. It is likely that Chen saw this organization as a potential political threat. After all, he did not create it, and many of the individuals within it were loyal to his predecessor. It is also likely that Chen did not want to be that closely associated with a group that was so much under of the influence of Chiang’s most ardent supporters. Whatever the actual reason, budget concerns were cited as the precipitating factor. With a total budget of 4,500 Yuan a month, the Institute was a notable undertaking. But that figure hardly seems outrageous given Li’s expansive vision for the organization. All told the Lianguang Guoshu Institute closed its doors after only two months, and without making any progress towards its ambitious goals.
That is where its story ends. The initial attempts to establish Guoshu in Guangzhou immediately fell victim to internal politics within the KMT. In retrospect it is almost too predictable.
All of which is great, because what happened next had an actual shaping effect on the development of Southern martial culture. The surprising collapse of the Lianguang Institute left a number of extremely talented Northern martial arts exponents unemployed (and more or less stranded) in Guangzhou. This seeming setback created new opportunities that spread the Northern arts more effectively than anything that Li had envisioned. After all, most of the instruction that had been provided in these initial months was directed at a relatively small group of government employees. Chen’s forced dissolution of the organization allowed its instructors to enter into a much broader (and truly competitive) marketplace for martial arts instruction. It was within these smaller commercial schools that arts such as Bak Siu Lam and Taijiquan really took off and came to be accepted by the general public.
Following the breakup of the Guoshu Institute, Li Xian Wu was hired by the Guangdong branch of the Jingwu Assocation as its new director of academic affairs. He later published a well-known guide to taijiquan. Gu Ru Zhang proved to be among the most influential of the remaining staff. Attempting to capitalize on the work that was already accomplished, he sought to create the Guangzhou Guoshu Institute (formally established in June of 1929). Gu was selected as its president, Wang Shaozhou was named its vice president and Re Shen Ku, Li Jing Chun and Yang Ting Xia (the wife of Wang), were all hired as instructors.
This new, smaller, organization enjoyed a measure of official backing and was housed in the National Athletic Association building on Hui Fu East Road in Guangzhou. That said, the new institute never subscribed to the grandiose policy objectives of its predecessors. Rather than regulating Southern China’s martial arts sector, it essentially entered the economic marketplace as one school among many.
And as fate would have it, Gu’s new efforts found some real success. In 1936 the Guangdong Province Athletic Association sponsored a martial arts exhibition at the Guangzhou Public Stadium. Gu’s Guangzhou Guoshu Institute performed for an enthusiastic crowd and received an award from the local government. Still, like most of the other local martial arts organizations it was forced to shut its doors in 1938 during the Japanese occupation. Yet it was due to the more private efforts of Gu and his fellow instructors, rather than the grandiose machinations of General Li, that the Northern arts established long lasting schools and lineages in Southern China. They did so by entering the marketplace and providing a good that consumers actually wanted.
An image of a now famous postcard that Gu Ruzhang sent to his students.
Martial Arts and the Weakness of “Established Churches”
It would be impossible to tell the story of China’s twentieth century martial arts without carefully reviewing the political opportunities, alliances and entanglements that presented themselves in each era. Still, as we review this material it quickly becomes evident that political sponsorship is a double-edged sword. More than one martial arts organization was destroyed by the capricious winds of change blowing through China’s political history. Political alliances proved to be a pathway to rapid growth, but also rapid obsolesce.
Leaders have repeatedly sought to use the martial arts as one element of larger campaigns to shape society more to their liking. In the short-run this creates funding and promotional opportunities. But it also creates martial arts institutions that are more responsive to the demands of political elites than the public who must actually attend classes and pay their sifu’s rent. Such a bargain is rarely good for the martial arts in the long-run as it prevents them from establishing the type of relationship with consumers that is necessary to survive periods of rapid social change.
The story of the Lianguang Guoshu Institute offers a critical insight into the strengths and weaknesses of “established” martial arts (to borrow a term of religious studies.) As a government backed institution, the only students it seemed capable of recruiting were individuals already dependent on the governor for their paychecks. Yet when its instructors were released into the competitive marketplace, they created popular schools and practices that quickly spread the northern styles across southern China. That has had a lasting impact on Guangdong’s martial culture.
Its official, holiday madness is upon us. Still, I wanted to comment on some of the more interesting stories that have been floating around. For new readers, this is a semi-regular feature here at Kung Fu Tea in which we review media stories that mention or affect the traditional fighting arts. In addition to discussing important events, this column also considers how the Asian hand combat systems are portrayed in the mainstream media.
While we try to summarize the major stories over the last month, there is always a chance that we may have missed something. If you are aware of an important news event relating to the TCMA, drop a link in the comments section below. If you know of a developing story that should be covered in the future feel free to send me an email.
Its been way too long since our last update so let’s get to the news!
Keeping kung fu relevant. Source: South China Morning Post.
English language tabloids continue to discover the newly “rediscovered” tradition of Chinese “bull fighting.” This is basically the latest attempt to parlay martial arts exhibitions into a local tourist attraction.
It seems that every year has that one story that just won’t die. If you had asked me at the beginning of the year whether that would be the “ancient art” of kung fu bull fighting, I would blinked in disbelief and asked if you were thinking of Mas Oyama. But here we are!
Calling this an art, or somehow more “real” than Spanish bull fighting, seems like a stretch. But the sudden appearance of this practice (unknown to the international press just last year), suggests that it would make a great case study on the “invention of tradition” in the Chinese martial arts. Or perhaps you could use it to delve into the evolving construction of masculinity within the martial arts. Calling all graduate students…
Shalini Singh’s skill with a broadsword earned her a gold medal last month at the Pan American Wushu Championships in Buenos Aires, Argentina. The San Jose teen is an eighth-grader at Stratford School Raynor in Sunnyvale.
Shalini Singh’s skill with a broadsword earned her a gold medal last month at the Pan American Wushu Championships in Buenos Aires, Argentina. The San Jose teen is an eighth-grader at Stratford School Raynor in Sunnyvale. (Photo courtesy of the Singh family)
She was 7 years old when started at Wushu Central on Coleman Avenue in San Jose and loved it immediately. In 2016, after four years of intense study, she earned a first-degree black belt. Now, she has been practicing Wushu for almost seven years, and currently trains about 18-20 hours per week at Elite Kung Fu Academy in Fremont.
“I really like the focus and discipline that Wushu has instilled in me,” Shalini said. “Wushu has taught me that failures are an opportunity to learn and improve yourself. I used to lose in all of my initial tournaments, and at first, it made me upset and dejected. But the advice of my coaches helped me identify where I was weak, and helped me improve my performance.”
For whatever reason, quite a few authors decided to delve into the history (or supposed history) of the Asian martial arts over the last month. Without a doubt the most sensational of these pieces was provided by the Fox Sports network. Its offering was modestly titled “4 Asian Martial Arts that teach you to end the fight with one strike.” This one is too funny (by which I mean bad) not to delve into.
Martial arts have become a means to deliver discipline, commitment and fitness into the practitioner’s life in the modern day scenario. Yes, one does learn how to defend oneself effectively also but they have largely turned into sport. But as recently as in the first half of the 20th century – the whole focus of martial arts was different. It wasn’t just used to imbue good values and equip someone for self-defence, but in those war-torn times, martial arts was an active engagement strategy against the enemy.
In that time, the focus of learning martial arts was to grievously maim or even kill your enemy in the battlefield.
In case you were wondering what these four deadly venoms are, we begin with Dim Mak (which is apparently now a single martial art invented by Bodhidharma, rather than a set of techniques), Silat (enough said), Ikken Hissatsu (which, judging by the provided video, is basically point karate highlight reel), and Varna Kali. All in all, the article is a font of joyful misunderstanding and myth-making. But in an era when everyone seems intent on tearing down the utility of the traditional martial arts, it stuck me as almost quaint. As I read it I couldn’t helping thinking, “So was this what 1968 felt like?”
The Abbot of the Shaolin Temple chimed in on Xu Xiaodong, the Chinese MMA fighter who has gained notoriety through his challenge matches with various traditional “masters.” Apparently Shi has his back.
“He’s a good guy, even though he’s a totally amateur MMA fighter,” said Shi, adding that “a hundred people in Henan province alone” could defeat Xu.
But Shi concluded: “Xu is doing the right thing by fighting fake kung fu.”
Ok, maybe that wasn’t a ringing endorsement. Still, I didn’t expect that level of engagement with Xu’s quest. Given his reputation with the Wushu establishment (not to mention the Chinese government) there doesn’t seem to be a lot of political upside for abbot Shi Yong Xinin here.
If you’ve ever been to the UFC Performance Institute in Las Vegas, chances are you’ve been wowed by the facility. Well, there is a new PI being constructed in Shanghai that will be three times the size of the one in Sin City.
‘Cultural Exchange Will Strengthen Bonds Between China & Africa.’ So proclaims a “Kung Fu Diplomacy” article in the Liberian Observer. This one discusses the close cooperation between local diplomatic staff and branches of the (ostensibly academic) Confucius Institute in using traditional Chinese culture to further the state’s public diplomacy objectives.
The Embassy of the People’s Republic of China near Monrovia in collaboration with the Confucius Institute at the University of Liberia (UL) on Saturday, November 10, hosted the traditional Chinese Arts performance, with some of the main performers coming from the Hunan University of Chinese Medicine in China.
The event, which was hosted at the Monrovia City Hall, was intended to strengthen China-Liberia relationship, highlighting culture exchanges between the two countries. Some of the performances comprised a series of China’s traditional sport-oriented health maintenance practices, including Martial Arts, Tai Chi, Qigong (a popular Chinese song) about unity, and some Chinese folk dances.
There have been a couple of interesting photo essays in the last couple of weeks. The first follows the career of Huo Jinghong, a 5th generation descendent of Huo Yunjia and an inheritor of his system. That article hits all of the notes that one might expect.
Li Zhujun makes a decorative sword at his studio in Tiejiangzhuang Village of Xingtang County, Shijiazhuang, north China’s Hebei Province, Nov. 14, 2018. For centuries, Tiejiangzhuang Village has been famed for its skillful blacksmiths and prosperous steel making industry. Li Zhujun is one of the village’s top steel makers. Based on the skills inherited from his father, Li gained an expertise in the steel-making technique “refined pattern welding”, which adds complicated patterns to the swords and knives during forging. The technique has been listed as an intangible cultural heritage by the city of Shijiazhuang. In recent years, the 47-year-old blacksmith has devoted himself to the renewal of this technique. His decorative swords, thus forged with more alternative patterns, show the enhanced aesthetics and exquisite product quality. (Xinhua/Chen Qibao)
Filipinos’ fascination for martial arts comes alive as more than 200 martial arts experts across the globe converge in Manila on Nov. 24 to celebrate the 80th founding anniversary of the Kong Han Athletic Club, the country’s premier martial arts school.
Abbot Chang Ding of Quanzhou City’s Shaolin Temple, and some 30 monks and members of the International South Shaolin Wuzuquan Federation, will lead participants on the occasion.
Did you hear about Marvel’s ambitious new superhero film project featuring Shang-Chi, a son of Fu Manchu. As you might have guessed, that last plot point is not going over well in China (where Marvel films are decently popular). Why? Fu Manchu, the villain of many ‘yellow peril’ novels is still widely remembered as an offensive symbol of Western anti-Chinese discrimination.
Anyone out there interested in martial arts and politics? If so, Malaysian Silat has been in the news quite a bit over the last few weeks. This article, titled “Silat alliance submits memo on ICERD, Malay issues at Istana Negara,” is a good place to get your orientation.
KUALA LUMPUR: Members of a silat coalition, known as Gabungan Silat Pertahan Perlembagaan, submitted a memorandum to the Yang Di-Pertuan Agong today, expressing their protest over International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination (ICERD) and other issues….Apart from the ICERD issue, Shahruddin said the note also highlighted the group’s other demands which included calling for the protection and upholding of Malay rights, Federal Constitution and the royal institution.
Typically I structure the MAS section of these news-updates around conference announcements and book updates. This time we are going to look at some new articles and papers instead. The first is a piece that I really enjoyed by Colin P. McGuire. You have all heard the song. Now its time to delve into what it really tells us about Cantonese martial culture!
Wong Fei-hung was a Cantonese martial arts master from southernChina who became associated with a melody called ‘General’s Ode’. Since the 1950s, over 100 Hong Kong movies and television showshave forged the link by using this melody as Master Wong’s theme.During fieldwork in a Chinese Canadian kung fu club, I observed several consultants claiming this piece as a Cantonese nationalanthem—a hymn for a nation without a sovereign state. Virtualethnography conducted online showed that this opinion is heldmore widely, but that the piece also inspires broader Chinesenationalist sentiment. My analysis of speech-tone relationships tomelodic contour in Cantonese and Mandarin versions of the song,however, has revealed a tight integration with the former that thelatter lacked. By sharpening Anderson’s concept of unisonance, I explore how this song has become an unofficial transnationalanthem for Cantonese people, arguing that Master Wong’s themeauralises an abstract sense of imagined community.
I chose the next paper as a representative of the rapidly growing literature on the South East Asian martial arts. And it seemed to offset some of the previous discussion of Silat.
The paper introduces Silat Tua, a traditional Malay martial art, and its relationship to the tropics of the Malaysian Peninsula and Singapore through the imagery work of the four Elements: Earth, Water, Fire, and Wind. In a world of increasing disconnect between Humans and Nature, the Silat Tua practice is a traditional martial art for bringing harmony and healing, as well as an understanding of how the building blocks of Nature can harmonise, complement and resonate with the natural resources of the human mind, body and spirit. Through recounting the legend of the art’s origin, the first proponent of Silat Tua is shown to have gained inspiration and lessons from the inhabited environment. Examples of how a Silat exponent may explore and come to understand the Elements are discussed before venturing into the practical application of the Elements in cultivating mindfulness and influencing behaviour. The physical environment thus, is not only a source of inspiration for movement but indeed an impetus for leading a harmonious and virtuous life. The paper concludes with the connection and implications of the Elements training in Singapore and its potential in navigating oneself through the constant changes inevitable in life.
I have not yet had a chance to read the following paper by George Jennings. But it looks fascinating and brings the conversation around to the martial practices of Latin America (a topic that deserves more discussion).
There are numerous ways to theorise about elements of civilisations and societies known as ‘body’, ‘movement’, or ‘physical’ cultures. Inspired by the late Henning Eichberg’s notions of multiple and continually shifting body cultures, this article explores his constant comparative (trialectic)approach via the Mexican martial art, exercise, and human development philosophy—
Xilam. Situating Xilam within its historical and political context and within a triad of Mesoamerican, native, and modern martial arts, combat sports, and other physical cultures, I map this complexity through Eichberg’s triadic model of achievement, fitness, and experience sports. I then focus my analysis on the aspects of movement in space as seen in my ethnographic fieldwork in one branch of the Xilam school. Using a bare studio as the setting and my body as principle instrument, I provide an impressionist portrait of what it is like to train in Xilam within a communal dance hall (space) and typical class session of two hours (time) and to form and express warrior identity from it. This articledisplays the techniques; gestures and bodily symbols that encapsulate the essence of the Xilam bodyculture, calling for a way to theorise from not just from and on the body but also across body cultures.
Finally, Paul Bowman has circulated a draft of this paper for comment and discussion. Looks fascinating!
this paper seeks to broach the complex relations of pleasure and violence in martial arts, in relation to their practice, performance and forms of consumption. It does so first by setting out the broad contours of the discursive status of both violence and pleasure in current debates about martial arts, before going on to deconstruct the implications of two short media texts: a controversial 2006 French Connection TV advert known as ‘Fashion versus Style’, and an uncontroversial music video for the 2015 song ‘Be Your Shadow’ by The Wombats.
An assortment of Chinese teas. Source: Wikimedia.
Kung Fu Tea on Facebook
A lot has happened on the Kung Fu Tea Facebook group over the last month. We looked at antique weapons, reviewed some Republic era TCMA manuals, and learned how to defend ourselves with nothing but a bicycle! (Yeah, apparently that was actually a thing in 1900). Joining the Facebook group is also a great way of keeping up with everything that is happening here at Kung Fu Tea.
Horse races are strongholds of pageantry and tradition, but when it comes to medieval texture, few can compare with the Palio di Siena. Oddly, any footage of the event reminds me of a critical issue within martial arts studies. I suppose that is an occupational hazard. Pretty much anything can remind me of some aspect of the martial arts.
Still, a few words on the Palio may be in order before setting out to explore what is “traditional” in current martial practice, and what this term should denote in academic writing. Hopefully exploring one of Europe’s oldest (and probably most dangerous) horse races will help us to distinguish between the notion of “tradition” as a rhetorical posture within the modern discourse on the martial arts, and the critical ways in which pre-modern martial arts activities diverge from their modern counterparts. Even if the physical movements and uniforms are indistinguishable from what was seen in the past, the actual activity that individuals are engaged in are always a response to contemporary events and conditions.
If one types “Palio” in a YouTube search bar, you will find numerous clips of horses and jockeys racing at breakneck speeds through Siena’s wonderful architecture, cheered on by an enthusiastic crowd. If you watch a little longer a few oddities will begin to appear. To begin with, traditional Italian architecture was never really designed with horse racing in mind. Indeed, it was probably more interested in slowing down mounted charges than facilitating them. It is not uncommon for horses to go down or riders to be unseated. That tendency is multiplied by the fact that the jockeys race bareback.
Even more interesting is the crowd itself, packed into every space surrounding the designated race course. The term “throng” is thrown around rather loosely, but no other word comes to mind as you survey the pulsing sea of humanity. Yes, tourists come to see the race. But the only way to achieve that density would be if a sizable proportion of the local neighborhoods showed up as well. Which of course thy do.
The Palio di Siena is much more than a horserace to the 17 wards that make up the city. It is a time of rivalry in which each neighborhood conspires to host banquets, celebrations, religious processions and demonstrations in an attempt to impress and outdo their neighbors. The race itself (run only by horses representing 10 of these wards, selected by lot) is the climax of a cycle of preparation that spans much of the year. Bands must be maintained, flag throwers trained, and one suspects that quite a bit of expense goes into maintaining Siena’s rather large population of urban race horses. In rare instances a special race is even commissioned to celebrate important city events or to mark critical anniversaries.
Each race is a festival, and the best party in town. It also appears that for many members of the local neighborhoods, the party is a requirement. One simply does not root for a horse from a neighboring ward simply because it has a better chance of winning. Everyone knows which team they are on, because it was the team that they were born into. While tourists watch the race, they do not, and cannot, experience it in the same way as those whose lives are interwoven with it. For them the party seems mandatory.
A depiction of kicking and unarmed fighting traditions in the traditional Italian martial arts.
The Italian Martial Arts Renaissance
While spectacular, the Palio di Siena is not unique. Italy’s famously independent cities and regions have generated countless festivals. Many of them have a distinctly martial character. The history of the Palio is fairly well known. It seems that seasonal boxing and jousting tournaments gave way to bull fighting and horse-racing at the end of the medieval period. The modern Palio (reorganized and consolidated in an attempt to reduce accidental injuries) dates to the early 1700s. Many of these Italian contests pit neighborhoods against each other. Sometimes the contests are good natured. In other instances, things look more like organized brawling held under the guise of some sort of sporting contest. But no matter the specific object of the festival, there are always parties.
It was actually the parties that caught my attention. Recently I have had the good fortune to observe small pieces of what might be called the modern Italian martial arts renaissance. Increasingly I am finding Italian martial artists in all sorts of unexpected places. Traditional Italian martial arts, including various styles of knife and stick fighting, have established footholds in North America and countries like Germany, France and Russia.
While something like Sicilian knife fighting is among the most visible of the Italian martial arts, this material has not traveled alone. Italian systems of boxing and wrestling are also being re-popularized. And the explosion of interest in HEMA has provided a ready-made outlet for many schools of Italian historical fencing. Indeed, a colleague in the Bay Area (and specialist in Italian stick fighting) recently told me that in his view the “traditional” Italian martial arts are united by a shared inheritance of embodied knowledge preserved within, and then borrowed from, these older fencing practices.
This view, while historically interesting, also reminds us of something else. There is a lot going on in the world of the Italian martial arts that does not fit within the self-identified realm of “tradition.” Italy has several interesting boxing traditions firmly rooted in the 20thcentury. Judo, BJJ and MMA are all popular pursuits. In fact, Ludosport, one of the largest lightsaber combat schools, was founded in Milan in the 2000s. It has since established branches all over Europe and North America. While I wonder whether some local stick fighting techniques made their way into the Ludosport curriculum, no one would think to call this a “traditional Italian martial art.”
That is where the puzzle begins to unfold. How do we know a “traditional” art when we see one? What specific practices, identities or expectations set these apart from their modern cousins?
In the 20thcentury “traditional Asian martial arts” declared their presence in a number of ways. They tended to introduce unique, nationally defined, training uniforms. Elaborate, usually invented, histories were taught to students as a way of defining their new identity as members of the schools and emphasizing a shared set of values. Movements were stylized in unique and aesthetically pleasing ways. New modes of personal address were introduced. Sometimes students were even expected to master a new language (whether Japanese, Korean or even Portuguese) if they wished to really “understand” their chosen martial practice. This differs from the ethos of the modern combat sports (boxing, wrestling and MMA) which embrace contemporary society, rather than throwing up symbolic barriers.
In these specific respects Ludosport actually comes off as a very “traditional” martial art. It strictly maintains its own codes of dress, address and behavior. Indeed, it tends to be a rather closed community at least partially because of these strategies. One is also expected to learn at least of bit of Italian to take part in classes. Yet its engagement with Italian culture goes well beyond that. I recently had the opportunity to watch students in southern New York counting down drills, naming techniques and going through entire tournament matches without a word of English being spoken. At least within Ludosport, Italian has become the universal language of the lighsaber. One suspects that a degree of fluency and affinity for Italian culture would be a practical (if not formal) prerequisite for actually mastering this system.
I think that the love of a good party is probably also necessary to flourish within the Ludosport community. Its organizers have devoted substantial energy to creating a yearly cycle of tournaments, each with its own period of preparation, and each followed by a period of celebration. Indeed, one of the things that has been most surprising about this community is distances that individuals are willing to travel (and the economic resources they will spend), to participate in these gatherings. The parties almost feel mandatory, and they are clearly the sort of community strengthening exercise that Emile Durkheim would have delighted in.
This global export of Italian culture is not unique to Ludosport. I asked what sort of student was most likely to take up the traditional Italian martial arts (knife and stick) while interviewing another instructor who moved to the Bay Area some time ago. He noted that when he began to teach, he expected only limited interest from the local community. Given the extent to which these practices are tied directly to Italian culture he guessed that his students would mostly be Italian Americans looking to reconnect with their heritage. Instead he discovered a huge amount of interest and a student body that closely mirrored the demographics of the local universities. While Italian-Americans occasionally take an interest in Sicilian knife fighting, or the Shepard’s stick, most of his students have no direct connection to Italy and many are Asian Americans.
When asked why these sorts of students stayed, or what they got out of traditional stick fighting, my friend concluded, after a moment of thought, that it was probably the community. They loved learning the language. They loved the dinners and the parties. He noted, with some surprise, the number of American university students who are now taking time to travel to Italy specifically to study with other martial arts instructors there.
On a technical level Ludosport is engaged in a very different exercise than that of my friend in the Bay Area. He pursues the study of “traditional” arts while they are intent on developing a “hyper-real” one. He wields a stick or knife, while they opt for the lightsaber. He teaches a skill-based classes to local university students, while Ludosport (which also supports a skills based curriculum) seems more interested in organizing itself as an international athletic league.
