Anyone who has studied the history of martial arts knows the story of the student in the monastery who has to practice the horse stance for a year before being allowed to learn anything else. Sounds boring as hell. and it seems silly to most of us. And, the truth is, we are all in entirely too much of a hurry for that approach. We could all gain a lot as well, I’m sure, from sitting on a mountain top and meditating for a few years. However, most of us are not looking to give ourselves to a life of devotion. We just want to add these ingredients to our lives and go on with business better prepared and with clearer heads and sounder bodies.
I know of Karate senseis who beat their students. One method of building strength and character is through ordeal. Sure. Not my thing. The old methods of teaching which seemed so harsh had their definite place. Lao Tzu said, “Those who conquer themselves are strong.” The old masters were not being cruel; they were doing what was necessary to create a new human being.
But, stop and smell those roses once in awhile.
The way we teach now, the concentration is on the moves: the dance. But, Kam Yuen told me very early on of the importance of “stillness.” Lao Tzu says, “Movement overcomes cold, stillness overcomes heat, clear calm is a rectifier of the world.
Effect Emptiness to the extreme, keep stillness ready; as the myriad things act in concert,” he says. I know this rhetoric is hard to follow. The essential point here is in calm stillness; when stillness reaches its climax, it produces motion, and, okay. We’re back to the workout. It’s a circle. Keep it going. Exercise and meditation. Movement and stillness. Dancing and sitting. Don’t forget to stretch.
Scientifically, as well as spiritually (if there really is any difference) this makes sense. As I understand it, acetacolin, the chemical that exists between the individual cells in the nervous system and is responsible for transmitting nerve impulses, is depleted by use, which is to say, activity. It is replenished by stillness: meditation, or “Sitting”, as the Hindus call it: remembering that the origins of kung fu are from India.
The I Ching says, “Faithfulness and trustworthiness are means of developing character.” The deeper purpose of martial-arts training is a matter of character development. I’ve been able to see from contact with fans over the years that when someone studies the arts, they do develop character, depth and some kind of serenity, even if the only reason they took it up was to learn to fight.
In the seventh century AD, not long after the introduction of kung fu to China, two Taoist mathematicians, Li and Yuan, developed a method of reading each other’s physiognomy to predict the course of human history. Yeah, they were able to track the rise and fall of dynasties and choose successors to the masters in this way. Sounds weird. Well, the Taoists are weird. Remember that when Bodhidharma arrived at the Shaolin monastery, there were monks who could levitate. At least, that’s the story.
The series Kung Fu had some wonderful twists to it that had nothing to do with kicking and punching. How about learning how to see from a blind man? If that isn’t a cool one, I don’t know what is. And it has all the sense of the miraculous that we were, most of us, searching for when we started this journey.
The upshot of all this would seem to be that there is magic to be found in the teachings if we look beneath the surface, though levitation is probably not an achievable option for most of us. Still, you never know. Sometimes, during a really good workout, I feel like I could fly.