Yet for all of their differences, both organizations strike me as playing a fundamentally similar role within the Italian martial arts renaissance. Each presents a set of skills embedded within a distinctly Italian cultural framework. This rich web of understanding is conveyed not just through embodied knowledge (which obviously constitutes the core of actual practice), but also through the promotion of media, social networks, language acquisition, travel and an emphasis on the intensive socialization of new students. What sorts of models exist for understanding this behavior (or in the case of Ludosport, creating it from the ground up)? One suspects that examining Italy’s long history of neighborhood festivals (often structured around quasi-military contests) might be a good place to start.
A less traditional Italian martial art.
The Mandatory Party?
Still, the more we look at festivals like Palio di Siena, the more paradoxes appear. Can a raging, multi-week, period of intensive community preparation, practice and partying really be made mandatory? What sort of social sanctions could convince people who don’t like the traffic (or who find the injuries to horses and riders disturbing) not to take that long-awaited vacation to Canada? Or on a more philosophical level, if the community mandates that you go out and have fun, isn’t that really a type of work? Sure, there may be loud music and lots of alcohol, but if one is required to be there, aren’t you really performing a civic or organizational duty?
This was one of several important questions that the anthropologist Victor Turner asked in his 1974 essay “Liminal to Liminoid, in Play, Flow and Ritual: As Essay in Comparative Symbology.” His answer is particularly important for understanding the gradations of “tradition” that we might find in the martial arts. Yet on an even more basic level, he attempts to provide insights about the nature of the modern world, and the ways that industrialized and post-industrial societies tend to reposition “play” as “leisure” and “work” as “labor.”
The brief version of Turner’s answer would likely be that the existence of a “mandatory party” is possible in certain times and places, but not in our current situation. The advent of industrialization brought a fundamental transformation to how we understand concepts like “leisure” and “free time.” As such, when we see something that resembles, or postures, as a mandatory party, its important to consider what social work it is attempting to accomplish within a modern social context. What set of personal or psychological needs are being fulfilled by something that is, in reality, almost certainly a voluntary consumption decision?
Turner begins by observing that in truly traditional communities, characterized by extensive face to face interactions, the line between transformative ritual (whether seasonal in nature or a rite of passage) and the world of normal daily work was often not what we would think. Agricultural or physical labor was necessary to prepare material for religious sacrifices which would then ensure the productivity of one’s work in the coming year. An individual ritual action might be hedged about with symbolic cultural markers, demarcating it as “sacred space.” Yet the cycles of the calendar itself tended to unite things into a single whole. It dictated when work would happen, when times would be lean, and when festivals could be celebrated. Regulating the success of this system (thus ensuring the survival of the group) monopolized the resources of the community.
It is not a surprise, then, to read about entire communities coming out to cooperatively plant in the spring or gather crops later in the year. That sort of work was an economic and social necessity. Yet Turner went on to note that the sorts of feasts and festivals that occurred in these communities were also mandatory and a type of social work, rather than being an optional event or an example of modern “leisure.” Just as one had a responsibility to work in the community fields, or defend the community’s boundaries in its militia, one also had a responsibility to take part in the festivals and rituals that ensured fecundity, or attempted to ward off disease or natural disaster.
Certainly, these times were marked with celebration and creative play. Yet they were also instances of very intense social work. The notion of true leisure (meaning a realm of voluntary activity chosen by the individual and financed by the fruits of their personal labor) could only come into existence once economic markets had been developed in land and labor, a process that Karl Polanyi called “The Great Transformation.” Turner had much to say about this distinction, but perhaps we can summarize simply by noting that even if a given ritual might be preserved across this cultural barrier, its nature and meaning would be utterly transformed. To call on a seasonal example, wassailing in 16thcentury England was quite different, and implied a very different set of social structures and responsibilities, then singing Christmas carols today. The latter is strictly a voluntary (and modern) activity. The former was very much a “mandatory party” which wealthy landowners could not easily opt out of.
I think that one can see all of this illustrated in our modern confusion over the definition of Chinese martial culture. Did these practices originate in the changing social conditions (urbanization) of the Song dynasty, the coastal military crisis of the Ming, or ritual attempts to control disease, flood and famine in the Qing? The answer, of course, is “yes.” Both practice and performance have been deeply implicated within the development of the Chinese martial arts. The 16thcentury piracy crisis necessitated the reform of martial training to counter a new threat. Yet the four horsemen of the apocalypse always ride together. Famine and disease do not exist separately from military conflict. They are closely associated with it. Wars lead to hunger, and hunger leads to social violence.
This relationship was clearly understood by Chinese scholars, community leaders and military officers, all of whom had ample opportunities to study the subject in great detail. Thus martial rituals (lion and dragon dancing, several types of temple processions, the staging of community operas) carried out to address these more existential threats cannot ever be fully separated from the practical business of “real” martial arts training. Our constant attempts to do so, to fracture the overall unity of martial culture, tells us much more about the ways that economic and social specialization shape our own culture than anything about what happened in pre-1911 China. In 1840 both training with the militia and celebrating the New Year with the lion dance company were examples of “kung fu” because both were types of social work that certain young men were expected to render to the larger community. At times there was a ludic aspect to this work, but again, the party was mandatory.
None of this is the case today. Indeed, the party itself seems to have largely vanished. While conducting interviews I often hear the old timers talk about the wonderful socialization that happened after training at Chinese martial arts schools during the 1970s and 1980s. They relate stories of the hours spent in restaurants, or the group expeditions to grindhouse theaters to watch kung fu films. It all sounds wonderful. But I have never actually seen anything like it within my own experience. Instead, it is always framed as something “we used to do.”
When I ask about the change inevitably I hear that people grew-up, had families and got too busy. I suspect that this also signals the dramatic loss of social capital within American society that Putnam and other social scientists have written about. Still, the very fact that one can make a choice about this, that the party can even go out of fashion, suggests that these sorts of activities are very different from their pre-modern forbearers. What had been social work, necessary to maintaining the community, came to be experienced as a type of leisure, one consumer good among many which individuals used to fill their free time. It was this prior transformation that allowed it to become too expensive or unfashionable to continue.
All of this should lead to a moment’s reflection on what we mean when using the term “traditional” to discuss the martial arts. I am not suggesting that anyone change their terminology, but we should be aware that two very different possibilities are always at play. Logically, “tradition” would seem to refer to the practices and social structures of the pre-modern era. It was at this time that one might find a truly “mandatory party,” or martial arts practice understood as a necessary aspect of community service. Yet that is almost never what practitioners or scholars actually mean when using the term today. Instead they are referring to a group of modern practices which emerged in the late 19thor 20thcentury, almost all of which attempt to convey an ethno-nationalist body of knowledge through a type of physical training defining itself in opposition to “modern” (read, universally available) sports. This is “tradition” as a label that is chosen within a very modern marketplace of ideas, rather than something that predates or rejects a modernist understanding of the world. While the label points back to an imagined past of “essentialist” and immutable national identities, such a usage can exist only within a contemporary context.
“Local Militia Shandong.” 1906-1912 by Fr. Michel de Maynard.
Conclusion
So why would some communities (either kung fu schools in the 1970s, or Italian martial arts today) attempt to replicate the tradition of the mandatory party? Again, rather than an actual return to the past, one suspects that this is a response to proximate concerns found within recent trends. Over the summer I had a chance to attend Ludosport’s first national tournament in the USA and was surprised by the number of athletes that they assembled. It must have been a sizable percentage of the organization’s entire American student body. One can only wonder at the economic costs of making something like that happen.
As the tournament went on the attraction became more evident. Certainly, the matches and workshops were interesting, but the party was fantastic. It was the primary means by which old friendships were reinforced and new relationships forged. It was there that the basic social values of the group were hashed out. Indeed, these social gatherings were so important they were not left to chance. Ample time for “spontaneous” socialization was actually built into the events schedule. Further, the organizer’s habit of repeatedly scheduling important business meetings for school owners and instructors as “break-out sessions” during the main parties meant that for the professional within the group, the “mandatory party” was not just a metaphor. You really did have to be there. That was actually rough on many of the more jetlagged attendees.
Creating a martial arts group that can impose these sorts of costs on its member is not easy in the current environment. The higher the barriers to entry, the lower one’s potential student base will be. Still, it is not hard to see the attraction in all of this. Social and economic changes within the American economy have, over the last few decades, hollowed out its once vibrant community and associational life. Individuals crave a sense of intense, authentic community, something that, in an increasingly chaotic world, you can build a life around.
Creating those sorts of institutions is no easy task. It is one that goes well beyond looking for a time to schedule a couple of weekday classes. Still, the recent success of the Italian martial arts (whether traditional or hyper-real) in North America suggests that there is an immense appetite for this more intensive community experience.
This also raises questions for students of martial arts studies. When you look at the “clan structure”, cyclic yearly calendar and “mandatory parties” of Ludosport, it is easy to be reminded of the pre-modern traditions of something like the Palio di Siena. Indeed, one suspects that these sorts of social institutions served as a model for the construction of this more modern organization. Yet if we forget that the world that structures these demands is actually quite different from the one that gave rise to an earlier generation of community traditions, that modern leisure is not the same thing as peasant’s play, we will misunderstand the social work that the martial arts perform today.
The latest (dire) global warming report produced by US government scientists is inspiring conversations everywhere. I overheard a particularly interesting discussion between two colleagues earlier this week which focused not so much on the technological or policy measures that would be necessary to deal with rapid climate change, but the sorts of social attitudes would be necessary to support those steps. They were discussing well-funded public relations campaigns, but I must confess that I have (empirically well grounded) doubts as to how effective these sorts of efforts can be. “Confirmation bias” suggests that people are most likely to accept messages that reinforce what they already believe, or what they have already experienced. Long lasting changes in attitude usually emerge from the ground up, and not as a slick advertising campaign. After all, not every advertisement for a product, candidate or social cause is quite as successful as its backers may have hoped.
This is one of the reasons why I am interested in popular culture. It allows one to begin to decipher some of the logic behind larger patterns of political change or stability. Rather than being an escape from the world of politics, I often think of it as the repository of shared attitudes and values which are the raw materials of tomorrow’s innovations. It literally defines the realm of what is imaginable. Whether that is a comforting thought is a different question.
The martial arts may, at first, seemed removed from large scale social or political concerns. Much of our research focuses on identity, embodied experience, history, or the impact of these practices on relatively small communities. All of this is important, but it does not exhaust the significance of the martial arts within modern society. I suspect that many of us study the micro-effects of the martial arts as we are martial arts practitioners ourselves. We are anecdotally aware of their transformative power, so it is only natural that we would want to explore and systematize these insights.
Nevertheless, there is a bigger picture. The social effects of the martial arts stretch far beyond the relatively small and ever shifting group of individuals who are actually training in them at a given point in time. Their representation in the media has a profound effect on how we imagine our world. I also suspect that the interaction between these arts and the political realm are likely to become increasingly significant.
That last proposition may seem far-fetched as we spar, roll or practice on any given night. To understand how we must first come to terms with the economic concept of the “externality.” Simply put, this notion helps to explain “market failures” when (from society’s point of view) too little or too much of a good is provided. While discussions that treat the martial arts as something that can be bought or sold tend to be socially frowned upon, the simple truth is that almost all of us encounter them as a commercial product within an economic marketplace. An externality exists when the individuals who buy and sell a good (that would be us) are not capable of capturing the full benefits (or negative implications) of their market transaction.
A quick illustration may be helpful. Psychologists have noted that moods tend to be “contagious” within a social network. If you are surrounded by individuals who are stressed and unhappy, you are more likely to feel the same way, all else being equal. But if one of your friends is in a particularly good mood, that is likely to have an impact on your mood as well. I suspect that many of my readers can already guess where I am going with this. Individuals who practice the martial arts (or who engage in any form of regular exercise) report increased levels of wellness (measured across a wide variety of dimensions) and lower stress levels. That is precisely why many of these students pay for school membership in the first place.
Yet the “contagious” aspects of mood and lifestyle choices suggest that friends and family members are also reaping some of the benefits of this consumption choice even if they have never taken a single martial arts class. Because their increase in well-being is invisible in a supply/demand, chart it is not taken into account when a teacher decides how many nights of instruction to offer, or a consumer decides how many hours a week to devote to training. The end result is the existence of an externality where, because the full benefits of some people’s martial arts practices are hard to measure, the “good” in question is under-provided.
This is a single, somewhat trivial, example. But the world of the martial arts and combat sports generates dozens of similar externalities’ touching on all sorts of cultural, social and political questions. These externalities are likely to be shaped by the social, market and political forces that regulate the expression of the martial arts in a given place, and as such they vary by country and time period. In some cases we may also find that martial arts practice (like the consumption of any good) has unexpected negative consequences and that they are being over-provided. For instance, one suspects the current culture of traveling long distances for short seminars which is so vital to the financial success of many martial arts schools is doing the planet no favors. That seems like something that is likely to change in the future.
Nor is any of this a particularly new idea, though, to the best of my knowledge, no one has yet to formalize these intuitions through the lens of micro-economics. China and Japan both subsidized, promoted and even mandated certain types of martial arts practice in the early 20thcentury, but not because there was a burning need to train middle school students in practical self-defense skills. Rather they realized that an entire complex of other values and “benefits” (fitness, discipline, patriotism, increased militarism) accompanied martial arts training. It was the secondary effects of Guoshu or Budo that drove their consumption. Whether any of this would really “work in the octagon” was not the primary consideration in the promotion of these programs.
Fortunately for us, the violent and unstable years of the 1930s are now in the past. But what about the future? How might the unintended, unpriced, consequences of martial arts practice help us to deal with some of the massive challenges facing modern society? When might some of these externalities take on negative consequences? And what sort of balance are we likely to see between grass roots efforts emerging out of popular culture on the one hand, and coordinated (possibly government backed) information campaigns on the other?
Obviously, such a topic is too big for a single blog post. It could well be the subject of an entire series of books. My goal in this essay is to lay out some unexpected macro-level ways in which the martial arts might help (or inhibit) our attempts to address largescale issues. The following post touches on global warming as a “hot” topic that has been in the news. Yet this basic method of analysis, one that focuses on the externalities of martial arts practice, could easily be applied to any number of social or political issues (some of which I may return to in the future.)
A typically minimalist Japanese dojo. Photograph by Jared Miracle.
Wabi-Sabi and a Warming Planet
While popular discussions tend to focus on the practical “reality” of the martial arts, or perhaps their history, I suspect that much of their true transformative value lies in the unique aesthetic vision that each art conveys. A certain amount of caution is necessary here as the exact contents of this vision varies from art to art. The cunning of Brazilian Capoeira practitioners can be seen and felt in their practice. It is one part of a set of social survival strategies that is discussed, debated and judged in physical movement. Yet the uniqueness of Brazilian society suggests that this cannot ultimately be reduced to the sorts of “cunning” that one might find in Irish stick fighting, or the “yin power” that is expressed in Chinese martial or ritual performance. Both “yin power” and “cunning” can be understood as aesthetic expressions of cultural meditations on the challenges of survival in often harsh environments. Yet each conveys a distinct set of nuances and insights.
Given the importance of the Japanese martial arts in kicking off the modern exploration of these fighting systems, perhaps we should not be surprised to discover that the concept of Wabi-Sabi (usually understood as values related simplicity, impermanence, asymmetry and austerity) has permeated further into the global consciousness that any of these other martial arts related visions. It is not hard to find evidence of the philosophical notions (focusing on the Buddhist insights that all things are impermanent, empty and vessels for suffering) that underpinned this aesthetic style within the Japanese martial arts. One can see it in the simplicity of the traditional judo gi, the austere etiquette of the dojo, and even the way that scrolls or artwork are presented in the school’s tokonoma.
Still, my first encounter with Wabi-Sabi was not mediated by the martial arts. As I teenager I was lucky enough to study with (and work for) Bill Valavanis, who runs the International Bonsai Arboretum in Rochester NY. It was primarily through the mediums of bonsai, traditional Japanese gardening and stone appreciation that I encountered a set of concepts which amounted to a profound meditation on the nature of existence at a formative time in my own life. Neither martial artists or Bonsai masters can deny the essential truth of existence. All things are impermanent, and all things are incomplete. Within such a philosophical framework it is easy to elevate frugality, simplicity and austerity as the key guiding values of human existence.
One suspects that a profound appreciation for Wab-Sabi arose just as much out of the observation of daily life in early-modern Japan as erudite Buddhist argument. In truth, Japanese life was often harsh, food was scarce, and the material conditions that most people lived under were spartan at best. Japanese houses were (and to a certain extent remain) unheated during the winter, and the hottest days of summer brought their own challenges. Yet students of Japanese history and culture are often amazed by the beautiful material culture that was woven out of these challenging conditions.
The modern West sits at a crossroads. Our social, economic and political systems have rested on the core principle that people should be able to consume as many material goods as they want. And if they cannot achieve this level of consumption now, they have a right to work towards it in the future. It seems unlikely that this situation can continue. Failure to politically address rising sea levels, increased severe weather and the future loss of prime agricultural land to drought would be economically and socially catastrophic. One might think of this worst-case scenario as global warming’s “hard landing.”
But even the best-case, most cooperative, scenarios will eventually require a massive adjustment to practically everyone’s lifestyle within the industrialized West. Short of a miraculous technological innovation that allows us to pull carbon from the atmosphere at will, huge changes in consumer behavior are likely in store. These will influence what we eat, how we travel and where we live. We are likely to see birthrates plummet across the developed world as raising children becomes more expensive. In the long run, cuts in consumer activity married to a dropping, aging, population, suggests that we could see a significant shrinking of major markets. That, in turn, suggests a massive reduction in the rates technological, medical and social change which we have come to expect.
Anyone who has spent enough time in the social sciences knows how difficult forecasting is. Economists love to make predictions. In my field (political science) we try to avoid it whenever possible. The challenges of modeling climate change are well known and much discussed. But they pale next to the sheer impossibility of predicting how people (at either the individual or national level) are likely to respond to this. And given that the scope of climate change (whether we can ensure a relatively “minor” rise of 2 degrees, or if we end up in more of a worst-case scenario) is dependent on the creative and cooperative behavior of such unpredictable actors, I don’t think that anyone can accurately say what the future will be.
Still, we know a few things. Whether we agree to tie our own hands through democratically decided legislation, or allow unmediated market forces and natural processes to do it through a “hard landing,” the average resident of the Western world will be consuming a lot less. Realistic carbon taxes (if instituted) will raise the price of all sorts of inelastic goods (food, transportation, heating) in relatively predictable ways. Drought, sea-level change and a rising demand for energy will do the same things (though in a much less predictable way) through market mechanisms. One way or another, discretionary spending is going to drop. It is hard to say by how much, or when. But it is impossible to believe that this will not have a substantive effect on where and how we live. In short, we are already transitioning from a period of “wanting more” to one of “getting less.”
The beauty of snow, contrasted with the challenge of winter, has often been a subject for Japanese artists. Source: Evening Snow at Kanbara, from the series “Fifty-three Stations of the Tōkaidō” by Utagawa Hiroshige. metmuseum.org
This brings me back to the Japanese notion of Wabi-Sabi. Within this philosophical vision “freedom” does not originate from one’s ability to escape the bounds of the natural world. Rather, freedom is found as one lives successfully in harmony with it. More often than not in Japanese history, this has taken the form of finding beauty and meaning in the simple, the frugal, the rustic and the sincere.
As a political scientist I worry that the sorts of “diminished expectations” that climate change is already bringing will lead to increased levels of social instability and violence. It is hard to see the current riots in France (the worst since 1968) as anything other than a preview of what could happen in many other places as carbon taxes start to bite, or governments lose the ability to keep up with mounting natural disasters and rising food prices. Some of this will be unavoidable. But our social expectations of a world in which progress is measured in increased consumption is sure to exacerbate such tensions.
The concept of Wabi-Sabi is interesting to me as it has always been more than a set of guidelines for gardening or architecture. It is a remarkably well-developed argument about the benefits of choosing less, of living simply, rather than always pushing for more. The central problem of modern existence is the creation of social and individual meaning. Whatever its drawbacks, the economically focused “American Dream” succeeded in structuring the imaginations, efforts and expectations of generations. It can only be modified or replaced by another set of principles capable of doing the same.
Telling a generation of Americans that due to their carbon footprint they can only buy “tiny homes,” or 500 square foot urban apartments, is a recipe for revolution. But supporting a vision of society where people spend more time having experiences with friends and family rather than working to acquire ever more things to stuff in ever larger houses could be the beginning of a renaissance. Cultivating a deep appreciation for Wabi-Sabi as an aesthetic vision, and accepting the fundamental values that lie behind it, could be an important step in making that happen. Indeed, it might prove to be the most important moment of cultural exchange between Japan and the global West.
This is where we return to the martial arts. Sadly, one cannot really gain an understanding of these concepts (let alone cultivate a new set of values) simply by reading blog posts. In my experience Wabi-Sabi is a set of values that must be physically experienced to be fully appreciated. My small appreciation for these values came from hours spent working in an arboretum as a teenager, time spent living in Japan as a young adult, and countless hours invested in the training hall.
Sadly, Bonsai is not a not a very popular hobby in the United States. But the martial arts are. They are studied by children and adults in a wide variety of settings. More importantly, they are projected, appreciated and debated through our media. While only a minority of individuals practice them, there are very few people who don’t have some sort of expectations about, or understanding of, the Asian martial arts. This makes them an important vector to promote a new set of values as society enters an era of consuming less but appreciate more.
As intriguing as this possibility is, it would still require a massive effort. Indeed, this is where political intervention or well-funded informational campaigns might enter the picture. In large part the martial arts have succeeded in the West as they have been adapted to reflect modern Western values, rather than the full complexity of, say, Chinese or Japanese culture. Yet the perpetual search for authenticity within these communities (and perhaps the new or exotic by those who are curious about them), might provide an opening to increasingly bring notions like Wabi-Sabi to the forefront of public discussions of certain martial arts. Equally helpful would be public relations campaigns linking these values to fashionable changes going on in other areas of popular culture, health, architecture or diet. Again, physically enacting such values, and experiencing them in multiple realms of life, is a necessary precondition for their acceptance.
One might object, correctly, that in focusing on the philosophical or aesthetic dimension of the martial arts we lose sight of their “true purpose.” Worse yet, we risk turning them into purely didactic, rather than practical, exercise. Certainly, care is necessary. Yet it is worth remembering that communities and nations have always been acutely aware of the externalities that the martial arts produce. Throughout the 19thand 20thcentury states were generally much more interested in the “supplementary” side effects of martial practice than the details of what was actually taught in the training hall. Acknowledging this fact is not “politicizing” the martial arts. They have been political all along. The real challenge facing us, both as scholars and practitioners, is to understand the full social implications of what we are already doing. Only then can we ask the difficult questions about what will best safeguard the psychological well-being and physical safety of our students as we move into an uncertain future.
棍進槍 STAFF VERSUS SPEAR 蘭晉如 by Lan Jinru [Chapters 7–10 of An Authentic Description of Shaolin Staff Methods, published Jan, 1930]
[translation by Paul Brennan, Nov, 2018]
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第七章 棍進槍 CHAPTER SEVEN [CHAPTERS 7–10]: STAFF VERSUS SPEAR
開門式 第一動作 OPENING POSTURE / MOVEMENT 1
甲方。（卽持棍人）雙手持棍。右手持棍尾在胸前。手心向下。左手抓棍身。在身後。手心向裏。使棍斜伏於左脇。站於練習場一端起點之左方。（指甲方所在任何一端正中為起點乙方亦然）左足在前。兩足距離約一尺餘。兩膝蓋微曲。左足踵提起。足尖觸地。全體重點。移於右腿。胸向右方。（起點右面）兩目注視乙方。（卽持槍人）微停。右足向前開一步。左足向前開一步。仍是足尖觸地。足踵提起。同時右手棍尾。左手棍頭。初在右足開步之際。各貼身傍畫一大圓圈。（棍尾經後向下旋轉棍頭經前向上旋轉）復於原處。其姿式與前同從略。同時乙方。（卽持槍人）雙手持槍。右手抓槍樽。曲肘。使槍樽緊貼右脇後方。手心向裏。左手抓槍身下端。胳膊向前伸直。手心向上。兩手距離約二尺餘。使槍尖橫向甲方。站於練習場另端之右前方。（起點右前面）右腿站直。左足在前。足踵提起。足尖觸地。兩足距離約一尺四五寸。胸向起點左方。兩目注視甲方。微停。雙手將槍舉起過頂。左手鬆開。沈下。同時右足向左前方。（起點左前面）橫開一步。（觸地後足尖向起點左前方）左足再向起點右前方開一步。原地再向右轉。使全體由右方轉一小圈。前胸仍向原方。（唯此時右足已在前方）右膝弓曲。左腿在後伸直。成前弓後箭步。同時右手及槍。落於胸前曲肘。使槍樽伏於右脇後方。手心向裏。同時左手在胸前接槍。手心向上。朝裏擰勁。擰至手心向下。同槍尖向外一叩。兩手距離約二尺餘。槍頭仍向甲方。其式如第一圖。 Person A (holding the staff), hold your staff with both hands, your right hand holding the tail of your staff in front of your chest, the center of the hand facing downward, your left hand grasping the body of your staff behind you, the center of the hand facing inward, causing your staff to be making a diagonal line against your left ribs. [Presumably due to the different authorship of this section, the “head” and “tail” of the staff are reversed to the tail being the thicker end and the head being the thinner end, something to keep in mind while studying these movement descriptions.] Your position in the practice space is in the southeast. (The orientations in these descriptions are assigned according to A’s perspective [in his initial position], even those for B.) [Being a clumsy way to establish orientations for a set in which two people switch places, I have replaced them with simple compass directions, same as for the Staff Versus Staff set (Chapters 2–6). However, in this section Person A instead begins on the left side of photo 1, causing the compass for the photos to be reversed. Also, the photos the Staff Versus Staff section maintain their orientations, whereas in this section there are several reverse views, causing the compass to flip again. Therefore for most of the photos, there is this compass:
S E –↑– W N
South is the back of the photo, north being the photographer, west on the right side, east on the left side. But for photos 15, 17, 25, 30, 38, 46, 47, and 49, there is the same compass as for all of the Staff Versus Staff photos:
N W –↑– E S
North in these cases is the back of the photo, south being the photographer, east on the right side, west on the left side.] Your left foot is forward, your feet just over a foot apart, both knees slightly bent, your left heel lifted, toes touching down, the weight on your right leg. Your chest is facing toward the north, your gaze toward B, and you slightly pause in this position. Your right foot takes a step forward, then your left foot takes a step forward, toes again touching down, heel lifted. At the same time, your hands draw a large circle with your staff (your right hand holding the tail of your staff, your left hand holding the head of your staff), keeping it close to each side of your body, the tail of your staff arcing downward to the rear [on your right side] as the head of your staff arcs forward and upward [on your left side], then returning to the same position as before. Person B (holding the spear), at the same time as A’s movement, you are holding your spear with both hands, your right hand grasping the end of your spear, the elbow bent, putting the end of your spear close behind your right ribs, the center of the hand facing inward, your left hand grasping the body of your spear toward the forward section, the arm straightened forward, the center of the hand facing upward, your hands just over two feet apart, the tip of your spear pointing toward A with the blade horizontal. Your position in the practice space is in the northwest, your right leg standing straight, your left foot forward, heel lifted, toes touching down, your feet about a foot and a half apart. Your chest is facing toward the south, your gaze toward A, and you likewise slightly pause in your position. Your hands lift your spear above your head, your left hand letting go and sinking down, while your right foot takes a step sideways toward the southwest (coming down with the toes pointing toward the southwest) and then your left foot takes a step toward the northwest [thereby moving you farther away from A], turning you to your right from your original position with a small turn of your body toward the south, your chest still facing the same direction as before (except that now your right foot is forward), your right knee bending, left leg straightening behind, making a stance of front leg a bow, rear leg an arrow. At the same time, your right hand lowers in front of your chest, the elbow bending, bringing the end of your spear close behind your right ribs, the center of the hand facing inward, as your left hand grabs your spear in front, the center of the hand facing upward, and twists inward until the center of the hand is facing downward, sending the tip of your spear outward with a snap, your hands just over two feet apart, the tip of your spear again pointing toward A. See photo 1 [each of these photos indicating 甲者 Person A (Chen Fengqi, who was also Person A in the Staff Versus Staff section) and 乙者 Person B (Liu Junling)]:
第二動作 MOVEMENT 2:
乙方承式向前進步。挺槍照甲方頭額直刺。（進步多寡以場之大小而定）同時甲方。亦向前進步。（兩方集於場之中間）待乙槍刺來。兩手托棍。向頭上猛架乙槍。左足在前。膝蓋伸直。右腿微曲。兩足距離約一尺五六寸。腰部微向後縮。左手朝上。伸直。微向前方。手心向起點右前方。五指伸開。伏於棍之兩旁。右手向上伸。肘微曲。使棍頭向身左前下方。胸向起點右前方。兩目注視乙方。乙方刺槍時。右手用力猛砍左手。在胸前扶之。右手砍至離左手約四五寸為止。左足在前。膝蓋弓曲。右腿伸直。成小前弓後箭步。兩足距離約一尺七八寸。上身微向前探。兩目注視甲方。其式如第二圖。 B, continuing from the previous posture, advance, (the number of steps you advance depending on the size of the practice space) and extend your spear with a stab toward A’s forehead. A, you are also advancing (so that the two of you are now more toward the middle of the practice space). When you see the stab coming, your hands prop up over your head, fiercely bracing away B’s spear, your left foot forward, the knee straightening, your right leg slightly bending, your feet about a foot and a half apart, your waist slightly shrinking back. Your left arm is straightening upward and slightly forward, the center of the hand facing toward the northwest, fingers extended and supporting on the side of your staff, your right arm extended upward, the elbow slightly bent, the head of your staff pointing downward toward the southwest. Your chest is facing toward the northwest, your gaze toward B. B, when stabbing, your right hand forcefully shoots out, your left hand supporting in front of your chest, your right hand finishing about half a foot away from your left hand. Your left foot is forward, the knee bending, your right leg straightening, making a small bow & arrow stance, your feet about a foot and three quarters apart. Your upper body is slightly reaching forward, your gaze toward A. See photo 2:
第三動作 MOVEMENT 3:
甲方將乙槍架出。承乙方下部空虛。甲方雙手持棍。左手仍在前由左向右。照乙方足部猛踏。同時乙方見棍踏來。兩足急向後跳一大步。該時右手槍樽。亦隨向後縮。至右脇。左手仍在胸前。手心向上。與前姿式不變。此時乙方。復進步挺槍。照甲方頭額直刺。左手不變。右手仍向前直砍。至離左手約四五寸為止。左足在前。仍成前弓後箭步。胸向起點左後方。兩目注視甲方。同時甲方。見槍刺來。乃由身之右方。使棍頭向左猛掛。右膝微曲。左足在前。足尖觸地。足踵提起。兩足距離約一尺餘。全身重點。移於右腿。棍頭向上。左肘彎曲。右手沈下。左手心向前。胸向起點。前方。兩目注視乙方。其式如第三圖。 A, after bracing away B’s spear, take advantage of the gap at B’s lower body by using both hands to send your staff from left to right, your left hand staying forward, with a fierce smashing action toward B’s [front] foot [as your shift your weight forward onto your own front foot]. B, when you see A’s staff smashing toward you, suddenly jump back a large step with both feet as your right hand draws back the end of your spear to your right ribs, your left hand still in front of your chest, the center of the hand facing upward. Then finish in the same posture as in the previous movement, advancing and stabbing toward A’s forehead, the position of your left hand not changing as your right hand again shoots forward, finishing about half a foot away from your left hand, your left foot forward, again making a stance of front leg a bow, rear leg an arrow. Your chest is facing toward the southeast, your gaze toward A. A, when you see the stab coming, send the head of your staff from right to left with a fierce hanging action, your right knee slightly bending, your left foot in front with its toes touching down, heel lifted, your feet just over a foot apart, the weight shifting onto your right leg. The head of your staff is pointing upward, your left elbow bending, your right hand sinking down, the center of your left hand facing forward. Your chest is facing toward the west, your gaze toward B. See photo 3:
第四動作 MOVEMENT 4:
甲方將槍掛出。遂卽雙手舉棍。由頭上至腦後。（此時左手鬆開下降右手單手持棍）右足向前開一步。同時右棍在腦後經身之右方。猛向乙方足部打一掃蹚。該時兩足距離約二尺。兩膝弓曲。成騎馬式。然腰部亦向前弓曲。胸向起點左方。兩目注視乙方。同時乙方見棍掃來。兩足猛向高跳。右手槍樽速縮至右脇後方。左手仍在前。手心向上。槍尖直向甲方。右膝彎曲。左足在前。膝亦微曲。足尖觸地。足踵提起。兩足距離約一尺餘。全身重點移於右腿。胸向左方。（起點左面）面向起點後方。兩目注視甲方。其式如第四圖。 A, after sending away B’s spear with a hanging action, raise your staff over your head with both hands and bring it behind your head (your left hand in this moment letting go and lowering, your right hand alone holding your staff). Then as your right foot takes a step toward the west, your right hand sends your staff from behind your head, passing the right side of your body, and suddenly attacking B’s foot with a “sweeping the hall” action, [your left hand correspondingly rising up,] your feet about two feet apart, both legs bending, making a horse-riding stance, but with your waist bending forward. Your chest is facing toward the south, your gaze toward B. B, when you see A’s staff sweeping toward you, your feet suddenly jump up high and your right hand quickly withdraws the end of your spear behind your right ribs, your left hand still forward, the center of the hand facing upward, the tip of your spear pointing toward A. [When you land,] your right knee bends, your left foot forward, the knee also slightly bent, toes touching down, heel lifted, your feet just over a foot apart, the weight shifted onto your right leg. Your chest is facing toward the south, your face toward the east, your gaze toward A. See photo 4:
第五動作 MOVEMENT 5:
乙方復跟步進前。（跟步云者卽左足向前開一步右足緊隨左足之後跟步也）照甲方右肩直刺。右手仍止於左手之後。約四五寸。其姿式。與前刺甲方之動作相同。該時甲方見槍刺來。遂用雙手持棍。左手在前。手心向外。反把將棍扣住。右手及棍尾緊伏於左脇之下。左手用力向身之右後方猛搜。槍尖全身微向右轉。同時右足向後縮半步。使胸向後方。（起點後面）左膝弓曲。右足在前。足踵提起。足尖觸地。兩足距離約一尺餘。身之重點。移於左腿。面向起點後方。兩目注視乙方。其式如第五圖。 B, advance with a follow step (meaning that your left foot steps out and your right foot closely follows behind it), stabbing straight toward A’s right shoulder, your right hand stopping about half a foot behind your left hand. This action of stabbing toward A is the same as in the previous posture. A, when you see the stab coming, hold your staff with both hands, your left hand going forward, the center of the hand facing outward, grabbing your staff with a covering grip, your right hand and the tail of your staff hiding below your left ribs, and your left hand forcefully goes toward your body’s right rear, fiercely seeking the tip of B’s spear, your body slightly turning to the right. At the same time, your right foot withdraws a half step, your chest facing toward the west, your left knee bending, your right foot in front, heel lifted, toes touching down, your feet just over a foot apart, the weight on your left leg. You are facing toward the west, your gaze toward B. See photo 5:
第六動作 MOVEMENT 6:
乙方。將槍仍縮回。兩足不動。復挺槍。照甲方右膝下部直刺。同時甲方見槍刺來。右足向身後猛撤一步。同時右手棍尾。急轉至右脇。使棍頭橫斜。朝下猛捕。使棍頭觸地。向左前方。（起點左前面）右膝曲。左腿伸直。兩足距離約二尺。兩足尖均向起點左方。前胸亦向起點左方。腰部微向前曲。兩目注視乙方。其式如第六圖。 B, again withdraw your spear, your feet staying where they are, then extend your spear, stabbing toward A’s right shin. A, when you see the stab coming, your right foot quickly withdraws a step behind you as your right hand draws an arc with the tail of your staff until it is at your right ribs, causing the head of your staff to go across diagonally, and fiercely seize downward, sending the head of your staff to touch the ground toward the southwest [northwest], your right knee bending, left leg straightening, your feet about two feet apart, the toes of both feet pointing toward the south [north]. Your chest is also facing toward the south [north], your torso slightly bending forward, your gaze toward B. See photo 6:
第七動作 MOVEMENT 7:
乙方左手前移。手心向上。右手縮回脇部後方。兩足不動。復照甲方頭額直刺。此時左手後移。右手向前直砍。止於左手後方約四五寸。同時甲方。見槍刺來。雙手執棍。猛向上托乙方之槍。左手朝上伸直。微向前。低於右手約五六寸。手心向右。（起點右面）五指伸開。伏於棍之旁。右手朝上。肘微曲。兩腿與前姿式不變。唯腰部抬起垂直。兩目注視乙方。其式如第七圖。 B, your left hand is shifted forward, the center of the hand facing upward, as your right hand withdraws behind your ribs, your feet staying where they are. Then stab toward A’s head, your left hand being shifted to the rear as your right hand shoots forward, stopping about half a foot behind your left hand. A, when you see the stab coming, your hands fiercely prop up B’s spear, your left hand going upward and slightly forward, the arm straightening, the hand about half a foot lower than your right hand, the center of the hand facing toward the north, fingers opened, supporting the side of your staff, your right hand going upward, the elbow slightly bent. Your legs do not change their position from the previous posture, but your torso lifts to become upright. Your gaze is toward B. See photo 7:
第八動作 MOVEMENT 8:
甲方將乙槍架出。同時左足尖朝外撇。使向起點左方。右足向前橫開一步。觸地。後足尖向起點左方。膝蓋伸直。右膝曲。兩足距離約二尺餘。全身重點。移於左腿。在右足開步之際。左手沈下。右手執棍。在腦後。使棍由身後經右方。猛向乙方左足部打一掃蹚。同時乙方。左手微鬆。姿式與前不變。右手急仍縮囘右脇後方。同時見甲方照足部掃來。兩足猛向高跳。落地後。左足仍在前。兩足距離約一尺餘。兩膝微曲。胸向起點右前方。槍尖橫向甲方。兩目注視甲方。同時甲方承打掃蹚之際。原地向左轉。使胸向起點後方。卽時右足在左足後方。向前開一步。左足再由右足後方。又向前開一步。膝蓋弓曲。右腿在後伸直。成小前弓後箭步。兩足距離一尺餘。在右足開步之際。右手棍。由右方。經前方。畫一大圓圈。折回。斜伏於左脇下部。棍頭向起點。前下方。離地約四五寸。棍尾與眼眉相平。左手在後伸直。手心向裏。右肘橫曲。手心向下。面目由左方。隨棍頭同時轉向起點前方。兩目注視乙方。其式如第八圖。 A, after propping away B’s spear, your left toes swing outward toward the south, then your right foot steps forward, the foot coming down sideways, the toes pointing toward the south, the knee straightening, your right [left] knee bending, your feet just over two feet apart, the weight shifted onto your left leg. As your right foot steps out, your left hand sinks down and your right hand sends your staff past your head, behind your body, through the area to your right, and fiercely sweeping toward B’s left foot. B, your left hand slightly loosens, but your posture remains the same as your right hand withdraws behind your right ribs. When you see A’s staff sweeping toward your foot, your feet suddenly jump up high and come down to the rear, your left foot still forward, your feet just over a foot apart, both knees slightly bent. Your chest is facing toward the northwest, the tip of your spear pointing toward A, your gaze toward A. A, continuing from the sweep, turn around leftward so that your chest is facing toward the east, your right foot at the same time stepping forward from behind your left foot, your left foot then stepping forward from behind your right foot, the knee bending, your right leg straightening behind, making a small stance of front leg a bow, rear leg an arrow, your feet just over a foot apart. As your right foot steps out, your right hand sends your staff from your right side and across in front of you, thereby completing a full circle, and bending in to point your staff diagonally downward below your left ribs. The head of your staff is pointing downward, about half a foot away from the ground, the tail of your staff at eyebrow level, your left arm straightening behind, the center of the hand facing inward, your right arm bending across, the center of the hand facing downward. Your face turns to the left as the head of your staff arcs toward the west, your gaze toward B. See photo 8:
第九動作 MOVEMENT 9:
乙方趁勢進步。追擊甲方。同時甲方。見乙方追來。以原式向起點後方退走。（開步之多寡以場之大小而定）乙方追至場之一端。挺槍直刺甲方頭部後腦。甲方見槍刺來。乃由右方。向後轉身。用棍經上方。掄起。照乙方頭部連封帶劈。同時左腿站直。足尖向起點右方。右足提起足尖下垂。伏於左膝裏外端。使右腿成三角形。胸向右方。（起點右面）同時隨右棍停於頭部上方。五指伸直。並攏。手心向上。面向起點前方。兩目注視乙方。該時乙方用槍直刺甲方。忽見甲方用棍劈來。乙方右足向後急退一小步。膝蓋曲。左足緊隨。兩足距離約七八寸。左足在前。足踵提起。足尖觸地。同時兩手緊抓槍樽。猛向上騰過頂。胳膊微曲。槍尖微低。向起點右後方。胸向起點左後方。兩目注視甲方。其式如第九圖。 B, take advantage of the opportunity by advancing, chasing to attack A. A, when you see B chasing, continue stepping toward the east to retreat away from him (the number of steps depending on the size of the practice space). B, once you have chased A all the way across the practice space [both of you finishing with your left foot forward], send your spear stabbing straight to the back of his head. A, when you see the stab coming, turn around rightward and roll your staff over, passing above you and continuing into a sealing chop toward B’s head. At the same time, your left leg straightens, the toes pointing toward the north, and your right foot lifts, the toes hanging down close to the inner side of your left knee, causing your right leg to form a triangle shape. Your chest is facing toward the north [south]. By the time your staff is over B’s head, [your left hand has raised,] the fingers straight and together, the center of the hand facing upward. You are facing toward the west, your gaze toward B. B, when you see A’s staff suddenly chopping toward you, your right foot quickly retreats a small step, the knee bends, and your left foot closely follows until your feet are about three quarters of a foot apart, your left foot in front, the heel lifted, toes touching down. At the same time, fiercely send the end of your spear upward over your head, your arms slightly bent, the tip of your spear slightly lower than the end and pointing toward the northeast. Your chest is facing toward the southeast, your gaze toward A. See photo 9:
第十動作 MOVEMENT 10:
乙方。雙手沈下。同時將槍向下一扣。左手順槍桿。向前移。手心向上。右手貼於右脇後方。手心向裏。兩手距離約二尺餘。該時左足抬起。向前開一大步。右足緊隨半步。左膝曲。右腿伸直。成小前弓後箭步。同時右手猛向前伸。使槍尖照甲方直刺。右手仍停於左手後方。胸向起點後方。兩目注視甲方。同時甲方。見槍刺來。右足向前開一步。足尖朝外撇。右手棍由裏向上一裹。左足再向前開一步。成騎馬式。同時右手下沉。伏於右脇下方。手心向裏。使棍斜貼胸部。棍頭斜向上方。棍頭高於頭頂約一尺弱。在右棍向裏裹時。左手接棍中段向外猛科。手心向起點右方。胸亦向起點右方。面向起點前方。兩目注視乙方。其式如第十圖。 B, your hands sink down, sending your spear covering downward, your left hand shifting forward along the shaft of your spear, the center of the hand facing upward, your right hand close behind your right ribs, the center of the hand facing inward, your hands just over two feet apart. Your left foot now lifts and takes a large step forward, then your right foot follows with a half step, your left knee bending, right leg straightening, making a small stance of front leg a bow, rear leg an arrow, as your right hand suddenly extends forward, sending the tip of your spear stabbing toward A, your right hand again finishing just behind your left hand. Your chest is facing toward the east, your gaze toward A. A, when you see the stab coming, your right foot takes a step toward the east, the toes swinging outward, as your right hand wraps the inward and upward. Then your left foot takes a step toward the east, making a horse-riding stance, as your right hand sinks down to be close below your right ribs, the center of the hand facing inward, making your staff diagonal near your chest, the head of your staff pointing diagonally upward just under a foot higher than your headtop. While your right hand wraps your staff inward, your left hand grabs the middle section and sends your staff knocking outward, the center of the hand facing toward the north. Your chest is also facing toward the north, your face toward the west, your gaze toward B. See photo 10:
第十一動作 MOVEMENT 11:
乙方之槍。被棍科出。同時將槍縮回。兩足不動。右膝微曲。全身亦隨微向後縮。左手姿式不變。唯稍向前移。右手仍伏於右脇後方。同時右足猛登。膝蓋伸直。右手又猛向前伸。照甲方頭額直刺。其姿式與第十圖相同。詳見前。同時甲方見槍刺來。猛向左轉。使胸向正前方。（起點正前面）右足在原地轉。膝蓋微曲。左足向後收回一小步。膝蓋亦曲。足踵提起。足尖觸地。兩足距離約一尺餘。全身重點。移於右腿。在原地向左轉時。右手姿式不動。左手持棍。猛向左帶。面向起點前方。兩目注視乙方。其式如第十一圖。 B, once your spear has been knocked aside, withdraw it, your feet staying where they are, your right knee slightly bending, your body slightly shrinking back, your left hand maintaining its position but slightly shifting forward, your right hand again hidden behind your right ribs. Then your right foot suddenly presses, the knee straightening, and your right hand suddenly shoots forward, stabbing toward A’s forehead, your posture the same as in photo 10. A, when you see the stab coming, suddenly turn to the left, causing your chest to be facing toward the east, your right foot staying where it is and pivoting, the knee slightly bending, your left foot withdrawing a small step, the knee also bent, the heel lifted, toes touching down, your feet just over a foot apart, the weight shifting onto your right leg. As you turn to the left, mostly staying where you are, your right hand maintains its position and your left hand suddenly sends your staff to the left with a dragging action. You are facing toward the west, your gaze toward B. See photo 11:
第十二動作 MOVEMENT 12:
承上式不停。甲方左足急向前開一小步。同時右足在左足後方。再向前開一步。兩膝均曲。成騎馬式。在右足開步之際。右肘提起。彎曲在胸前。使棍尾直向乙方之左腿之部猛戳。左手姿式不變。唯用力向下垂。兩手心均向下。胸向起點左方。兩目注視乙方腿部。同時乙方。見棍尾照腿部戳來。在足急退一小步。右足再向前開一步。同時左手移抓槍之中段。使槍尖向上。右手亦微向上移。使槍樽猛抵甲方棍尾。兩膝蓋曲。成騎馬式。右手心向下。左手心向上。胸向起點右方。兩目注視甲方棍尾。其式如第十二圖。 A, continuing from the previous posture from pausing, your left foot quickly takes a small step forward, then your right foot takes a step forward from behind your left foot, both knees bending, making a horse-riding stance. As your right foot steps out, your right elbow lifts and bends in front of your chest, and you send the tail of your staff poking toward B’s left leg, your left hand maintaining its position but forcefully dropping, the centers of both hands facing downward. Your chest is facing toward the south, your gaze toward B’s leg. B, when you see the tail of A’s staff poking toward your leg, your [left] foot quickly retreats a small step and your right foot then takes a step forward. At the same time, your left hand shifts its grip to the middle [forward] section of your spear, sending the tip of your spear upward, your right hand also slightly shifting upward, and you send the end of your spear to brace away the tail of A’s staff, both knees bending, making a horse-riding stance, the center of your right hand facing downward, the center of your left hand facing upward. Your chest is facing toward the north, your gaze toward the tail of A’s staff. See photo 12:
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第八章 (CHAPTER EIGHT)
第十三動作 MOVEMENT 13 [switching places]:
甲方棍尾。托乙方槍樽向上絞。同時右足向起點左方。橫移一小步。足尖向外撇。左足向起點前方。開一步此時乙方。與甲方動作相同。該時右足亦橫移一小步。（向起點右放）足尖亦向外撇。左足亦開一步。（向起點後方與甲方相背）此時甲方已轉至乙方所站之地點。胸向起點。右方。而乙方則轉至甲方所站之地點。胸向起點左方。此時乙方將槍樽縮回。提高。右足向後撤一步。使槍尖朝下。向前照甲方右腿下部直刺。兩手用力下垂。左肘伸直。手心向上。右肘微曲。手心向下。胸向起點前方。兩目注視甲方腿部。甲方照腿刺來。右足猛向後撤一步。左手用力向右前方（身之右前方）猛推。使棍頭上方。急抵乙方之槍尖上端。胸向起點左後方。兩手心均向下。左肘伸直。右肘曲。使棍斜伏於腹部右方。面向起點後方。兩目注視乙方。棍尖。其式如第十三圖。 A, use the tail of your staff to prop up the end of A’s spear in an arc [going clockwise] as your right foot shifts a small step across toward the south, the toes swinging outward, and your left foot steps out toward the west. B, as A moves, your right foot also shifts a small step across (toward the north), the toes also swinging outward, and your left foot steps out (toward the east, going around A [as he is going around you]). You have both now switched places. A, your chest is facing toward the north. B, your chest is facing toward the south. B, withdraw the end of your spear raised high as your right foot withdraws a step and then send the tip of your spear stabbing forward and downward toward B’s lower body, your hands forcefully dropping into place, your left elbow straightening, the center of the hand facing upward, your right elbow slightly bending, the center of the hand facing downward. Your chest is facing toward the west, your gaze toward A’s leg. A, when you see the stab coming, your right foot withdraws a step as your left hand forcefully pushes to your forward right, sending the head of your staff to quickly brace away the tip of B’s spear. Your chest is facing toward the southeast, the centers of both hands facing downward, your left elbow straightening, your right elbow bending, causing your staff to be positioned diagonally, close to the right side of your belly. You are facing toward the east, your gaze toward the tip of B’s staff [spear]. See photo 13:
第十四動作 MOVEMENT 14:
乙方原姿式不動。將槍縮回。復照甲方左膝下部猛刺。甲方見槍刺來。左足向裏橫移一小步。足尖向外撇。同時右足再向前開一步。左手用力一帶。使棍頭將槍尖向外撥出。左肘曲。使棍頭向後上方。右肘向下。伸直。使棍尾向前下方。在右足進步之時。右手用力。使棍尾順槍桿直向上磕乙方左手。此時兩足尖均向起點左方。胸亦向起點左方。兩膝曲。成騎馬式。唯上身微向起點後方探。面向起點後方。兩目注視乙方。同時乙方。見棍尾照左手磕來。左手猛向後。移至右手所在之處。同時右足不動。左足猛向後撤半步。足尖觸地。足踵提起。槍尖亦在前觸地。兩肘彎曲。使兩手縮於胸部下方。兩手心均向上。胸向起點前方。兩目注視棍尾。其式如第十四圖。 B, without changing your posture, withdraw your spear, then fiercely stab toward A’s lower left leg. A, when you see the stab coming, your left foot shifts a small step across inward, toes swinging outward, and your right foot then takes a step forward. Your left hand is forcefully dragging, sending the head of your staff to deflect the tip of B’s spear outward, and your left elbow bends, sending the head of your staff upward behind you, your right elbow straightening downward, sending the tail of your staff forward and downward. As your right foot advances, your right hand forcefully sends the tail of your staff upward to be parallel with the shaft of B’s spear and knock against his left hand, the toes of your feet now pointing toward the south. Your chest is also facing toward the south, both knees bending, making a horse-riding stance, your upper body slightly reaching toward the east, your face toward the east, your gaze toward B. B, when you see the tail of A’s staff coming to knock your left hand, your left hand suddenly shifts to the rear to be next to your right hand. At the same time, your right foot stays where it is, but your left foot suddenly withdraws a half step, toes touching down, heel lifted, the tip of your spear touching the ground in front, both elbows bending, causing your hands to withdraw below your chest, the centers of both hands facing upward. Your chest is facing toward the west, your gaze toward the tail of A’s staff. See photo 14:
第十五動作 MOVEMENT 15:
乙方右足。同時向後撤一大步。左足亦隨右足撤半步。膝蓋微曲。右膝伸直。上身前探。成小前弓後箭步。同時左手向前移。伸直。右手握槍樽。縮回右脇之後方。復猛向前砍。照甲方頭部猛刺。同時甲方見槍刺來。左足不動。膝蓋彎曲。右足猛向後退半步。膝蓋微曲。足踵提起。足尖觸地。兩足距離約一尺餘。全身重點移於右腿。同時右足原地向右轉。右手棍尾向下沉。左手棍頭向上。左手用力。經胸前向身之右方推磕乙方之槍尖。此時右手伏於腹部左端。手心向裏。左手伏於膀肩旁。手心向前。胸向起點後方。兩目注視乙方。其式如第十五圖。 B, your right foot withdraws a large step, and your left foot follows, withdrawing a half step, the knee slightly bending, your right knee straightening, your upper body reaching forward as you make a small stance of front leg a bow, rear leg an arrow. At the same time, your left arm shifts forward, the arm straightening, and your right hand withdraws the end of your spear behind your right ribs, then shoots forward, suddenly stabbing toward A’s head. A, when you see the stab coming, your left foot stays where it is, the knee bending, and your right foot suddenly retreats a half step, the knee slightly bending, heel lifted, toes touching down, your feet just over a foot apart, the weight shifting onto your right [left] leg, your right [left] foot pivoting rightward. At the same time, your right hand sinks down the tail of your staff, your left hand sending the head of your staff upward, and your left hand forcefully pushes out to your right, knocking away the tip of B’s spear. Your right hand is now close to the left side of your abdomen, the center of the hand facing inward, your left hand close beside your [right] shoulder, the center of the hand facing forward. Your chest is facing toward the east, your gaze toward B. See photo 15 [reverse view]:
第十六動作 MOVEMENT 16:
同時乙方。右手復縮囘脇部後方。左手姿式不變。右手復向前猛砍。轉向甲方右膝下部直刺。甲方右足猛向左足後方撤一大步。膝蓋弓曲。左足亦隨撤半步。左膝伸直。足尖橫向起點左方。同時右手復於右脇後方。左手向下按。使棍頭由前直下。捺乙方槍尖。左手。左手伸直。手心向下。右肘微曲。手心向裏。上身向起點左方。微曲。胸向起點左方。面向起點後方。兩目注視乙方。其式如第十六圖。 B, your right hand withdraws behind your ribs, the position of your left hand not changing, then your right hand fiercely shoots forward with a stab toward A’s right knee. A, your right foot suddenly withdraws a large step behind your left foot, the knee bending, and your left foot also withdraws a half step, the knee straightening, the toes pointing across toward the south. At the same time, your right hand goes behind your right ribs and your left hand pushes downward, sending the head of your staff downward from in front of you, pressing down the tip of B’s spear, your left arm straightening, the center of the hand facing downward, your right elbow slightly bending, the center of the hand facing inward, your upper body slightly bending toward the south. Your chest is facing toward the south, your face toward the east, your gaze toward B. See photo 16:
第十七動作 MOVEMENT 17:
乙方復將槍縮回。照甲方頭部直刺。其姿式與前式相同。詳見前。故從畧。同時甲方雙手握棍。橫向上架乙方槍尖。同時將槍架出。使棍經腦後。（此時右手沈下）右手單手抓住棍尾。由身右方。橫向乙方腿部打一掃蹚。同時左足向右足後方猛撤一步。原地由左方向後轉。右足復向起點前方開一步。（此時胸已向起點前方）在右足開步之際。右手持棍橫掄。經右方。由前方斜伏於左脇之下。（在棍掄至面前時左手已接棍抓住）棍頭向起點。後下方。離地約五六寸。左肘向下斜方伸直。手心向裏。右肘橫曲。手心向下。右膝弓曲。左腿伸直。成前弓後箭步。唯此時胸向起點左方。面向起點後方。兩目注視乙方。當甲方打掃蹚時。同時乙方。將槍縮回。兩足高跳。落地後。其姿式與前不變。詳見上。胸向起點前方。兩目注視甲方。其式如第十七圖。 B, withdraw your spear, then stab toward A’s head, your posture still the same as in the previous movement. A, with both hands holding your staff horizontally, prop up the tip of B’s spear, and once the spear has been propped away, your staff passes behind your head (your right hand sinking down), your right hand now grasping your staff on its own, holding the tail of your staff, bringing it across from your right to attack B’s leg with a “sweeping the hall” action. At the same time, your left foot suddenly withdraws a step behind your right foot, arcing behind you from your left, then your right foot takes a step toward the west (your chest now facing toward the west). As your right foot steps out, your right hand has swung your staff across from the right and brings it in front of you to be a diagonal line close below your left ribs (your left hand now grabbing your staff), the head of your staff pointing downward toward the east, about half a foot away from the ground. Your left arm is straightened diagonally downward, the center of the hand facing inward, your right elbow bent across, the center of the hand facing downward, your right knee bending, left leg straightening, making a stance of front leg a bow, rear leg an arrow. Your chest is now facing toward the south, your face toward the east, your gaze toward B. B, when A attacks with “sweeping the hall”, withdraw your spear, jumping high with both feet, and then after you land, your posture is again the same as before. Your chest is facing toward the west, your gaze toward A. See photo 17 [reverse view]:
第十八動作 MOVEMENT 18:
甲方姿式不變。直向起點前方走。兩目仍回視乙方。同時乙方亦挺槍開步。直追甲方。（甲方開步之多寡視練習場之大小而定）甲方走至練習場之另一。端乙。方照甲方腿部後方直刺。同時甲方見槍刺來。右手不動。左手曲肘。將棍向後提起。再向前猛搏槍尖。同時左足在後。橫向右方。（起點右面）移半步。膝蓋伸直。右膝弓曲。兩足距離約二尺弱。成前弓後箭步。胸向起點左方。兩足尖均向起點左方。面向起點後方。兩目注視槍。同時乙方左足在前。膝蓋微曲。右足在後。伸直。成小前弓後箭步左。手仍向前伸直右。手槍樽。仍停於左手裏面。胸向起點前方。兩目注視甲方腿部。其式如第十八圖。 A, without changing your posture, walk toward the west with your gaze turned to look toward B. B, step out to pursue A. A, with the number and size of your steps depending on the practice space, walk to one end of the space. B, stab to the back of A’s [left] leg. A, when you see the stab coming, your right hand stays where it is as your left elbow bends, lifting your staff behind you and then suddenly sending it forward to smack away the tip of B’s spear. At the same time, your left foot shifts a half step across toward the north, the knee straightening, your right knee bending, your feet just under two feet apart, making a stance of front leg a bow, rear leg an arrow. Your chest is facing toward the south, the toes of both feet pointing toward the south. You are facing toward the east, your gaze toward B’s spear. B, your left foot is forward, the knee slightly bent, right foot behind, the leg straightening, making a small stance of front leg a bow, rear leg an arrow. Your left hand is again extended forward, your right hand again finishing with the end of your spear near the inside of your left hand. Your chest is facing toward the west, your gaze toward A’s leg. See photo 18:
第十九動作 MOVEMENT 19:
乙方復將槍縮回。兩足不動。唯身亦向後縮。又照甲方頭部直刺。同時甲方。右手棍尾沈下。左手將棍頭抬起。向上用力。向左猛扣乙槍。此時右足不動。半面向左轉。同時左足縮回一小步。足踵提起。足尖觸地。全身重點。移於右腿。胸向起點後方。左肘橫曲。手心向起點右方。右手心向起點右方。面向起點後方。兩目注視乙方。其式如第十九圖。 B, withdraw your spear, your feet staying where they are, your body also shrinking back, then stab toward A’s head. A, your right hand sinks down the tail of your staff as your left hand forcefully lifts up the head of your staff and then goes to the left, fiercely covering B’s spear. At the same time, your right foot stays where it is but does a half pivot to the left, and your left foot withdraws a small step, heel lifted, toes touching down, the weight shifting onto your right leg. Your chest is facing toward the east, your left elbow bending across, the center of the hand facing toward the north [south], the center of your right hand also facing toward the north [south]. You are facing toward the east, your gaze toward B. See photo 19:
第二十動作 MOVEMENT 20:
同時甲方。將乙槍扣住。右足向起點後方開一步。棍尾由身後。經頭上向乙方直劈。同時右手順棍下沈。距離左手約七八寸。手心向下。同時左肘曲。成三角形。上段緊伏左脇下段。成水平線。手心向下。使棍頭緊伏下段底面。棍頭與肘尖相齊。棍頭與棍尾成水平。上身微向前探。面向起點後方。兩目注視乙方。同時乙方。見棍尾劈來。將槍縮回。右足向後撤一步。左足亦隨右足向後撤一步。方向仍不變。同時右手槍樽提起。左手向前微推。架住棍尾。左手朝裏裹勁。使槍桿上端。裹至棍尾在下。槍桿在上。胸向起點右方。兩目注視棍尾。其式如第二十圖。 A, after covering B’s spear, your right foot steps out toward the east as you send the tail of your staff from behind you, over your head, and chopping toward B, your right hand sinking down [i.e. sliding inward along your staff] to be about three quarters of a foot away from your left hand, the center of the hand facing downward. Your left elbow is bent, making a triangle shape, the upper arm near your left ribs, the forearm making a horizontal line, the center of the hand facing downward, the head of your staff lowered to be level with the elbow, the head and tail of your staff making a horizontal line [diagonal according to the photo]. Your upper body is slightly reaching forward. You are facing toward the east, your gaze toward B. B, when you see the tail of A’s staff chopping toward you, pull back your spear as your right foot withdraws a step, your left foot following by also withdrawing a step, your orientation remaining the same. Then your right hand lifts the end of your spear and your left hand slightly pushes forward to brace away the tail of A’s staff, your left [right] hand also wrapping inward, causing the shaft of your spear to be angled upward, resulting in the staff being underneath and the spear being on top. Your chest is facing toward the north, your gaze toward the tail of A’s staff. See photo 20:
第二十一動作 MOVEMENT 21:
甲方兩足不動。右手向棍尾處移。抓住棍尾端。（此時左手鬆開）使棍頭經上方。直向乙方猛劈。上身向前探。左手隨棍停於頭部上方。五指伸開並攏。手心向上。右胳膊伸直。棍頭與棍尾相平。胸向起點右方。面向起點後方。兩目注視乙方。同時乙方。右足微向起點右後方撤一小步。左足亦隨撤一小步。足踵微提起。足尖觸地。兩膝伸直。同時右手槍樽。微隨左手。左手抬高。使槍尖向身右前上方。左手用力向外擰勁。使槍尖猛扣甲棍。手心向左方。（起點左面）右手心向下。其式如第二十一圖。 A, with your feet staying where they are, your right hand shifts to the tail of your staff (your left hand letting go), sending the head of your staff over you and chopping toward B, your upper body reaching forward, your left hand following your staff to finish above your head, the fingers extended but together, the center of the hand facing upward, your right arm straightening, the head and tail of your staff level with each other. Your chest is facing toward the north, your face toward the east, your gaze toward B. B, your right foot withdraws a small step slightly toward the northeast and your left foot also withdraws a step, the heel slightly lifted, toes touching down, both knees straightening. At the same time, your right hand at the end of your spear slightly follows your left hand as your left hand lifts, sending the tip of your spear upward to the forward right of your body, your left hand forcefully twisting outward, causing the tip of your spear to suddenly cover A’s staff, the center of the hand facing toward the south, the center of your right hand facing downward. See photo 21:
第二十二動作 MOVEMENT 22:
甲方不停。卽向起點前方開步進行。左手仍在頭部上方。胸向起點右前方。面由右方。轉向起點後方。兩目注視乙方。同時右手及棍。在身後隨胳膊伸直。棍頭觸地。向起點正後方。胳膊與棍成直線。同時乙方姿式不變。向前開步。（甲乙兩方開步多寡視場之大小而定）甲方走至場之另一端。乙方用力照甲方頭部直刺。乙方左足在前。甲方見槍刺來止步。左足在前。右手用力使棍之中段向上猛托。右手朝上伸直。微向起點後方。手心向上。棍頭向起點左後下方。同時右足向後退回一小步。足踵微提起。足尖觸地。胸向起點右後方。左手仍在頭上不變。兩目注視乙槍。其式如第二十二圖。 A, without pausing, advance [retreat] toward the west, your left hand still above your head. Your chest is facing toward the northwest, your face toward the east, your gaze toward B. At the same time, your right hand and your staff follow your body back, the arm straightening, the head of your staff touching the ground toward the east, the arm and staff together making a straight line. B, maintaining your posture, chase toward the west as A walks to that end of the practice space (the amount of steps for both of you depending on the size of the practice space), and forcefully stab toward his head, your left foot again going forward. A, when you see the stab coming, bring your feet to a halt with your left [right] foot forward, [left foot behind], as your right hand forcefully sends the middle section of your staff propping upward, the arm extending upward and slightly toward the east, the center of the hand facing upward, the head of your staff pointing downward toward the southeast. At the same time, your right foot retreats a small step, the heel slightly lifted, toes touching down. Your chest is facing toward the northeast, your left hand still positioned above your head, your gaze toward B’s spear. See photo 22:
第二十三動作 MOVEMENT 23:
乙方將槍縮回。兩足不動。復照甲方右腿下部猛刺。同時甲方。右足向起點前方猛撤一步。膝蓋弓曲。左足不動。原地向右擰。使足尖向起點左方。膝蓋伸直。兩足距離約三尺。（然隨身之高矮而定）使全身重點。移於右腿。同時右手用力擰。使棍頭向後旋轉。經頭上朝下猛捕。左手亦抓棍之中段。用力向下按。胳膊伸直。手心向下。右手心向裏。肘微曲。腰部微向前曲。胸向起點左方。兩目注視乙方。此時乙方姿式。左足在前。膝蓋微曲。右腿在後。伸直。上身微向前探。左手在前伸直。手心向上。右手持槍樽。在左手之後。距離左手約五六寸。胸向起點前方。兩目注視甲方。其式如第二十三圖。 B, withdraw your spear, your feet staying where they are, then fiercely stab downward toward A’s right leg. A, your right foot suddenly withdraws a step toward the west, the knee bending, your left foot staying where it is and pivoting to the right so the toes are pointing toward the south, the knee straightening, your feet about three feet apart (depending on your own height), the weight shifting to your right leg. At the same time, your right hand forcefully twists, sending the head of your staff arcing behind you, passing over your head, and fiercely seizing downward, your left hand also grasping the middle section of your staff and forcefully pushing it down, the arm straightening, the center of the hand facing downward, the center of your right hand facing inward, the elbow slightly bent, your torso slightly bending forward. Your chest is facing toward the south, your gaze toward B. At this time, B’s posture is thus: your left foot is forward, the knee slightly bent, your right leg straightened behind, your upper body slightly reaching forward, your left hand forward, the arm straight, the center of the hand facing upward, your right hand holding the end of your spear about half a foot behind your left hand. Your chest is facing toward the west, your gaze toward A. See photo 23:
第二十四動作 MOVEMENT 24:
乙方不動。將槍縮回。復照甲方頭部直刺。甲方見槍刺來。右足不動。原地向左轉。使足尖向起點後方。左足縮回半步。足踵提起。足尖觸地。膝微曲。兩足距離一尺餘。同時左手持棍抬起。使棍向身之左方猛帶。手心向起點後方。胸亦向起點後方。右手棍尾伏於右脇下部。面向起點後方。同時乙方。復將槍縮回。兩足不動。又照甲方左腿下部猛刺。同時甲方。左足向起點左方橫移一小步。足尖向外撇。右足在左足後方。向起點後方開一步。兩膝均曲。成騎馬式。右手棍尾在右足開步之際。使棍尾向前猛抵乙槍。兩足尖均向起點右方。胸向起點右方。面向起點後方。兩目注視乙槍。其式如第二十四圖。 B, staying where you are, withdraw your spear, then stab straight toward A’s head. A, when you see the stab coming, your right foot stays where it is and pivots to the left so the toes are pointing toward the east, your left foot withdrawing a half step, heel lifted, toes touching down, the knee slightly bent, your feet just over a foot apart. At the same time, your left hand lifts the [head] of your staff, fiercely dragging to your left, the center of the hand facing toward the east, as is your chest, your right hand holding the tail of your staff hidden below your right ribs. You are facing toward the east. B, again withdraw your spear, your feet staying where they are, and then fiercely stab downward toward A’s left leg. A, your left foot shifts a small step across toward the south, toes swinging outward, and your right foot takes a step toward the east from behind your left foot, both knees bending, making a horse-riding stance. As your right foot steps out, your right hand sends the tail of your staff forward, fiercely bracing away B’s spear, your feet pointing toward the north. Your chest is also facing toward the north, your face toward the east, your gaze toward B’s spear. See photo 24:
第二十五動作 MOVEMENT 25:
乙方左足。在右足前。向起點後方撤一步。同時左手抬起。使槍尖向上。左手移抓槍之上段。右手亦向上移。隨向前推。使槍樽直搗甲方右腿下部。右肘伸直。手心向下。左肘曲。手心向上。右膝曲。左腿伸直。成前弓後箭步。胸向起點左方。面向起點前方。兩目注視甲方。同時甲方見槍樽搗來。左足向起點後方開一步。右手抬起。曲肘。使棍尾向上。左手沈下。肘伸直。使棍頭向下。左手向前速推。使棍頭猛抵乙方槍樽。兩膝均曲。兩足尖均向起點左方。成騎馬式。胸向起點左方。面向起點後方。兩目注視乙槍。其式如第二十五圖。 B, your left foot withdraws a step toward the east from in front of your right foot, your left hand lifting, sending the tip of your spear upward and shifting its grip to the forward section of your spear. Your right hand also shifts upward, then pushes forward, sending the end of your spear pounding toward A’s lower right leg, your right elbow straightening, the center of the hand facing downward, your left elbow bending, the center of the hand facing upward, your right knee bending, your left leg straightening, making a stance of front leg a bow, rear leg an arrow. Your chest is facing toward the south, your face toward the west, your gaze toward A. A, when you see the end of B’s spear pounding toward your leg, your left foot takes a step toward the east and your right hand lifts, the elbow bending, sending the tail of your staff upward, your left hand sinking down, the elbow straightening, sending the head of your staff downward, and your left hand quickly pushes forward, sending the head of your staff to be bracing away the end of B’s spear, both knees bending, the toes of both feet pointing toward the south, making a horse-riding stance. Your chest is facing toward the south, your face toward the east, your gaze toward B’s spear. See photo 25 [reverse view]:
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第九章 (CHAPTER NINE)
第二十六動作 MOVEMENT 26:
同時乙方槍樽。同甲方棍頭向上絞。（槍樽在上棍頭在下）絞至與頭平。乙方槍樽向回提高。同時右足向後撤一步。左手沈下伸直。使槍尖朝下。在身之左方。左手猛向前推。右手用力下垂。使槍尖直刺甲方左腿下部。其姿式與上式不變。唯此時右足在後。而胸已轉向起點右方。同時甲方。左手棍頭。與槍樽相絞。見槍照腿部刺來。右足猛向前開一步。左肘曲。棍頭向上。右手下沈。使棍尾向下。右手向前一推。使棍尾猛抵乙槍。兩膝均曲。仍成騎馬式。其姿式與前相同。唯此時右足在前。胸已轉向起點右方。其式如第二十六圖。 The end of B’s spear and the head of A’s staff are coiling upward (spear on top, staff underneath). B, once they are at head level, withdraw the end of your spear by lifting it high, your right foot withdrawing a step behind you, your left hand sinking down, the arm straightening, pointing the tip of your spear downward to your left, and then your left hand fiercely pushes forward, your right hand forcefully dropping downward, sending the tip of your spear stabbing toward A’s left lower leg. The posture is the same as before [Movement 24], your right foot behind, your chest turned to be facing toward the north. A, your left hand is holding the head of your staff as it coils with the end of B’s spear, and then when you see the stab coming toward your leg, your right foot suddenly takes a step forward, your left elbow bending, sending the head of your staff upward, your right hand sinking down, sending the tail of your staff downward, and your right hand pushes the tail forward, fiercely bracing away B’s spear. Both knees are bending, again making a horse-riding stance, the posture the same as before [Movement 24], your right foot forward, your chest turned to be facing toward the north. See photo 26:
第二十七動作 MOVEMENT 27:
甲方不停。同時將槍抵出。左手鬆開。右手抵住。用力使棍頭經上方向前直劈。上身亦向前探。左手隨棍停於頭部上方。五指伸開並攏。手心向上。兩足不動。及一切姿式與前不變。同時乙方見棍照頭部劈來。右足向起點右後方猛撤一小步。左足亦隨撤一小步。足踵微提起。足尖觸地。兩膝伸直。上身向右方微斜。同時將槍縮回。右手在右脇後下方。微隨左手。左手向外擰勁。使槍尖向外猛扣甲棍。左手心向起點左方。胸向起點左前方。面向起點前方。兩目注視甲其。方式如第二十七圖。 A, without pausing after bracing away B’s spear, your left hand lets go and your right hand forcefully sends the head of your staff upward and chopping forward, your upper body also leaning forward, your left hand following your staff to stop above your head, fingers extended but still together, the center of the hand facing upward, your feet staying where they are, your stance not changing from the previous posture. B, when you see A’s staff chopping toward your head, your right foot suddenly withdraws a small step toward the northeast, then your left foot also withdraws a small step, the heel slightly lifted, toes touching down, both knees straightening, your upper body slightly leaning toward the south. At the same time, your spear withdraws, your right hand going behind and below your right ribs, and your left hand slightly twists outward, sending the tip of your spear outward to suddenly cover A’s staff, the center of your left hand facing toward the south. Your chest is facing toward the southwest, your face toward the west, your gaze toward A. See photo 27:
第二十八動作 MOVEMENT 28:
甲方不停。卽向起點前方開步進行。姿式左手仍在頭部上方。胸向起點右前方。面由右方轉向後。兩目注視乙方。同時右手及棍。在身後。胳膊伸直。棍頭觸地。向起點正後方。胳膊與棍成直線。同時乙方姿式不變。向前開步。（起點前面）直追（甲乙兩方、開步多寡、視場之大小而定）甲方走至場之另一端。乙方用力照甲方頭部直刺。乙方左足在前。甲方見槍刺來。止步。右足在前。左足在後。右手用力使棍之中段。向上猛托。右手朝上伸直。微向起點後方。手心向上。棍頭向起點左後下方。同時右足向後退回一小步。足踵微提起。足尖觸地。胸向起點右後方。左手仍在頭上不變。兩目注視乙槍。其式如第二十八圖。 A, without pausing, advance [retreat] toward the west, your left hand still above your head. Your chest is facing toward the northwest, your face toward the east, your gaze toward B. At the same time, your right hand and your staff follow your body back, the arm straightening, the head of your staff touching the ground toward the east, the arm and staff together making a straight line. B, maintaining your posture, chase toward the west as A walks to that end of the practice space (the amount of steps for both of you depending on the size of the practice space), and forcefully stab toward his head, your left foot again going forward. A, when you see the stab coming, bring your feet to a halt with your right foot forward, left foot behind, as your right hand forcefully sends the middle section of your staff propping upward, the arm extending upward and slightly toward the east, the center of the hand facing upward, the head of your staff pointing downward toward the southeast. At the same time, your right foot retreats a small step, the heel slightly lifted, toes touching down. Your chest is facing toward the northeast, your left hand still positioned above your head, your gaze toward B’s spear. See photo 28:
第二十九動作 MOVEMENT 29:
乙方將槍縮回。兩足不動。復照甲方右腿下部猛刺。同時甲方。右足向起點前方猛撤一步。膝蓋弓曲。左足不動。原地向右擰勁。使足尖向起點左方。膝蓋伸直。兩足距離約三尺。（隨身之高矮而定）使全身重點。移於右腿。右手用力擰。使棍頭向後旋轉。經頭上。至面前朝下猛捕。同時右手亦抓棍之中段。用力向下按。胳膊伸直。手心向下。右手心向裏。肘微曲。腰部微向前曲。胸向起點左方。兩目注視乙方。此時乙方姿式。左足在前。膝蓋微曲。右腿在後伸直。手心向上。右手持槍樽。在左手之後。距離左手約五六寸。胸向起點前方。兩目注視甲方。以上姿式。與第二十三圖動作相同。其式如第二十九圖。 B, withdraw your spear, your feet staying where they are, then fiercely stab downward toward A’s right leg. A, your right foot suddenly withdraws a step toward the west, the knee bending, your left foot staying where it is and pivoting to the right so the toes are pointing toward the south, the knee straightening, your feet about three feet apart (depending on your own height), the weight shifting to your right leg. At the same time, your right hand forcefully twists, sending the head of your staff arcing behind you, passing over your head, and fiercely seizing downward once in front of your face, your right [left] hand also grasping the middle section of your staff and forcefully pushing it down, the arm straightening, the center of the hand facing downward, the center of your right hand facing inward, the elbow slightly bent, your torso slightly bending forward. Your chest is facing toward the south, your gaze toward B. At this time, B’s posture is thus: your left foot is forward, the knee slightly bent, your right leg straightened behind, [your left hand forward,] the center of the hand facing upward, your right hand holding the end of your spear about half a foot behind your left hand. Your chest is facing toward the west, your gaze toward A. This posture is the same as in photo 23. See photo 29:
第三十動作 MOVEMENT 30:
乙方將槍縮回。使右手向後伸直。左手移抓槍之上段。同時左足尖向外撇。右足在左足後方。向起點前方開一步。此時胸已向起點左方。左手沈下。右手由後向前。（此時右手移抓槍之中段）使槍樽照甲方頭部猛劈。左手曲肘。手心向上。右手在前。肘微曲。手心向下。胸向起點左方。面向起點前方。兩目注視甲方。同時甲方見槍樽劈來。兩足向前猛進一小步。雙手持棍。猛向上架。右手向上伸直。左肘微曲。向前上方伸。兩手心均向起點左後方。使棍尾高於棍頭約一尺五六寸。棍頭向起點右後下方。胸向起點左後方。右膝彎曲。足尖向起點左方。左膝在前。伸直。足尖向起點左後方。面向起點後方。兩目注視乙方其式如第三十圖。 B, withdraw your spear, your right arm straightening behind, your left hand shifting its grip to the forward section of your spear. At the same, your left toes swing outward and your right foot takes a step toward the west from behind your left foot. With your chest now facing toward the south, your left hand is sinking down and your right hand comes forward from behind (shifting its grip to the middle section), sending the end of your spear fiercely chopping toward A’s head. Your left elbow is bent, the center of the hand facing upward, and your right hand is forward, the elbow slightly bent, the center of the hand facing downward. Your chest is facing toward the south, your face toward the west, your gaze toward A. A, when you see the end of B’s spear chopping toward you, your feet both advance a small step forward as you fiercely prop up your staff with both hands, your right arm straightening upward, your left elbow slightly bent as it extends forward and upward, the centers of both hands facing toward the southeast as you put the tail of your staff about a foot and a half higher than the head of your staff, the head of your staff pointing downward toward the northeast. Your chest is facing toward the southeast, your right knee bending, the toes pointing toward the south, your left knee straightened in front, the toes pointing toward the southeast. You are facing toward the east, your gaze toward B. See photo 30 [reverse view]:
第三十一動作 MOVEMENT 31:
甲方左手沈下。右足在左足後面。向起點後方開一步。右手向前按。使棍尾照乙方頭部直劈。左肘彎曲。手心向下。使左肘緊挾棍頭。於左脇上端。右手在前。肘微曲。手心向下。斯時右膝在前彎曲。左腿伸直。成前弓後箭步。胸向起點右後方。面向起點後方。兩目注視乙方。同時乙方右足猛撤一步。右手抬起。復移抓槍樽。使槍樽向上。同時左手伸直。向上托。使槍中段。猛架甲棍。此時右手向上。手心朝起點右前方。左手在前伸直。向起點左前上方。手心向上。槍樽高於槍尖約一尺七八寸。槍尖向起點左前下方。右腿在後伸直。左腿亦伸直。唯足踵微提起。足尖觸地。上身向後微閃。胸向起點右前方。面向起點前方。兩目注視甲方。其式如第三十一圖。 A, your left hand sinks down as your right foot takes a step toward the east from behind your left foot, your right hand pushing forward, sending the tail of your staff chopping toward B’s head. Your left elbow is bent, the center of the hand facing downward, the elbow wrapping the head of your staff to your left ribs. Your right hand is forward, the elbow slightly bent, the center of the hand facing downward. Your right knee in front is bent, left leg straight, making a stance of front leg a bow, rear leg an arrow. Your chest is facing toward the northeast, your face toward the east, your gaze toward B. B, your right foot suddenly withdraws a step, your right hand lifting, shifting its grip to the end of your spear, and sending it upward, your left hand at the same time extending and propping up, sending the middle section of your spear to fiercely prop away A’s staff. Your right hand is now above, the center of the hand facing toward the northwest, your left hand forward, the arm straight, pointing toward the southwest, the center of the hand facing upward, the end of your spear about a foot and three quarters higher than the tip, the tip pointing downward toward the southwest. Your right leg is straightening behind, your left leg also straightening, the heel slightly lifted, toes touching down, your upper body slightly dodging back. Your chest is facing toward the northwest, your face toward the west, your gaze toward A. See photo 31:
第三十二動作 MOVEMENT 32:
同時乙方。左手向裏擰。使槍尖向裏裹。棍尾裹至乙槍在上。棍尾在下。甲方兩足不動。左手鬆開沈下。復伸至頭部上方。五指伸直並攏。手心向上。右手用力。使棍頭由後經上方。照乙頭部直劈。上身微向前探。同時乙方。左手向左用力。使槍向左猛掛。右手槍樽在後。微隨。使槍尖向上。兩方其餘姿式。與前不變。其式如第三十二圖。 B, your left hand twists inward, causing the tip of your spear to wrap inward, wrapping around the tail of A’s staff until the spear is on top and the staff is underneath. A, with your feet staying where they are, your left hand lets go and sinks down, then extends until above your head, the fingers extended but together, the center of the hand facing upward, as your right hand forcefully sends the head of your staff behind you, passing over you, and chopping toward B’s head, your upper body slightly reaching forward. B, your left hand forcefully goes to the left, sending your spear across with a sudden hanging action, your right hand at the end of your spear slightly following, causing the tip of your spear to go upward. The rest of the posture is the same as before [Movement 21]. See photo 32:
第三十三動作 MOVEMENT 33:
甲方。右手持棍。在前。左手抓棍尾。用力向乙方左腿下部打一掃蹚。同時乙方高跳。右足先觸地。由左方旋轉一圈。使胸復向起點前方。左足再向前觸地。此時雙手挺槍。復照甲方腿部猛刺。右腿在後伸直。左膝彎曲。成小前弓後箭步。左手在前。手心向上。右手在後。距離左手約五六寸。胸向起點前方。兩目注視甲方。同時甲方。左足不動。右足微向起點左方。橫移一小步。膝蓋伸直。左膝微曲。左手鬆開。置於頭部上方。五指伸開並攏。右手持棍。使棍頭在前觸地。不動。胳膊伸直。向起點右方猛撥。右手反背。使手心向起點左方。胸向起點右方。棍尾直向上。胳膊橫平。面向起點後方。兩目注視乙方。其式如第三十三圖。 A, with your right hand still holding your staff, your left hand comes forward to also take hold of the tail section and you forcefully do a “sweeping the hall” attack toward B’s lower left leg. B, jump high, your right foot coming down first, [your torso] turning from the left so that your chest is facing toward the west as your left foot comes down forward and you extend your spear with both hands, fiercely stabbing toward A’s [right] leg, your right leg straightening behind, left knee bending, making a small stance of front leg a bow, rear leg an arrow. Your left hand is forward, the center of the hand facing upward, right hand behind, about half a foot away from your left hand. Your chest is facing toward the west, your gaze toward A. A, your left foot stays where it is as your right foot slightly shifts across a small step toward the south, the knee straightening, your left knee slightly bending. Your left hand lets go and is placed above your head, the fingers extended but together, as your right hand puts the head of your staff firmly onto the ground and the arm straightens, suddenly deflecting toward the north, the hand turned over so the center of the hand is facing toward the south. Your chest is facing toward the north, the tail of your staff pointing upward, your [right] arm horizontal. You are facing toward the east, your gaze toward B. See photo 33:
第三十四動作 MOVEMENT 34:
甲方將槍撥出。右手用力。使棍頭由身後。經頭上向乙方頭部直劈。其餘姿式。與前不變。唯該時上身向前探。右膝彎曲。左腿伸直。成前弓後箭步。同時乙方復將槍縮回。全體隨向後縮。左手將槍抬起。朝上猛向左帶。其姿式與前第二十一圖相同。其式如第三十四圖。 A, after deflecting B’s spear away, your right hand forcefully sends the head of your staff from behind your body, over your head, and chopping straight toward B’s head. The rest of the posture is the same as before [Movement 21], except that this time your upper body is reaching forward. Your right knee is bent, left leg straight, making a stance of front leg a bow, rear leg an arrow. B, withdraw your spear, your body also withdrawing, your left hand lifting your spear, the hand facing upward, and fiercely drag to the left. This posture is the same as in photo 21. See photo 34:
第三十五動作 MOVEMENT 35:
甲方不停。卽向起點前方開步。進行姿式。左手仍在頭部上方。胸向起點右前方。面由右方轉向起點後方。兩目注視乙方。同時右手及棍。在身後。隨胳膊伸直。棍頭觸地。向起點正後方。胳膊與棍成直線。同時乙方姿式不變。向前開步。（起點前面）直追（甲乙兩方、開步多寡、視練習場之大小而定）甲方。走至練習場之另一端。乙方用力照甲方頭部直刺。乙方左足在前。甲方見槍刺來。止步。右足在前。左足在後。右手用力使棍之中段。向上猛托。右手朝上伸直。微向起點後方。手心向上。棍頭向起點左後下方。右足向後退回一小步。足踵微提起。足尖觸地。胸向起點右後方。左手仍在頭上不變。兩目注視乙槍。以上姿式及動作。與前第二十二圖相同。其式如第三十五圖。 A, without pausing, advance [retreat] toward the west, your left hand still above your head. Your chest is facing toward the northwest, your face toward the east, your gaze toward B. At the same time, your right hand and your staff follow your body back, the arm straightening, the head of your staff touching the ground toward the east, the arm and staff together making a straight line. B, maintaining your posture, chase toward the west as A walks to that end of the practice space (the amount of steps for both of you depending on the size of the practice space), and forcefully stab toward his head, your left foot again going forward. A, when you see the stab coming, bring your feet to a halt with your right foot forward, left foot behind, as your right hand forcefully sends the middle section of your staff propping upward, the arm extending upward and slightly toward the east, the center of the hand facing upward, the head of your staff pointing downward toward the southeast. At the same time, your right foot retreats a small step, the heel slightly lifted, toes touching down. Your chest is facing toward the northeast, your left hand still positioned above your head, your gaze toward B’s spear. The posture and movement is the same as for photo 22. See photo 35:
第三十六動作 MOVEMENT 36:
乙方將槍縮回。兩足不動。復照甲方右腿下部猛刺。同時甲方。右足向起點前方猛撤一步。膝蓋弓曲。左足不動。原地向右擰勁。使足尖向起點左方。膝蓋伸直。兩足距離約三尺。（然亦隨身體高矮而定）使全身重點。移於右腿。右手用力擰。使棍頭向後旋轉。經頭上朝下猛捕。同時左手亦抓棍之中段。用力向下按。胳膊伸直。手心向下。右手心向裏。肘微曲。腰部微向前曲。胸向起點左方。兩目注視乙方。此時乙方姿式。左足在前。膝蓋微曲。右腿在後伸直。上身微向前探。左手在前伸直。手心向上。右手持槍樽。在左手之後。距離左手約五六寸。胸向起點前方。兩目注視甲方。其姿式動作。與前第二十三圖相同。其式如第三十六圖。 B, withdraw your spear, your feet staying where they are, then fiercely stab downward toward A’s right leg. A, your right foot suddenly withdraws a step toward the west, the knee bending, your left foot staying where it is and pivoting to the right so the toes are pointing toward the south, the knee straightening, your feet about three feet apart (depending on your own height), the weight shifting to your right leg. At the same time, your right hand forcefully twists, sending the head of your staff arcing behind you, passing over your head, and fiercely seizing downward, your left hand also grasping the middle section of your staff and forcefully pushing it down, the arm straightening, the center of the hand facing downward, the center of your right hand facing inward, the elbow slightly bent, your torso slightly bending forward. Your chest is facing toward the south, your gaze toward B. At this time, B’s posture is thus: your left foot is forward, the knee slightly bent, your right leg straightened behind, your upper body slightly reaching forward, your left hand forward, the arm straight, the center of the hand facing upward, your right hand holding the end of your spear about half a foot behind your left hand. Your chest is facing toward the west, your gaze toward A. This posture is the same as in photo 23. See photo 36:
第三十七動作 MOVEMENT 37:
乙方不動。將槍縮回。復照甲方頭部直刺。甲方見槍刺來。右足不動。原地向左轉。使足尖向起點後方。左足縮回半步。足踵提起。足尖觸地。膝蓋微曲。兩足距離約一尺餘。同時左手持棍抬起。使棍向身之左方猛帶。手心向起點後方。胸亦向起點後方。右手棍尾。伏於右脅下部。面向起點後方。同時乙方。復將槍縮回。兩足不動。又照甲方左腿下部猛刺。同時甲方。左足向起點左方橫移一小步。足尖向外撇。右足在左足後方。向起點後方開一步。兩膝蓋彎曲。成騎馬式。右手棍尾。在右足開步之際。使棍尾向前猛抵乙槍。兩足均向起點右方。胸亦向起點右方。面向起點後方。兩目注視乙槍。其姿式與前第二十四圖相同。其式如第三十七圖。 B, staying where you are, withdraw your spear, then stab straight toward A’s head. A, when you see the stab coming, your right foot stays where it is and pivots to the left so the toes are pointing toward the east, your left foot withdrawing a half step, heel lifted, toes touching down, the knee slightly bent, your feet just over a foot apart. At the same time, your left hand lifts the [head] of your staff, fiercely dragging to your left, the center of the hand facing toward the east, as is your chest, your right hand holding the tail of your staff hidden below your right ribs. You are facing toward the east. B, again withdraw your spear, your feet staying where they are, and then fiercely stab downward toward A’s left leg. A, your left foot shifts a small step across toward the south, the toes swinging outward, and your right foot takes a step toward the east from behind your left foot, both knees bending, making a horse-riding stance. As your right foot steps out, your right hand sends the tail of your staff forward, fiercely bracing away B’s spear, your feet pointing toward the north. Your chest is also facing toward the north, your face toward the east, your gaze toward B’s spear. The posture is the same as in photo 24. See photo 37:
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第十章 (CHAPTER TEN)
第三十八動作 MOVEMENT 38:
同時乙方槍樽。與甲方棍頭向上絞。槍樽在上。棍頭在下。絞至與頭平。乙方槍樽縮回。提高。同時右足向後再撤一步。左手沈下伸直。使槍尖朝下。在身之左手。猛向前推。右手用力下捶。使槍尖直刺甲方左腿下部。其姿式與前不變。唯此時右足在後。而胸已轉向起點右方。同時甲方。左手棍頭與槍樽相絞。見槍刺來。右足猛向前開一步。同時左肘曲。棍頭抬起。向上。右手下沈。使棍尾向下。右手向前一推。使棍尾猛抵乙槍。兩膝彎曲。仍成騎馬式。唯此時。右足在前。胸已向起點右方。以上姿式。與前第二十六圖相同。其式如第三十八圖。 The end of B’s spear and the head of A’s staff are coiling upward, spear on top, staff underneath. B, once they are at head level, withdraw the end of your spear by lifting it high, your right foot withdrawing a step behind you [your left foot following], your left hand sinking down, the arm straightening, pointing the tip of your spear downward to your left, and then your left hand fiercely pushes forward, your right hand forcefully dropping downward, sending the tip of your spear stabbing toward A’s left lower leg. The posture is the same as in the previous movement, your right foot behind, your chest facing toward the north. A, your left hand is holding the head of your staff as it coils with the end of B’s spear, and then when you see the stab coming, your right foot suddenly shifts a step forward [your left foot following], your left elbow bending, sending the head of your staff upward, your right hand sinking down, sending the tail of your staff downward, and your right hand pushes the tail forward, fiercely bracing away B’s spear. Both knees are bending, again making a horse-riding stance, your right foot forward, your chest facing toward the north. The posture is the same as in photo 26 [which is itself a repeat of photo 24 and was just reused for Movement 37]. See photo 38 [in this case a reverse view]:
第三十九動作 MOVEMENT 39:
甲方不停。左手鬆開。移抓右手後方棍尾。右手在前。兩手用力。使棍頭經上方向前。照乙方左肩斜劈。同時上身亦向前探。兩足不動。其餘姿式與前不變。乙方右手槍樽。縮回右脅後下方。左手用力。將槍抬起。向身之左方猛帶。左肘曲。手心向起點後方。右手沈。同時右足不動。膝蓋彎曲。左足向後退回半步。足踵微提起。足尖觸地。胸向起點正前方。兩目注視甲方。其式如第三十九圖。 A, without pausing, your left hand lets go and shifts its grip to the tail of your staff behind your right hand, your right hand now forward, and both hands forcefully send the head of your staff forward from above, chopping diagonally toward B’s left shoulder, your upper body reaching forward, your feet staying where they are. The rest of the posture remains the same as in the previous movement. B, your right hand withdraws the end of your spear below and behind your right ribs as your left hand forcefully lifts your spear into a sudden dragging action to your left, the elbow bending, the center of the hand facing toward the east, your right hand sinking. At the same time, your right foot stays where it is, the knee bending, your left foot withdrawing a half step, heel slightly lifted, toes touching down. Your chest is facing toward the west, your gaze toward A. See photo 39:
第四十動作 MOVEMENT 40:
甲方仍雙手持棍。右手在前。將棍抬起。復照乙方左腿下方打一掃蹚。同時乙方。雙腿高跳。此時棍已轉甲之左方。甲方兩足不動。復將棍抬起。又照乙方頭部直劈。右膝在前彎曲。左腿伸直。成前弓後箭步。胸向起點後方。面亦向後方。兩目注視乙方。同時乙方雙手持槍。向上猛托。兩手朝上伸直。右足在前。膝蓋彎曲。左足在後伸直。成前弓後箭步。胸向起點右前方。面向起點前方。兩目注視甲方。其式如第四十圖。 A, still with both hands holding your staff, your right hand forward, lift your staff, then attack B’s lower left leg with a “sweeping the hall” action. B, jump high with both legs, letting A’s staff arc through toward the north. A, with your feet staying where they are, lift your staff and then chop toward B’s head, your right knee bending forward, left leg straightening, making a stance of front leg a bow, rear leg an arrow. Your chest is facing toward the east, your face also toward the east, your gaze toward B. B, your hands send your spear fiercely propping up, your arms straightening upward, your right knee bending forward, your left leg straightening behind, making a stance of front leg a bow, rear leg an arrow. Your chest is facing toward the northwest, your face toward the west, your gaze toward A. See photo 40:
第四十一動作 MOVEMENT 41:
乙方雙手沈下。挺槍照甲方頭額直刺。其姿式與前不變。同時甲方見槍刺來。右足向左足後方。猛撤一步。同時雙手縮回。使棍頭朝上。猛向右帶。此時左膝微曲。右足在前伸直。足踵微提起。足尖觸地。胸向起點後方。兩目注視乙方。其式如第四十一圖。 B, your hands sink down and you extend your spear with a stab toward A’s forehead, the [rest of] your posture remaining the same as in the previous movement. A, when you see the stab coming, your right foot suddenly withdraws a step behind your left foot [withdraws a half step in front of your left foot] as your hands also withdraw, sending the head of your staff upward and fiercely dragging to the right, your left knee slightly bending, your right leg straightening in front, the heel slightly lifting, toes touching down. Your chest is facing toward the east, your gaze toward B. See photo 41:
第四十二動作 MOVEMENT 42:
乙方復將槍縮回。姿式不變。又照甲方左腿下部直刺。同時甲方。左足向起點右方橫移一小步。兩手擰勁。使棍頭在上。朝下猛捕。右足不動。膝蓋向下曲。左足向起點右後方伸直。足尖向起點左後方。腰部向前曲。此時右手在前。手心向下。左手在後。手心向上。兩胳膊成斜十字架。右手在上。左手在下。兩手距離約五六寸。棍頭向右後方。觸地。胸向起點左後方。面向起點後方。兩目注視乙方。其式如第四十二圖。 B, withdraw your spear, your posture not changing, and then stab downward toward A’s left [right] leg. A, your left [right] foot shifts a small step across toward the north as your hands twist, sending the head of your staff from above to fiercely seize downward, your right foot now staying where it is, the knee bending downward, as your left leg straightens toward the northeast, the toes pointing toward the southeast, your upper body slightly leaning forward. Your right hand is now in front, the center of the hand facing downward, your left hand behind, the center of the hand facing upward, your forearms making an X shape, right arm above, left arm below, your hands about half a foot apart. The head of your staff is touching the ground toward the southwest [northeast]. Your chest is facing toward the southeast, your face toward the east, your gaze toward B. See photo 42:
第四十三動作 MOVEMENT 43:
乙方姿式不變。將槍縮回。復照甲方頭額左端直刺。同時甲方站起。雙手持棍。與前不變。向上猛托。兩胳膊均向上伸直。棍頭向起點右後下方。胸向起點左後方。面向起點後方。兩目注視乙方。其式如第四十三圖。 B, without changing your posture, withdraw your spear, then stab toward the left side of A’s forehead. A, rise up with both hands holding your staff, their position not changing, and fiercely prop up B’s spear, your arms straightening upward, the head of your staff pointing downward [upward] toward the northeast. Your chest is facing toward the southeast, your face toward the east, your gaze toward B. See photo 43:
第四十四動作 MOVEMENT 44 [switching places]:
承上式。甲方將槍托出。左足向起點左方橫移一小步。足尖向外撇。右足在左足後方。向前開一步。雙手持棍。與前不變。用力使棍頭。經後旋轉。由右方橫向乙方腰部。攔腰一棍。（此時胸已由左轉、向起點右方、左足轉向前右足在後）在攔腰之際。同時左足。再由右足前方。向後撤一步。右膝在前彎曲。左腿伸直。成前弓後箭步。胸向起點正前方。雙手在前抓棍伸直。右手心向上。左手在後向下。面向起點前方。兩目注視乙方。同時乙方見棍照攔腰打來。左手抬起。使槍尖向上。右手下沈。左足向起點右方橫移一小步。足尖向外撇。右足在左足後面。向前開一步。及時原地向左轉。使胸向起點後方。（此時左足轉向前、右足在後）同時左足在前。向右足後方撤一步。右膝在前彎曲。左腿伸直。成前弓後箭步。胸向起點右方。在右足向前開步之際。兩手用力。使槍中段。猛抵甲棍。面向起點後方。兩目注視甲方。其式如第四十四圖。 A, continuing from the previous posture, having propped away A’s spear, your left foot shifts a small step across toward the south, toes swinging outward, and your right foot takes a step forward from behind your left foot, your hands not changing their position on your staff as they forcefully send the head of your staff arcing behind you and then swinging across toward B’s waist from your right. (In this instant, your chest is turning leftward to be facing toward the north so that as your left foot is turning in front of you, your right foot is momentarily becoming the rear foot.) Then as you swing across to his waist, your left foot withdraws behind your right foot [causing you to fully switch places with B], your right knee bending in front, your left leg straightening, making a stance of front leg a bow, rear leg an arrow. Your chest is facing toward the east, your hands extending your staff forward with the center of your right hand facing upward, your left hand behind, the center of the hand facing downward. You are facing toward the west, your gaze toward B. B, when you see A’s staff swinging toward your waist, your left hand lifts, sending the tip of your spear upward, your right hand sinking down, as your left foot shifts a small step across toward the north, toes swinging outward, and your right foot takes a step forward from behind your left foot. (In this instant, your chest is turning leftward to be facing toward the east so that as your left foot is turning in front of you, your right foot is momentarily becoming the rear foot.) Then your left foot withdraws to be behind your right foot [causing you to fully switch places with A], your right knee bending in front, your left leg straightening, making a stance of front leg a bow, rear leg an arrow. Your chest is facing toward the north. As your right foot steps forward, your hands forcefully send the middle section of your spear to suddenly brace away A’s staff. You are facing toward the east, your gaze toward A. See photo 44:
第四十五動作 MOVEMENT 45:
乙方右足向後撤一步。同時右手槍樽。後縮。左手沈下。挺槍照甲方頭額右端直刺。同時甲方。仍雙手持棍。向上猛托。兩手朝上過頂。使棍頭向起點右前下方。右足退回半步。足踵提起。足尖觸地。上身微向後縮。胸仍向起點前方。兩目注視乙方。其式如第四十五圖。 B, your right foot withdraws a step as your right hand withdraws the end of your spear, your left hand sinking down, then extend your spear, stabbing toward the right side of A’s forehead. A, still holding your staff with both hands, fiercely prop up, your hands going higher than your headtop, the head of your staff pointing downward toward the northwest, your right foot withdrawing a half step, heel lifted, toes touching down, your upper body slightly withdrawing. Your chest is again facing toward the west, your gaze toward B. See photo 45:
第四十六動作 MOVEMENT 46:
乙方將槍縮回。復照甲方腿部下方直刺。其姿式與前不變。甲方見槍刺來。同時右足。向起點左方橫移一小步。足尖向外撇。左足由右足後方。向前開一步。雙手持棍。用力使棍頭。由後經上方。向前猛捕。棍頭在前觸地。右手在前。手心向下。左手在後。手心向上。兩手成斜十字。右手在上。左手在下。兩手距離約五六寸。左腿在前伸直。右足曲膝。上身向前撲。使全身重點。移於右腿。胸向起點右前方。面向起點正前方。兩目注視乙方。其式如第四十六圖。 B, withdraw your spear and then stab downward toward A’s [right] leg, the rest of your posture remaining the same as in the previous movement. A, when you see the stab coming, your right foot shifts a small step across toward the south, toes swinging outward, and your left foot takes a step forward from behind your right foot, as your hands forcefully send the head of your staff to the rear, continuing over you, and then fiercely seizing forward, the head of your staff touching the ground. Your right hand is in front, the center of the hand facing downward, your left hand behind, the center of the hand facing upward, your forearms making an X shape, right arm above, left hand below, your hands about half a foot apart. Your left leg is forward and straightened, your right knee bending, and your upper body is leaning forward, the weight on your right leg. Your chest is facing toward the northwest, your face toward the west, your gaze toward B. See photo 46 [reverse view]:
第四十七動作 MOVEMENT 47:
同時乙方。復將槍縮回。又照甲方頭額直刺。姿式與前相同。此時甲方全身提起。左足退回一小步。足踵提起。足尖觸地。雙手原處不動。抬起。向上使棍中段。猛抵乙槍。棍頭向起點左前下方。胸向起點前方。兩目注視乙方。其式如第四十七圖。 B, withdraw your spear and then stab toward A’s forehead, the rest of your posture remaining the same as in the previous movement. A, your body rises and your left foot retreats a small step, heel lifted, toes touching down, as your hands lift, not changing their position, sending the middle of your staff upward, fiercely bracing away B’s spear, the head of your staff pointing downward [upward] toward the southwest. Your chest is facing toward the west [northwest]. Your gaze is toward B. See photo 47 [reverse view]:
第四十八動作 MOVEMENT 48:
甲方左足向起點右方橫一小步。足尖向外撇。右足由左足後方。向前開一步。同時雙手持棍。經右方。照乙方左腿下部猛掃。兩手在前伸直。右足在前。膝蓋彎曲。左腿伸直。成前弓後箭步。胸向起點左前方。面向起點正前方。兩目注視乙腿。同時乙方。左足向起點左方橫移一小步。足尖向外撇。右足在左足後方。向前開一步。同時右手沈下。左手抬起。使槍尖向上。右手上移向前推。猛抵甲棍。右足在前曲膝。左腿伸直。成前弓後箭步。胸向起點右後方。兩目注視甲棍。其式如第四十八圖。 A, your left foot shifts a small step across toward the north, toes swinging outward, and your right foot takes a step forward from behind your left foot as your hands send your staff swinging through on your right side and fiercely sweeping toward B’s left leg, both hands going forward, your arms straightening. Your right foot is forward, the knee bending, your left leg straightening, making a stance of front leg a bow, rear leg an arrow [although the photo shows A in a horse-riding stance]. Your chest is facing toward the southwest, your face toward the east, your gaze toward B’s leg. B, your left foot shifts a small step across toward the south [steps back toward the east], toes swinging outward, and your right foot takes a step forward from behind your left foot [shifts forward, toes swinging inward]. At the same time, your right hand sinks down and your left hand lifts, sending the tip of your spear upward, your right hand then shifting upward, and you push forward, fiercely bracing away A’s staff. Your right foot is forward, the knee bending, your left leg straightening, making a stance of front leg a bow, rear leg an arrow [although the photo shows B in a horse-riding stance]. Your chest is facing toward the northeast, your gaze toward A’s staff. See photo 48:
第四十九動作 MOVEMENT 49:
乙方右手槍提起。縮回右脅後方。同時右足向後撤一步。左手下沈。挺直照甲方頭額直刺。左腿在前曲膝。右腿在後伸直。成小前弓後箭步。胸向起點後方。兩目注視甲方。同時甲方。見槍照頭部刺來。兩足不動。上身向後縮。使右腿伸直。左腿弓曲。成左弓右箭步。同時雙手持棍。向上猛托乙槍。胸向起點左前方。面向起點前方。兩目注視乙方。其式如第四十九圖。 B, your right hand lifts your spear, withdrawing it behind your right ribs, your right foot withdrawing a step behind you, your left hand sinking down. Then extend, stabbing toward A’s forehead, your left leg bending in front, right leg straightening behind, making a small stance of front leg a bow, rear leg an arrow. Your chest is facing toward the east, your gaze toward A. A, when you see the stab coming, your feet stay where they are, your upper body withdrawing, your right leg straightening, left leg bending, making a stance of left leg a bow, right leg an arrow. At the same time, your hands send your staff upward, fiercely propping away B’s spear. Your chest is facing toward the southwest, your face toward the west, your gaze toward B. See photo 49 [reverse view]:
第五十動作 MOVEMENT 50:
同時乙方。見槍托出不停。復將槍縮回。又照甲方腿部直刺。（此時右手單手直砍、左手鬆開、停於頭部上方、五指伸開並攏、手心向上）右手挺槍之際。左足向後撤一步。膝蓋彎曲。右腿伸直。成前弓後箭步。胸向起點右後方。面向起點正後方。兩目注視甲方。同時甲方不停。右足經左足前面。向起點後方橫開一步。左足亦向起點後方橫開一步。同時右手持棍。向裏擰勁。（左手鬆開）使棍頭朝裏向外猛掛。左手停於頭部上方。五指伸開並攏。手心向上。此時左足曲膝。右腿伸直。成前弓後箭步。胸向起點左前方。面向起點正前方。兩目注視乙方。其式如第五十圖。 B, when you see A’s staff propping up, do not pause, instead withdraw your spear and then stab toward A’s [right] leg. (This time, your right hand works alone, your left hand coming away and finishing above your head, fingers extended but together, the center of the hand facing upward.) As your right hand extends your spear, your left foot withdraws a step and the knee bends, your right leg straightening, making a stance of front leg a bow, rear leg an arrow. Your chest is facing toward the northeast, your face toward the east, your gaze toward A. A, also without pausing, your right foot takes a step toward the east, passing in front of your left foot, then your left foot also takes a step toward the east. At the same time, your right hand holds your staff (your left hand letting go), twisting inward so that the head of your staff goes inward, then it fiercely goes outward with a hanging action, your left hand finishing above your head, fingers extended but together, the center of the hand facing upward. Your left knee is bent, your right leg straightened, making a stance of front leg a bow, rear leg an arrow. Your chest is facing toward the southwest, your face toward the east, your gaze toward B. See photo 50:
Bernard the Kung Fu Elf riding Shotgun with Santa. (Source: Vintage American Postcard, authors personal collection.)
I am not going to lie. The annual Christmas list is my favorite post of the year. So welcome to Kung Fu Tea’s seventh annual holiday shopping list! Not only are we going to find some cool gift ideas, but hopefully this post will inspire you to make time for martial arts practice during the festive season. Training is a great way to deal with the various stresses that holidays always bring. And Christmas is the perfect excuse to stock up on that gear that you have been needing all year.
This year’s shopping list is split into four categories: books, training equipment, weapons, and (for the first time) “gifts for the martial artist who has everything”. This last category will focus on experiences rather than objects. I have tried to select items at a variety of price points for each category. Some of the gift ideas are quite reasonable while others are admittedly aspirational. After all, Christmas is a time for dreams, so why not dream big!
Given the emphasis of this blog, many of these ideas pertain to the Chinese martial arts, but I do try to branch out in places. I have also put at least one Wing Chun related item in each category. Nevertheless, with a little work many of these ideas could be adapted to fit the interests of just about any martial artist.
As a disclaimer I should point out that I have no financial relationship with any of the firms listed below (except for the part where I plug my own book). This is simply a list of gift ideas that I thought were interesting. It is not an endorsement or a formal product review. Lastly, I would like to thank my friend Bernard the “Kung Fu Elf” (see above) for helping me to brainstorm this list.
Books to Feed You Head
This has been a good year for books. Nowhere is the growth of martial arts studies more evident than in the explosion of new publications. Things have been so busy this year that I have been forced to restrict myself to new releases. Still, the first item on this list is both reasonably priced and outstanding reading….
The Martial Arts Studies Reader answers this need, by bringing together pioneers of the field and scholars at its cutting edges to offer authoritative and accessible insights into its key concerns and areas. Each chapter introduces and sets out an approach to and a route through a key issue in a specific area of martial arts studies. Taken together or in isolation, the chapters offer stimulating and exciting insights into this fascinating research area. In this way, The Martial Arts Studies Reader offers the first authoritative field-defining overview of the global and multidisciplinary phenomena of martial arts and martial arts studies.
Chinese martial arts is considered by many to symbolise the strength of the Chinese and their pride in their history, and has long been regarded as an important element of Chinese culture and national identity. Politics and Identity in Chinese Martial Arts comprehensively examines the development of Chinese martial arts in the context of history and politics, and highlights its role in nation building and identity construction over the past two centuries. ?
This book explores how the development of Chinese martial arts was influenced by the ruling regimes’ political and military policies, as well as the social and economic environment. It also discusses the transformation of Chinese martial arts into its modern form as a competitive sport, a sport for all and a performing art, considering the effect of the rapid transformation of Chinese society in the 20th century and the influence of Western sports. The text concludes by examining the current prominence of Chinese martial arts on a global scale and the bright future of the sport as a unique cultural icon and national symbol of China in an era of globalisation.
You can find my review of this book here. While I am a bit disappointed that the author failed to engage with the recent English language scholarship on the Chinese martial arts, this book is sure to show up in many future bibliographies.
Now for something a little lighter (err, easier to read…at 500 pages this book is actually quite heavy…)
The most authoritative biography—featuring dozens of rarely seen photographs—of film legend Bruce Lee, who made martial arts a global phenomenon, bridged the divide between Eastern and Western cultures, and smashed long-held stereotypes of Asians and Asian-Americans.
Forty-five years after Bruce Lee’s sudden death at age thirty-two, journalist and bestselling author Matthew Polly has written the definitive account of Lee’s life. It’s also one of the only accounts; incredibly, there has never been an authoritative biography of Lee. Following a decade of research that included conducting more than one hundred interviews with Lee’s family, friends, business associates, and even the actress in whose bed Lee died, Polly has constructed a complex, humane portrait of the icon.
Polly explores Lee’s early years as a child star in Hong Kong cinema; his actor father’s struggles with opium addiction and how that turned Bruce into a troublemaking teenager who was kicked out of high school and eventually sent to America to shape up; his beginnings as a martial arts teacher, eventually becoming personal instructor to movie stars like James Coburn and Steve McQueen; his struggles as an Asian-American actor in Hollywood and frustration seeing role after role he auditioned for go to a white actors in eye makeup; his eventual triumph as a leading man; his challenges juggling a sky-rocketing career with his duties as a father and husband; and his shocking end that to this day is still shrouded in mystery.
Polly breaks down the myths surrounding Bruce Lee and argues that, contrary to popular belief, he was an ambitious actor who was obsessed with the martial arts—not a kung-fu guru who just so happened to make a couple of movies. This is an honest, revealing look at an impressive yet imperfect man whose personal story was even more entertaining and inspiring than any fictional role he played onscreen.
This is the first long-term analysis of the development of Japanese martial arts, connecting ancient martial traditions with the martial arts practised today. The Historical Sociology of Japanese Martial Arts captures the complexity of the emergence and development of martial traditions within the broader Japanese Civilising Process.
The book traces the structured process in which warriors’ practices became systematised and expanded to the Japanese population and the world. Using the theoretical framework of Norbert Elias’s process-sociology and drawing on rich empirical data, the book also compares the development of combat practices in Japan, England, France and Germany, making a new contribution to our understanding of the socio-cultural dynamics of state formation. Throughout this analysis light is shed onto a gender blind spot, taking into account the neglected role of women in martial arts.
The Historical Sociology of Japanese Martial Arts is important reading for students of Socio-Cultural Perspectives in Sport, Sociology of Physical Activity, Historical Development of Sport in Society, Asian Studies, Sociology and Philosophy of Sport, and Sports History and Culture. It is also a fascinating resource for scholars, researchers and practitioners interested in the historical and socio-cultural aspects of combat sport and martial arts.
The practice of capoeira, the Brazilian dance-fight-game, has grown rapidly in recent years. It has become a popular leisure activity in many cultures, as well as a career for Brazilians in countries across the world including the US, the UK, Canada and Australia. This original ethnographic study draws on the latest research conducted on capoeira in the UK to understand this global phenomenon. It not only presents an in-depth investigation of the martial art, but also provides a wealth of data on masculinities, performativity, embodiment, globalisation and rites of passage.
Centred in cultural sociology, while drawing on anthropology and the sociology of sport and dance, the book explores the experiences of those learning and teaching capoeira at a variety of levels. From beginners’ first encounters with this martial art to the perspectives of more advanced students, it also sheds light on how teachers experience their own re-enculturation as they embody the exotic ‘other’.
Embodying Brazil: An Ethnography of Diasporic Capoeira is fascinating reading for all capoeira enthusiasts, as well as for anyone interested in the sociology of sport, sport and social theory, sport, race and ethnicity, or Latin-American Studies.
You don’t need very much gear to practice the Chinese martial arts. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t nice to have a couple of things on hand, particularly when you start to get bruised up from partner work or dummy drills. While researching the history of a prominent family of martial arts practicing pharmacists in Foshan I came across the story of this particular brand of Dit Da Jow. I should probably dig some of that research out of my notes and turn it into an essay. But ever since then, I have kept a bottle of it around. You can usually find this brand at your local Chinese pharmacy, or even a good sized grocery story. Barring that, you can always just order it from Amazon.
This style of striking pad that was popularized in Muay Thai training, but I use it all the time in my Wing Chun practice. Honestly, I can’t think of the (striking) school that couldn’t use a few more pairs of these. Best of all, the size is always right! The perfect inexpensive gift for the Sifu in your life.
Having the right gear is good. But having the perfect bag to haul it all around in is (as they say) priceless. That is particularly true if the gear you are hauling is heavy, awkwardly shaped, or likely to freak people out if you were just walk down the sidewalk with it on your shoulder. These bags can be pricey at $150. But after having destroyed a few lower quality, non-purpose built bags over the last year, I am gaining a renewed appreciation for how easy a good gear bag can make life. Particularly when swords and lightsabers are involved.
Everyone seems to be talking about bringing more competitive style sparring into traditional Chinese martial arts training. And that means thinking about the right gear. I like my Hayabusa boxing gloves, but something like this might be great for those who want a little more dexterity for grabs, laups and paks.
And now for some “affordable” luxury. In the last couple of years a number of my kung fu brothers have bought (or switched to) iron body training dummies. These are a lot cheaper than nicely made wooden dummies, and they can easily be stuck in the corner of room that might not otherwise accommodate a hanging dummy (which I still think is the way to go if you have a chance). But while the quality of the Jong’s body and base is often great, I have noticed several (and I mean lots) of complaints about broken legs and rough workmanship on the arms. Lets face it, these are the parts of the dummy that we actually come into contact with the most frequently. So why not upgrade that part of your Jong to something a little more reliable and nicer to the touch?
At $120, is this the perfect jian for basic skills training and forms work? I have had a couple of longtime practitioners make that argument recently, based not just on the price point but the weight of this sword. Given my continuing exploration of Wudang Jian, I have a feeling that this is one item that might be making its way onto my personal shopping list.
There is no denying that the dadao is hot. I am seeing lots of interest in this weapon. The social scientist in me thinks that we need to take a step back and ponder what this all means. But my more practical side just wants to grab one of these trainers and work on some sword vs. bayonet drills. This particular trainer is available with either a disk or “S” guard. Also check out Purpleheart’s nylon jian trainers.
If you would prefer a sharper (and more historically/ethnographically significant) knife at a decent price point, why not consider an antique Nepalese military kukri. I have been collecting these for years, and have always found it ironic that the originals are so cheap compared to the latter British and Indian copies that were mass produced during the World Wars. Once you get your kukri be sure to check out this guide and discover your knife’s history.
There are lots of high quality butterfly swords out there, but I have been partial to these as their slim construction is much closer to most of the antiques that have survived than the sorts of “chopping” swords which became more popular after the early 20th century. And lets be honest, nothing say’s “Christmas” to the Wing Chun student/instructor in your life more than discovering a set of these in their stocking.
For the Martial Artist Who Has Everything….
I have long believed that many people are attracted to the martial arts as a type of virtual tourism. By practicing these arts we find a way to visit, contemplate and experience aspects of a time or place that we might not otherwise be able to visit. That is an important point to stress as survey data suggest that increasingly consumers value unique experiences more than the acquisition of objects. As such, the last section of our holiday list provides a different take on what the martial arts have to offer.
Lets begin with a destination that one can only visit through martial arts training. Have you (or the Star Wars fan in your life) ever wanted to learn to wield an elegant weapon from a more civilized age? If so, consider joining the Terra Prime Light Armory. Its a free, open-source, lightsaber academy run by experienced martial artists (mostly Kung Fu/Taijiaqan guys, but you will find some other stuff in there as well). If there is a brick and mortar club in your area they will be more than happy to point you in the right direction, and if not they offer an extensive database of on-line learning tools with individualized feedback mechanisms. Best of all, a voyage with the “Learners in Exile Corps” will not cost you a thing as these guys are in it for the love of the game. Sometimes the best things in life really are free!
No matter what aspect of the martial arts, and their interaction with popular culture, you are interested in, you are likely to find it at Combat Con. Held annually in Las Vegas (August 1-4, 2019), this event is unique in that it brings together a wide range of armed and unarmed martial arts instructors, while also hosting a variety of tournaments, performances, workshops for writers and game developers, cosplay contests and yes, even a full contact lightsaber tournament ($15 entrance feee). So if you are a social scientist who studies the martial arts in the modern world, the only question you have to ask yourself is why aren’t you already planning on going?
Its hard to estimate the cost of this one. Obviously you will need to fly to Vegas in August (which, in all honesty, is not the best time of year to visit this desert oasis). The public can visit the event for free, but if you want to do all of the workshops, tournaments and events you will probably end up paying in the $200-$300 range.
Left to Right: Doug Farrer, Scott Phillips, Paul Bowman at the Farewell Dinner of the 2015 Martial Arts Studies Conference in Cardiff.
Its not hard to find cheap plane tickets to LA, and this is the premier event of the Martial Arts Studies community. I can’t say enough about how much I have enjoyed these meetings over the years. The sense of community is really unlike anything I have ever seen at a conference before. An advanced registration would make the perfect gift for either yourself or the erudite warrior/scholar in your life.
A still from Come Drink With Me. Classic martial arts cinema at its best.
This is the part of the list where we dream big. It goes without saying that China is full of places where you can spend a few months studying the martial art of your choice (including Wing Chun). I selected this school as Chengdu is on my bucket list of places to stay for a few months, and one of my friends studied with Master Li for years when he lived in the area as a journalist. This would be a very authentic/rustic experience, rather than the sort of school catering to the “glampers” out there. And Chengdu has a great martial arts history that needs more exploration in the English language literature.
Prices for extended live-in training start at just under $1000 USD (not including airfare). Of course the real cost of this this sort of “Kung Fu Pilgrimage” is taking a few months off from work. But this is the stuff that dreams are made of!
That is it for this year’s Christmas shopping list. If you have other suggestions for items that might be of interest to the Kung Fu Tea community tell us in the comments!
Bernard the Kung Fu Elf riding Shotgun with Santa. (Source: Vintage American Postcard, authors personal collection.)
I am not going to lie. The annual Christmas list is my favorite post of the year. So welcome to Kung Fu Tea’s seventh annual holiday shopping list! Not only are we going to find some cool gift ideas, but hopefully this post will inspire you to make time for martial arts practice during the festive season. Training is a great way to deal with the various stresses that holidays always bring. And Christmas is the perfect excuse to stock up on that gear that you have been needing all year.
This year’s shopping list is split into four categories: books, training equipment, weapons, and (for the first time) “gifts for the martial artist who has everything”. This last category will focus on experiences rather than objects. I have tried to select items at a variety of price points for each category. Some of the gift ideas are quite reasonable while others are admittedly aspirational. After all, Christmas is a time for dreams, so why not dream big!
Given the emphasis of this blog, many of these ideas pertain to the Chinese martial arts, but I do try to branch out in places. I have also put at least one Wing Chun related item in each category. Nevertheless, with a little work many of these ideas could be adapted to fit the interests of just about any martial artist.
As a disclaimer I should point out that I have no financial relationship with any of the firms listed below (except for the part where I plug my own book). This is simply a list of gift ideas that I thought were interesting. It is not an endorsement or a formal product review. Lastly, I would like to thank my friend Bernard the “Kung Fu Elf” (see above) for helping me to brainstorm this list.
Books to Feed You Head
This has been a good year for books. Nowhere is the growth of martial arts studies more evident than in the explosion of new publications. Things have been so busy this year that I have been forced to restrict myself to new releases. Still, the first item on this list is both reasonably priced and outstanding reading….
The Martial Arts Studies Reader answers this need, by bringing together pioneers of the field and scholars at its cutting edges to offer authoritative and accessible insights into its key concerns and areas. Each chapter introduces and sets out an approach to and a route through a key issue in a specific area of martial arts studies. Taken together or in isolation, the chapters offer stimulating and exciting insights into this fascinating research area. In this way, The Martial Arts Studies Reader offers the first authoritative field-defining overview of the global and multidisciplinary phenomena of martial arts and martial arts studies.
Chinese martial arts is considered by many to symbolise the strength of the Chinese and their pride in their history, and has long been regarded as an important element of Chinese culture and national identity. Politics and Identity in Chinese Martial Arts comprehensively examines the development of Chinese martial arts in the context of history and politics, and highlights its role in nation building and identity construction over the past two centuries. ?
This book explores how the development of Chinese martial arts was influenced by the ruling regimes’ political and military policies, as well as the social and economic environment. It also discusses the transformation of Chinese martial arts into its modern form as a competitive sport, a sport for all and a performing art, considering the effect of the rapid transformation of Chinese society in the 20th century and the influence of Western sports. The text concludes by examining the current prominence of Chinese martial arts on a global scale and the bright future of the sport as a unique cultural icon and national symbol of China in an era of globalisation.
You can find my review of this book here. While I am a bit disappointed that the author failed to engage with the recent English language scholarship on the Chinese martial arts, this book is sure to show up in many future bibliographies.
Now for something a little lighter (err, easier to read…at 500 pages this book is actually quite heavy…)
The most authoritative biography—featuring dozens of rarely seen photographs—of film legend Bruce Lee, who made martial arts a global phenomenon, bridged the divide between Eastern and Western cultures, and smashed long-held stereotypes of Asians and Asian-Americans.
Forty-five years after Bruce Lee’s sudden death at age thirty-two, journalist and bestselling author Matthew Polly has written the definitive account of Lee’s life. It’s also one of the only accounts; incredibly, there has never been an authoritative biography of Lee. Following a decade of research that included conducting more than one hundred interviews with Lee’s family, friends, business associates, and even the actress in whose bed Lee died, Polly has constructed a complex, humane portrait of the icon.
Polly explores Lee’s early years as a child star in Hong Kong cinema; his actor father’s struggles with opium addiction and how that turned Bruce into a troublemaking teenager who was kicked out of high school and eventually sent to America to shape up; his beginnings as a martial arts teacher, eventually becoming personal instructor to movie stars like James Coburn and Steve McQueen; his struggles as an Asian-American actor in Hollywood and frustration seeing role after role he auditioned for go to a white actors in eye makeup; his eventual triumph as a leading man; his challenges juggling a sky-rocketing career with his duties as a father and husband; and his shocking end that to this day is still shrouded in mystery.
Polly breaks down the myths surrounding Bruce Lee and argues that, contrary to popular belief, he was an ambitious actor who was obsessed with the martial arts—not a kung-fu guru who just so happened to make a couple of movies. This is an honest, revealing look at an impressive yet imperfect man whose personal story was even more entertaining and inspiring than any fictional role he played onscreen.
This is the first long-term analysis of the development of Japanese martial arts, connecting ancient martial traditions with the martial arts practised today. The Historical Sociology of Japanese Martial Arts captures the complexity of the emergence and development of martial traditions within the broader Japanese Civilising Process.
The book traces the structured process in which warriors’ practices became systematised and expanded to the Japanese population and the world. Using the theoretical framework of Norbert Elias’s process-sociology and drawing on rich empirical data, the book also compares the development of combat practices in Japan, England, France and Germany, making a new contribution to our understanding of the socio-cultural dynamics of state formation. Throughout this analysis light is shed onto a gender blind spot, taking into account the neglected role of women in martial arts.
The Historical Sociology of Japanese Martial Arts is important reading for students of Socio-Cultural Perspectives in Sport, Sociology of Physical Activity, Historical Development of Sport in Society, Asian Studies, Sociology and Philosophy of Sport, and Sports History and Culture. It is also a fascinating resource for scholars, researchers and practitioners interested in the historical and socio-cultural aspects of combat sport and martial arts.
The practice of capoeira, the Brazilian dance-fight-game, has grown rapidly in recent years. It has become a popular leisure activity in many cultures, as well as a career for Brazilians in countries across the world including the US, the UK, Canada and Australia. This original ethnographic study draws on the latest research conducted on capoeira in the UK to understand this global phenomenon. It not only presents an in-depth investigation of the martial art, but also provides a wealth of data on masculinities, performativity, embodiment, globalisation and rites of passage.
Centred in cultural sociology, while drawing on anthropology and the sociology of sport and dance, the book explores the experiences of those learning and teaching capoeira at a variety of levels. From beginners’ first encounters with this martial art to the perspectives of more advanced students, it also sheds light on how teachers experience their own re-enculturation as they embody the exotic ‘other’.
Embodying Brazil: An Ethnography of Diasporic Capoeira is fascinating reading for all capoeira enthusiasts, as well as for anyone interested in the sociology of sport, sport and social theory, sport, race and ethnicity, or Latin-American Studies.
You don’t need very much gear to practice the Chinese martial arts. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t nice to have a couple of things on hand, particularly when you start to get bruised up from partner work or dummy drills. While researching the history of a prominent family of martial arts practicing pharmacists in Foshan I came across the story of this particular brand of Dit Da Jow. I should probably dig some of that research out of my notes and turn it into an essay. But ever since then, I have kept a bottle of it around. You can usually find this brand at your local Chinese pharmacy, or even a good sized grocery story. Barring that, you can always just order it from Amazon.
This style of striking pad that was popularized in Muay Thai training, but I use it all the time in my Wing Chun practice. Honestly, I can’t think of the (striking) school that couldn’t use a few more pairs of these. Best of all, the size is always right! The perfect inexpensive gift for the Sifu in your life.
Having the right gear is good. But having the perfect bag to haul it all around in is (as they say) priceless. That is particularly true if the gear you are hauling is heavy, awkwardly shaped, or likely to freak people out if you were just walk down the sidewalk with it on your shoulder. These bags can be pricey at $150. But after having destroyed a few lower quality, non-purpose built bags over the last year, I am gaining a renewed appreciation for how easy a good gear bag can make life. Particularly when swords and lightsabers are involved.
Everyone seems to be talking about bringing more competitive style sparring into traditional Chinese martial arts training. And that means thinking about the right gear. I like my Hayabusa boxing gloves, but something like this might be great for those who want a little more dexterity for grabs, laups and paks.
And now for some “affordable” luxury. In the last couple of years a number of my kung fu brothers have bought (or switched to) iron body training dummies. These are a lot cheaper than nicely made wooden dummies, and they can easily be stuck in the corner of room that might not otherwise accommodate a hanging dummy (which I still think is the way to go if you have a chance). But while the quality of the Jong’s body and base is often great, I have noticed several (and I mean lots) of complaints about broken legs and rough workmanship on the arms. Lets face it, these are the parts of the dummy that we actually come into contact with the most frequently. So why not upgrade that part of your Jong to something a little more reliable and nicer to the touch?
At $120, is this the perfect jian for basic skills training and forms work? I have had a couple of longtime practitioners make that argument recently, based not just on the price point but the weight of this sword. Given my continuing exploration of Wudang Jian, I have a feeling that this is one item that might be making its way onto my personal shopping list.
There is no denying that the dadao is hot. I am seeing lots of interest in this weapon. The social scientist in me thinks that we need to take a step back and ponder what this all means. But my more practical side just wants to grab one of these trainers and work on some sword vs. bayonet drills. This particular trainer is available with either a disk or “S” guard. Also check out Purpleheart’s nylon jian trainers.
If you would prefer a sharper (and more historically/ethnographically significant) knife at a decent price point, why not consider an antique Nepalese military kukri. I have been collecting these for years, and have always found it ironic that the originals are so cheap compared to the latter British and Indian copies that were mass produced during the World Wars. Once you get your kukri be sure to check out this guide and discover your knife’s history.
There are lots of high quality butterfly swords out there, but I have been partial to these as their slim construction is much closer to most of the antiques that have survived than the sorts of “chopping” swords which became more popular after the early 20th century. And lets be honest, nothing say’s “Christmas” to the Wing Chun student/instructor in your life more than discovering a set of these in their stocking.
For the Martial Artist Who Has Everything….
I have long believed that many people are attracted to the martial arts as a type of virtual tourism. By practicing these arts we find a way to visit, contemplate and experience aspects of a time or place that we might not otherwise be able to visit. That is an important point to stress as survey data suggest that increasingly consumers value unique experiences more than the acquisition of objects. As such, the last section of our holiday list provides a different take on what the martial arts have to offer.
Lets begin with a destination that one can only visit through martial arts training. Have you (or the Star Wars fan in your life) ever wanted to learn to wield an elegant weapon from a more civilized age? If so, consider joining the Terra Prime Light Armory. Its a free, open-source, lightsaber academy run by experienced martial artists (mostly Kung Fu/Taijiaqan guys, but you will find some other stuff in there as well). If there is a brick and mortar club in your area they will be more than happy to point you in the right direction, and if not they offer an extensive database of on-line learning tools with individualized feedback mechanisms. Best of all, a voyage with the “Learners in Exile Corps” will not cost you a thing as these guys are in it for the love of the game. Sometimes the best things in life really are free!
No matter what aspect of the martial arts, and their interaction with popular culture, you are interested in, you are likely to find it at Combat Con. Held annually in Las Vegas (August 1-4, 2019), this event is unique in that it brings together a wide range of armed and unarmed martial arts instructors, while also hosting a variety of tournaments, performances, workshops for writers and game developers, cosplay contests and yes, even a full contact lightsaber tournament ($15 entrance feee). So if you are a social scientist who studies the martial arts in the modern world, the only question you have to ask yourself is why aren’t you already planning on going?
Its hard to estimate the cost of this one. Obviously you will need to fly to Vegas in August (which, in all honesty, is not the best time of year to visit this desert oasis). The public can visit the event for free, but if you want to do all of the workshops, tournaments and events you will probably end up paying in the $200-$300 range.
Left to Right: Doug Farrer, Scott Phillips, Paul Bowman at the Farewell Dinner of the 2015 Martial Arts Studies Conference in Cardiff.
Its not hard to find cheap plane tickets to LA, and this is the premier event of the Martial Arts Studies community. I can’t say enough about how much I have enjoyed these meetings over the years. The sense of community is really unlike anything I have ever seen at a conference before. An advanced registration would make the perfect gift for either yourself or the erudite warrior/scholar in your life.
A still from Come Drink With Me. Classic martial arts cinema at its best.
This is the part of the list where we dream big. It goes without saying that China is full of places where you can spend a few months studying the martial art of your choice (including Wing Chun). I selected this school as Chengdu is on my bucket list of places to stay for a few months, and one of my friends studied with Master Li for years when he lived in the area as a journalist. This would be a very authentic/rustic experience, rather than the sort of school catering to the “glampers” out there. And Chengdu has a great martial arts history that needs more exploration in the English language literature.
Prices for extended live-in training start at just under $1000 USD (not including airfare). Of course the real cost of this this sort of “Kung Fu Pilgrimage” is taking a few months off from work. But this is the stuff that dreams are made of!
That is it for this year’s Christmas shopping list. If you have other suggestions for items that might be of interest to the Kung Fu Tea community tell us in the comments!
I have just arrived back in Ithaca after spending Sunday driving rather than typing. Still, I have two items that I want to share. The first is a short interview I did with the Rochester Review after The Creation of Wing Chun was released by SUNY Press. I thought it came out rather well, so enjoy!
Second, have you submitted your proposal for the upcoming Martial Arts Studies meetings in California? If not, time is running out fast. Lets get those proposals sent in before Friday. Abstracts are easy to write, all you need is 200 words and a dream!
***I am off visiting family over the holiday weekend, so we are headed back to the archives. Since our (American) readers have just celebrated Thanksgiving, I though it would be appropriate to revisit an essay that asks what we should be grateful for as martial artists and students of martial arts studies. Spoiler alert, the answer is Bruce Lee.***
Introduction: Bruce Lee at 75
Yesterday I celebrated Thanksgiving with my family. As is customary on this day of remembrance I took a few moments to think about the last year and review the many things that I had to be grateful for. The year has been an eventful one.
In the professional realm I had a book published on the social history of the southern Chinese martial arts. I also delivered a keynote address at the first annual martial arts studies conference in the UK and, just recently, saw the publication of the first issue of our new journal on that same topic. I have had opportunities to meet and share my interests with all sorts of fascinating people from all over the world, and have started a number of other projects that should be bearing fruit months and years down the road. As the old Chinese saying goes, a wise man thinks of the source of the water that he drinks, and as I did so it occurred to me that I owe a profound debt of gratitude to Bruce Lee.
Today is the 75th anniversary of Lee’s birth in San Francisco. Born in California and raised in Hong Kong before returning to the West Coast at the end of the 1950s, Lee had a profound effect on the worlds of film, popular culture and the martial arts. While many claims about his career are exaggerated (one should treat with a certain degree of suspicion any assertion that someone was the “first” to do anything) there can be no doubt as to his ultimate impact on the public perception of the martial arts in America, as well as their rapid spread and popularization in the post-1970 era.
For anyone wondering what the point of Kung Fu was, Lee had a very specific answer. It combined a laser like focus on the problems of practical self-defense with a need to find personal and philosophical meaning in practice.
Like others who came before him, Lee argued that the martial arts were ultimately a means of self-creation. Yet drawing on the counter-cultural currents of the time he freed this discourse from the ideological chains that had linked such quests with ethno-nationalist projects for much of the 20th century. He instead placed the individual student at the center of the process. For Lee the martial arts went beyond the normal paradigms of personal security and self improvement and became a means of self actualization.
His own image on the silver screen promised that through these disciplines and their philosophies one could craft a “new self,” one that was fully fit for the challenges of an age of global competition and strife. It was promised that this “new self” would grow out of the process of self expression which the martial arts facilitated. Of course one had to first understand the true nature of these systems to free oneself from their stultifying structures. Individuals might agree or disagree (sometimes violently) with Lee’s assertions, but its hard to underestimate the impact that he had on the ways in which the martial arts are discussed in the West today.
Does this mean that in the absence of Bruce Lee I would not have written my book, or that we would not currently be reading a blog about martial arts studies? Ultimately those sorts of counterfactuals are impossible to answer, and they may cause more confusion than light. Japanese teachers had been promoting their arts in the West since the dawn of the 20th century. Sophia Delza knew nothing of Bruce Lee when she introduced Wu style Taijiquan to New York City. And the Korean government’s heavy support and promotion of Taekwondo had more to do with their own post-colonial struggles with the memory of the Japanese occupation than anything that came out of China.
I suspect that even in a world in which Lee had never existed the martial arts would still have found a respectable foothold in the West. A demand for these systems existed as part of larger cultural trends following WWII, Korea and the Vietnam War. Lee’s genius lay in his ability to understand and speak powerfully to the historical moment that existed.
Following his own advice he bent with the flow of history rather than fighting against it. Certainly some things would remain the same. That seems to follow from the structural nature of 20th century modernization and globalization. Ultimately our theories about the history of the martial arts are very much stories about these two forces (among others).
Yet would I be a student of Wing Chun, a somewhat obscure fighting system from the Pearl River delta region, without Bruce Lee’s rise to fame? Would I have had an opportunity to convince a university press to publish a book whose central historical case was built around a detailed, multi-chapter, biography of Ip Man, Bruce Lee’s teacher? And what of those individuals who study the martial arts? Would this body be as diverse (and sometimes radical) in the absence of Lee’s striking ability to speak to African and Latin-American martial artists (as well as many women and Asians) in the volatile 1970s?
Anthropological studies of the martial arts and social marginality remind us that people who are the most attracted to messages of resistance and individual empowerment are precisely those who have also been disempowered by the dominant social systems of the day. While the globalization of the East Asian martial arts would have come in one guise or another, its clear that I do have a lot to be grateful for when thinking about Lee’s contributions as a film maker, teacher and popularizer of the Chinese martial arts.
Birthdays are also important times for looking to the future. There can be no doubt that Lee’s image has retained a remarkable grip on the public imagination. Decades after his death he still frequently appears on magazine covers and in video games. Books bearing his name (either as an author or in their title) are found in every bookstore with a martial arts section. And Lee’s impact on the realm of martial art films can still be detected with ease. Countless allusions to his more iconic fight sequences can be seen on both the big and small screen. Ninjas may come and go, but even in the age of MMA it seems that Bruce will always have a home on the cover of Black Beltmagazine.
Still, one wonders if we are not starting to see changes in some aspects of how Lee is remembered and discussed. AMC recently aired a new series titled “Into the Badlands.” I have been following the advertising efforts around this project with great interest. The show’s creators have prided themselves in their extensive use of the martial arts. In fact, much of their advertising copy focuses on the fact that they are bringing “real” martial arts to the American small screen for the first time. Of course to make this claim with a straight face it is first necessary to seriously downplay, explain away or “forget” quite a bit of equally revolutionary TV that has come before, from Bruce Lee in the Green Hornet to Chuck Norris in Walker Texas Ranger.
A lot of discussion has also focused on Daniel Wu, the lead actor of this project. The show’s promoters have discussed the supposedly revolutionary nature of his role and the many ways in which he is changing the portrayal of Asian males in the entertainment industry. Yet if one drills down into this rhetoric very far what quickly becomes apparent is that Wu is seen as revolutionary in many of the exact same ways that Lee was seen as exceptional in his own era. The one real difference that stands out is that Wu’s character has the potential to develop a truly romantic story-line, where as this was something that was usually not seen with Lee’s films.
While the blame for this is often put on Hollywood (and there is no doubt that much of that is justified) one must also remember that Lee’s heroes came out of a genera of Cantonese storytelling and filmmaking in which romantic and martial leads tended to be somewhat segregated for important cultural reasons (see Avron Bortez for an extensive discussion of the construction of masculinity in the world of Kung Fu). While I applaud Wu for being able to pursue the sorts of roles that he finds interesting, I worry that his revolution is simultaneously erasing some of the traditional conventions of Chinese film and literature rather than challenging Western audiences with something unfamiliar. This is essentially the same discussion of hybrid borrowing vs. hegemony that seems to emerge in so many discussions of the globalization of popular culture. But whatever the ultimate resolution to this debate, it seems that there is an effort on the part of certain advertisers to retool and downplay Bruce Lee’s achievements in an effort to create a new moment of “revolution” in the current era.
Readers interested in looking at this specific discussion can see a number of the links that were included both in the most recent news update and on the Facebook group (in particular the Slate article titled “Daniel Wu is the Asian Action Hero that Bruce Lee Should have Been.”) Actually resolving the specific questions raised by all of this might take some time and far exceeds the space available in this post. Yet reviewing it led me to ask whether Bruce Lee is still the revolutionary figure that he once was. In our current moment do we still need Bruce Lee and his message of radical self-creation through the martial arts? Can he still act as a force for the popularization and spread of these fighting systems? Or is he becoming too culturally remote from modern students, readers and audiences? Is it likely that the public will remember his 100th birthday with the same enthusiasm that is greeting his 75th?
Ip Man and his best known student, Bruce Lee.
Bruce Lee and the Tao of Gung Fu
As I thought about these questions over the last couple of days I found myself turning to Lee’s unpublished “manuscript” The Tao of Gung Fu. In some respects this may seem like an odd choice. This book was never published in Lee’s lifetime, and as such most of this material had a rather limited impact on the way that people discussed either him or the martial arts in the 1970s and 1980s.
Nor is it always clear to me the degree to which this collection of chapters can be considered a true “book.” From the editor’s (John Little) description it appears that Lee abandoned the project before a complete manuscript was pulled together. A number of the early chapters were in place (they even make internal references to each other) but after that there may only have been an outline. This has been flushed out with notes, drawings and other pieces that Lee wrote over the years. Some pieces are in a more finished state than others, but none of it was ever intended to be made public during Lee’s life. In fact, it must be remembered that he made the rather conscious decision to walk away from the project. As such we can only speculate as to what would have made it into the final version had Bruce decided to actually pursue publication.
One of the things that bothers me about this particular book, as it was posthumously published by Tuttle and the Lee estate, is that it attempts to seamlessly weave this mass of material together into a coherent whole rather than letting the individual pieces, written over a range of years, stand on their own. Nor does it attempt to label what the original documentary sources of the various “chapters” actually were and how they fit into the larger body of Lee’s papers.
Obviously this is an annoyance for other historians working on Lee. And it is especially problematic when one realizes that a number of these essays were originally composed as papers for Lee’s classes at the University of Washington. While clearly bright and interested in philosophy (as well as its application to the martial arts) Lee is the sort of student who likely gave his teachers heart burn. As multiple other scholars (including John Little and James Bishop) have pointed out, Lee was guilty of plagiarizing a number of passages and key ideas throughout these essays.
In a few cases he simply borrowed text while dropping the quotes and footnotes, while in others he followed his sources much too closely (a problem known as “patchwriting”). In a number of other cases he appropriates ideas or insights without proper citation, or plays fast and loose with his sources. For a student of philosophy a surprising number of very detailed arguments are simply attributed to “Taoism” with no further support.
Worst of all, some of Lee’s best known personal stories, such as his exchange with his teacher Ip Man about the problem of relaxation, turn out to have been lifted from other sources (in that particular case the important popularizer of Zen, Allen Watts who had a striking similar exchange with his Judo teacher). James Bishop seems to be the best source currently available on the extent of Lee’s plagiarism and the sources that he was actually drawing on. Of course Lee never intended that these essays be published, let alone to be printed on t-shirts.
Given this list of problems and cautions, one might wonder why I would even discuss such a book. Simply put, the Tao of Gung Fu is a critical work not because the material in it is in any way original, but because it does a great job of clarifying the issues that were being discussed among a certain type of Chinese martial artist at a specific moment in time, and the sorts of sources that they had available to them (both in terms of technical manuals, but also cultural and philosophical resources) to make sense of all of it. While fans might be crushed by some of the instances of Lee’s patchwriting and plagiarism (which varied from unintentional to egregious) the transparent nature of these problems is actually a great blessing to cultural historians and students of martial arts studies.
Lee often starts by outlining questions that a wide variety of readers in his era would have found interesting, and with only a few minutes of googling you can figure out exactly what resources a young, somewhat educated martial artist would have had access to in both the Chinese and English language literatures. In short, for anyone interested in the specific steps by which the Chinese martial arts were culturally appropriated by the West, this book is a remarkable resource.
If you want to better acquaint yourself with the sources of Lee’s philosophy on the martial arts, this is the book that I would recommend. And for Wing Chun students it has the additional bonus of providing critical insight into how (at least some) individuals were discussing that system during the late 1950s and 1960s.
What then is the ultimate root of Lee’s philosophy of the martial arts? What ideas did he turn to in order to both make sense of these fighting traditions and to provide them with increased social meaning (and status) against the backdrop of Chinese culture and thought?
The Tao of Gung Fu provides an embarrassment of riches on these sorts of questions. Students of Wing Chun will likely find Lee’s discussions of Chi Sao (some of which is quite philosophical) to be the most interesting. And readers of history will no doubt want to pay close attention to Lee’s understanding of the subject as discussed in the book’s closing chapters.
Yet perhaps one of the most important themes in Lee’s thinking is set down in the very first chapter before being expanded upon throughout the rest of the manuscript. Here we see Lee outlining a three step process (one that he attributes to Daoism) in which something progresses from 1) the “primitive” stage 2) the stage of “art” 3) the stage of “artlessness.”
Most often this progression is applied to the martial arts themselves. Lee sees in this pattern the meta-history of the Chinese martial arts as a whole. They progressed from a simple, but natural, system to a more sophisticated but stultifying understanding. Finally, after years of hard work Chinese martial artists practiced, experimented and realized what non-essential material could be stripped away, leaving a set of systems what was both sophisticated but once again natural in its execution.
In other places Lee appears to apply this same process to the life history of individual styles. It can also be viewed as the stages that any given martial artist must progress through. In fact, Lee’s iconic “Liberate Yourself from Classical Karate” article is premised on this idea, as well as Lee’s contention that most Western martial artists at the time were stuck in stage two.
Yet Lee’s use of this basic framework extended far beyond the martial arts. At times he seems to have seen it as a more general lens by which we could examine the struggle of humans with both the natural and social worlds. Note for instance that Lee attempts to explain this teleology to his readers by using it as an explanation of the evolution of Chinese grammar between the classical and modern periods. And grasping its logic seems to be a precondition for the introduction of his later discussion of the nature of Yin and Yang in both the martial arts and Asian philosophy.
Given the centrality of this idea to Lee’s thought, it might be useful to ask where it originates. Lee himself claims that the idea is indigenous to Daoism and, at other points, Zen. This later claim may be bolstered by the observation of some Japanese stylists that their own systems suggest a similar progressive understanding of katas (or forms) in three progressive stages.
At the same time it must be remembered that Lee was a philosophy student when much of this material was written, and the resonances with some of the western thinkers he would have been introduced to is noteworthy. The system Lee is proposing seems to be somewhat in debt to Hegel and his progression from “thesis,” to “anti-thesis” and ultimately “synthesis.” We have already seen that Lee was very familiar with the works of Allen Watts, and its possible that this idea may have found its genesis in his writings. Indeed, this might be why Lee sometimes claims that he was outlining a “Zen” theory of progress.
While I suspect that this element of Lee’s thought reflects his study of Western writers and sources, once established it is the sort of thing that you can begin to see everywhere. We know, for instance, that Lee was influenced by the ideas of the mystic and writer Krishnamurti. While I have yet to find an exact statement of this idea in his writings, once it has been established in your mind it’s the sort of thing that will find easy parallels and support in some of Krishnamurti’s statements. Much the same goes for the Dao De Jing. I suspect that this theory of “becoming” struck Lee with such force, and became a cornerstone of his thought in this period, precisely because it seemed to find support in so many sources. The ease with which both Eastern and Western (and possibly even Marxist) sources could be used to illustrate aspects of this theory must have made it seem both universal and self-evident.
I suspect that this idea was also critical to Lee because while it facilitated a rejection of stultifying forms, it also argued that these things could only be overcome through study, experimentation and exhaustive practice. When we look at Lee’s workouts in this period (also provided by John Little) we see that Lee was drilling himself in basic techniques at the same time that he was advocating empirical verification and freedom from pointless tradition. There has always appeared to be a fundamental tension here, between what is necessary to learn a technique, and the desire to transcend it in the search of something more natural or personal. This three step teleology spoke directly to that dilemma, and claimed that the way forward was not a return to a primitive state that rejected scientific advances, but rather through a long and arduous process of additional practice, refinement and (most importantly) experimentation.
Bruce Lee sketching on the set for Game of Death. Photograph: Bruce Lee Estate. Source: The Guardian.
Conclusion: Walking On
While interesting on a technical level, its also important to think about the social implications of all of this. The claim that the only true knowledge which is possible is self-knowledge, gained through extensive practice and experimentation, is most likely to be attractive to individuals who feel themselves to be alienated from other sources of social power or meaning. Indeed, the basic ideas about self-actualization that Lee draws on have their origins in China’s martial arts sub-cultures which often acted as an alternate means of self-creation for marginal individuals within Chinese society.
As I have argued at length elsewhere, this would have been the context in which Lee first saw the martial arts being taught in Ip Man’s school to a generation of often angry, surprisingly alienated, young men in the Hong Kong of the 1950s. Lee’s contribution was to take this basic pattern and to combine it with the philosophical and counterculture currents of his own day in such a way that westerners could access this same technology of self-creation.
The 1970s, when the Chinese martial arts first exploded into popular consciousness, was a volatile decade. Globalization in trade markets was causing economic pain and increased income inequality at home at the same time that some western nations faced both security challenges and open conflict abroad. Nor did the gains of the civil rights movement in the US ensure the spread of racial harmony. Everywhere one looked traditional social institutions seemed to be under attack and society was struggling to produce new ways of understanding and coping with these challenges. Given these structural factors, it is not surprising that Lee’s onscreen presence and martial arts philosophy (to the extent that it was known at the time) had a profound effect on a generation of seekers looking for a new set of tools in their quest for self-production.
In many respects we seem to be entering a similar era. Clearly the situation today is not identical. The Cold War is gone, and an information and service based economy has replaced the manufacturing one (at least in the West). Yet many of the more fundamental concerns remain the same. Economic insecurity, militarism abroad and social conflict at home are once again challenging basic notions of what our nations stand for. Levels of public trust in a wide range of institutions has reached an all time low, and social organizations that once supported vibrant communities in past eras are struggling to survive.
Indeed, many of these factors are directly challenging the economic health and social relevance of the traditional martial arts today. Yet where large schools might falter one wonder’s if we are not seeing a renewed opportunity for the expansion of Lee’s ethos of individual struggle, experimentation and practice. If nothing else the recent discussion of Daniel Wu by the advertisers at AMC could be seen as evidence that there is a hunger for the renewal (and expansion) of the sort of revolution that Lee originally introduced to the West in the 1970s.
As the needs of students and audiences change I fully expect that the ways in which we see Bruce Lee will continue to evolve. That is the sign of a healthy discourse, and it suggests that Lee might be just as important for understanding the current situation within the martial arts community as its mid-twentieth century history. Given the cultural moment that we now find ourselves in, Lee’s promise of self-creation and his basic philosophy seem more important than ever. And as long as his achievements continue to be the yardstick by which each new “revolution” in the martial arts is measured, it seems likely that the memory of the Little Dragon will indeed live to see its 100th Birthday.
“London Sees Thrills Of Japanese Sport.” A self-defense demonstration by a female martial artist, choreographed to as to be humorous for the audience. Vintage Newsreel. 1932.
Doing the Homework
Students of Martial Arts Studies are the fortunate few. As research areas go, ours is pretty interesting. Yet as I review the literature (even recent publications from big name academic presses), it is clear that many of us are not making the most of our good fortune. There seems to be a tendency to approach the literature in narrow slices and not to look for the sorts of insights that are frequently turned up in broader, more comparative, explorations. The pie can be sliced in a variety of ways. Students of Japanese martial studies rarely deal with concepts and theories laid out in works on the Chinese styles. The literatures on combat sports and traditional arts often seem to run on parallel tracks. And there is always room for a more substantive engagement between the theoretical and historical wings of the literature.
So here is my pre-Thanksgiving public service announcement: When offered pie, always eat more than one slice. Bringing multiple lens to an investigation leads to more insightful conclusions. Beyond that, it makes the process of doing research richer and more intellectually fulfilling.
Still, we all have blind spots. As I was reviewing folders of research materials, it occurred to me that I may have created the mistaken impression that the English language treaty port newspapers in cities like Shanghai or Beijing only discussed Chinese fighting systems. Over the last few years we have examined dozens of articles in which Chinese hand combat systems were presented to a global audience during the 1920s and 1930s. Doing so is helpful as it problematizes the often-heard trope that the Chinese martial arts were unknown to Westerners prior to the 1960s, or that everything about these arts has been shrouded in impenetrable secrecy. In fact, both KMT officers and private instructors worked (with mixed success) to publicize China’s reformed and modernized physical culture as a way of demonstrating to the world the reformed and modernized nature of the Chinese state.
Focusing on these conversations has been valuable. Yet it must be remembered that all of this was only one aspect of a much larger exploration of the martial arts and combat sports which one could find in these same newspapers. While it is easy to focus only on the guoshu or taijiquan articles, in truth these pieces need to be read in conjunction with the frequent discussions of the Japanese martial arts, accounts of vaudeville style strongmen acts, and articles on western style boxing events which also appeared in the same pages. It is all too easy to inadvertently create a siloed vision of cultural history in which boxing, kung fu and judo all existed in their own isolated spheres. In truth they all competed for exposure within the pages of China’s treaty port press.
In an effort to correct this bias I would like to introduce one of the more interesting Republic era articles on the Japanese martial arts that I have come across. Judo is frequently mentioned in these pieces. We can even find several glowing accounts of judo exhibitions in Shanghai in this era. Likewise, Chinese martial arts reformers often turned to judo as a symbolic foil for their rivalry with Japan. The following article, on the other hand, is interesting as the Japanese origins of judo have been almost totally erased. Indeed, the Western appropriation of judo as a means of self-defense is so complete that the Japanese are barely mentioned, while cities like New York and Paris are looked to as centers of martial excellence.
Nor is this the only transformation which readers will detect. While Kano Jigoro opened his practice to women fairly early, the vast majority of Japanese judo students in the 1930s were men. Indeed, these were men often bound for service in the Japanese military. They had well developed ideas about cultivating a certain sort of masculinity which would be placed in the service of the state. In contrast, the current article goes to great lengths to present judo as an exclusively female practice. More specifically, it was framed as a tool of urban self-defense and a bulwark against a new “masher” panic. The dojo as a training space, white uniforms, colored belts and other aspects of Kano’s now globally famous practice are totally missing from this discussion. Instead we find a slightly updated take on the pre-war American usage of “jiu-jitsu” to basically signify “dirty fighting.”
All of this is even more interesting as one suspects that these were not errors emerging from ignorance. By the early 1930s judo was a well-established practice in the West. It had been featured in newsreels, books and extensively debated in the sporting press. Just to give us the proper perspective, the current article “introducing” judo was written more than 30 years after Theodore Roosevelt had famously promoted the same practice from his residence in the White House. Well educated Chinese and Western readers living in Shanghai (The China Press’core audience) had ample opportunities to see Japanese demonstration teams as they visited the city on a regular basis. Indeed, the Japanese invasions of Manchuria (1931) and Shanghai (1932) had sparked renewed public debate as to the role of physical education in a state’s battlefield success.
I suspect that this article never dropped Kano’s name, or mentioned black belts, as there was simply no need. All of that was already part of the public consciousness during the 1930s. It instead focused on the topic of women’s self-defense as that was both timely (note the repeated references to Vivian Gordon’s murder in New York City), and front-page images of petite women throwing men around like rag dolls was sure to sell papers.
It is important to take note of a few other topics that are missing from this article as well. To begin with, The China Presswas a pro-KMT newspaper with a liberal editorial line. It ran more (glowing) stories about the guoshu, and China’s martial practices more generally, than any other Republican era paper that I have studied. Its editors never missed an opportunity to note that China was the true home of jiu jitsu, or to publicize the latest Jingwu demonstration. It is thus remarkable that there is no mention of the Chinese martial arts anywhere in this piece.
While the photographs and writing style suggests that this may have originally been a newswire article intended for an American audience, I doubt that this is the entire story. Given the levels of outrage directed at the Japanese in 1931 and 1932, it probably would have been impossible to run an article that lauded any practice with Japanese roots in such a “patriotic” paper. Yet by completely erasing Japanese culture and martial values from the discussion of judo, effectively transforming the art into a primarily female, and Western practice, the editors may have gotten the best of all possible worlds. On the one hand they could run a sensational front-page article that would sell lots of papers. At the same time, they could appropriate an important marker of Japanese masculinity and militarism, presenting it as a cosmopolitan and almost exclusively feminine practice. One can only guess how thrilled the Japanese military officers and government staff in Shanghai were to see this treatment of their national art.
Still, this was by no means a negative portrayal of the art. One of the things that struck me as I read this piece was the extensive “how to” section at the end. Such discussions are so common in Western martial arts conversations that they are easy to dismiss. Yet they were quite rare in the pages of China’s English language treaty port press.
While these papers ran hundreds of articles on the Chinese martial arts, I don’t think I have once seen them undertake a detailed discussion about a specific Chinese technique. Instead demonstrations or systems were discussed in general terms for the edification of the reader, but not their education. While there was some training of foreign students in martial arts classes in China in the 1930s, buy in large this didn’t seem to be something that many people (either Western or Chinese) were interested in. Yet this article clearly suggests that judo is something Western women can (and should) learn. That seems to be a frank admission that while Chu Minyi and other reformers had hoped to make the Chinese martial arts a modern and cosmopolitan practice, it was Japan that had actually succeeded. Nevertheless, we as readers are left to ask if the following vision of judo remains in any way Japanese?
Here’s “Judo”, the Newest Art of Self-Defense Against Mashers
The China Press, Feb, 3 1932. Page A1
Curious Details of the Smashing Surpise Receptions American and English Girls are Planning for “Catch-as-Catch-Can” Masculine Admirers.
“Wreck the necker!”
This warlike cry has gone up on both sides of the Atlantic since judo, an improved version of Jiu Jitsu, was perfected recently. Jiu Jitsu has always been primarily a man’s sport but judo is for women only. It enables the frailest flower of femininity to throw and knock out a burly assailant with ease and dispatch.
Women’s judo clubs are being formed in New York and other American cities. In England enthusiastic feminine exponents of the method of self-defense against the Mashers have formed a team that is touring France, Germany and other European countries, giving exhibitions of this tricky and fascinating new art of self-defense.
Slight pressure of the fingers applied at the right moment, combined with sudden twists of the body by a judo expert, often results in broken limbs for the assailant. There is no question that if judo’s popularity continues to increase at its present rate the obnoxious masher species may soon entirely disappear. Certainly nothing yet devised discourages the male flirt so quickly as a dislocated arm, or a broken head followed by several months in a jail or hospital.
Any close student of the subject will tell you how easily not only serious injury, but death, may come to the unwary roughneck who chooses to inflict his unwanted attentions upon a girl schooled in the far from gentle craft of judo. A single lightening quick arm thrust from a girl who “knows her stuff” is sufficient in most cases to discourage any masher. The young lady trained in Judo tactics may be outweighed by a hundred pounds and look as defenseless as a fawn but when she goes into action Mt. Necker had better run.
A famous Japanese wrestling champion once said that homicide committed by jiu jitsu provides “a lovely death, no pains from bullets, knives or violence, You just fade out in a pleasant dream—and don’t know that perhaps you will never wake again.” The newly-perfected science of judo is equally effective in producing lethal effects although the physical instructors who teach it are careful to exclude the death dealing holds from their curriculum.
Unlike most forms of combat, judo’s effectiveness depends ironically enough on the strength and intensity of attack of one’s opponent. The more powerful he is and or furiously he falls upon his intended victim, the more serious his injuries are going to be.
Certainly no more astonishing surprise could be imagined. Instead of screaming and shrieking the young woman who knows judo outdoes the masher at his own game. With a minimum of effort, she can throw the strongest “he-man,” laugh at his efforts to embrace her and continue on her way, unmolested and at her leisure.
The underlying principal of this science is balance. In judo it is vastly more important to control perfectly one’s posture than to have building muscles and enormous energy. Japanese physical culturalists tell us that a “man without balance has no strength.” This is particularly true in jiu jitsu and judo. The very first thing the beginner learns is to change an opponent’s posture while maintaining her own. This is done by maneuvering him to his heels and toes, which enables one to throw him with little exertion.
As a typical example of the judo science, let us take a girl weighing about 110 pounds and say a husky 190 pound man has seized her throat in both hands. Now the ordinary young woman, unschooled in judo, would naturally concentrate her efforts on attempts to tear his hands from her throat. The judo adept, however, would waste no time and strength on such a futile task.
Her technique, though simple, would be amazingly effective. Her first move would be to take a short step backwards with her left foot. This will bring the attacker’s balance to his toes, naturally weakening his equilibrium.
Next, she would quickly swing her right arm sharply across his left arm, pivoting her right toe and bringing her right shoulder forward. Her arm would pass close to her face until her right shoulder touches her chin. In that position she would exert irresistible leverage on the man’s wrist with her shoulder. This will break any grip, no matter how powerful, with the result that her assailant must fall slightly forward with face unguarded, leaving him a ready target for an elbow jolt to the face or a paralyzing cut on the back of the head.
If Vivian Gordon, the New York girl who was strangled to death in a taxi cab some time ago, had known such elementary judo moves she might have outwitted her slayer and escaped a gruesome fate.
The larger picture in the upper right half of the page shows a young woman swinging a husky male over her hip. The uninformed may well ask how this slight girl could carry a powerful man off his feet and throw him to the ground.
The answer is judo and a perfect sense of timing and balance. You will notice that the girl in the photograph is bending forward. The man had come up behind her and seized her by the throat. But she shot her head and shoulders sharply forward, throwing his weight on his toes and off balance. Seizing his shoulders, she adroitly rolled him over her hips. The picture was snapped just as she was about to throw him to the ground.
Perhaps you have seen one acrobat on the stage holding three or four partners on his shoulders. Ordinary men cannot do this, of course, because they have not studied the science of balance and timing. The acrobat has learned to distribute the weight of his companions evenly, to assume a posture that enables him to lift and hold an enormous number of pounds and to time his efforts so that his powers are never overtaxed. Strength is vital, but alone it is not enough. Until he has mastered these twin sciences his efforts at great weight-lifting will fail.
The same holds true of the judo students. The two photographs in the half center of this page demonstrate the ease with which a judo expert can disarm and knock down a stick-wielding assailant. In one picture you see her catching his arm just above the elbow. Her judo instructors have taught her that holding an arm above the shoulder greatly weakens the arm’s powers of resistance. Placing her knee behind his right leg she pushes his arm backwards until he is off balance. With this accomplished, she finds sending him backwards over her extended knee is child’s play.
Another photo on this page illustrates another effective judo maneuver that can be used when the assailant comes up behind his intended victim and seizes her by the throat. Instead of trying to wriggle from his strong grip, the girl merely grasps his elbows and bends quickly forward, catapulting him over her head and shoulders. This is called the shoulder throw.
Brutal attackers often use the chancery hold, which consists of encircling the victim’s neck with one arm and battering her face with the other fist. Judo teaches girls how to break easily this painful hold. If the assailant has gripped her neck in his left arm and strikes her face with his right fist, she reaches quickly up his back and over his right shoulder with her right hand and places the inner edge of her finger under his nose, where there is an extraordinarily sensitive nerve center. Pressing on this diagonally towards the back of the head will quickly cause the fellow to release his grip.
The next move is to extend the pressure backwards and downwards. If at the same time the girl grips him under the knee, raising him upward and forward, the gentleman will soon be spilled upon the ground with much violence.
The photograph depicting the young woman jamming the heel of her hand against the man’s chin demonstrates the perfect counter offensive against the mashers who sieze women about the waist. You can be sure when the roughneck caress is returned in this manner the likelihood of a repetition of the Casanova tactics is very small.
Possibly the most spectacular of the group of extraordinary photographs is the one which portrays the young woman lying on the ground and kicking her surprised assailant in the stomach. In this case the girl has fallen backwards to the ground, pulling the man into a flying fall. As she fell, she drew up her foot and, on reaching the ground, she sent him sprawling over her head with a powerful and well-directed kick to his abdomen.
This startling defense should only be employed by experts who have been adequately instructed in the science of relaxing. Like football coaches, the teachers of this new art and fascinating study teach their students to go limp when falling. A limp body does not strike the ground with half the violence that a stiff one does.
When Benny Leonard was the world’s Lightweight Boxing Champion he often attributed much of his extraordinary punching powers to his knowledge of anatomy. He exactly knew what spot to hit and consequently opponents crumpled up before what seemed likely fairly light punches. A knowledge of anatomy is even more necessary to girl judo experts than it is to boxers.
The new judo vogue began by a woman who saw in it a chance to reduce the ever-growing number of fatalities and injuries suffered by girls attacked in lonely sections of towns and cities. Certainly it equips young women with an excellent defense against the cave-man tactics of roughneck admirers.
