Against my better judgement I picked up a copy of Keeper of Light and Dust by Natasha Mostert, a novel about an MMA fighter, a chi vampire, and the woman who loves them. As a work of fiction it doesn't amount to much: the characters are lightly-penciled archetypes, the plot is predictable1, and the computer bits brought to mind nothing so much as the worst hacking scene of all times. At least it kept me entertained on the plane.
However... the book merits discussion for reasons apart from its plot. It contains a lot of concepts related (sometimes tangentially) to the martial arts, many of which I'd never been exposed to before. Being the kind of person who collects verbiage like other people collect shot glasses I'm compelled to research these terms and present them for your amusement. Additionally, Mostert brings in a lot of real-world research throughout the work which putatively supports the existence of chi. Since one of my stated purposes in running this blog is to take the woo out of the martial arts this presents an excellent opportunity to critically review this research. This, in turn, will lead to some general criticism of the book's presentation of chi and the scientific method.
Interesting MA Terms From The Book
The first item is a cluster of 3 concepts: seme, haragei, and kobudera. I've run into seme in the past while reading Miyamoto Musashi: His Life And Writings2, but the other two are completely new to me. Seme is hard to articulate; it's attacking without actually attacking, the projection of something
which impairs the ability of your opponent, but the nature thereof depends on who you're asking. In the book what's being projected is chi, though I'm inclined to go with the more materialistic explanation that seme is the art of letting your opponent psyche eirself out. Anyone who's sparred before knows that you can sometimes get a sense of how good someone is just by the way they walk and hold themselves. Or you may have seen that person spar before and know exactly how good they are. In any case when it comes time to spar you may find yourself thinking "I'm toast" (or "Ey's toast"), which can have a definite impact on your performance. Seme would then be the art of engaging in that set of behaviors most likely to engender the reaction "I'm toast" in your opponent.
Haragei and kobudera are a pair of opposing ideas somewhat related to seme3. While seme is essentially the projection of the appearance of skill, haragei and kobudera are, respectively, the detection and concealment of intent. These words correspond (more or less) to the clumsier, but more familiar, English concepts of "reading your opponent" and "not telegraphing". Mostert takes some liberties with both, transforming them into chi-based skills that work at a distance.
Another interesting conceptual cluster revolves around various "dim". There's dim mak, which has been done to death and I won't get into here, but the book also mentions "dim ching". The Internet is, of course, rife with inaccuracies, but if this thread is to be believed then dim mak and dim ching comprise, along with dim hsueh (not mentioned in the book), a tripartite system of pressure-point-style attacks. One term corresponds to nerves, one to arteries/veins ("blood gate"), and one to chi flow, though there seems to be some disagreement on the 'tubes as to which is which. There is also a mention of "12 dim mak katas" which seems to have some basis in reality; a search for "dim mak kata" on Google mostly turns up references to Dim-mak's 12 Most Deadly Katas: Points of No Return4 by Erle Montaigue. Since Mostert references another one of Montaigue's works (The Encyclopedia of Dim Mak) in the postface I suspect Montaigue is the ultimate source of the kata reference. In any case, next time some fool starts going on about "dim mak" now you can say "Actually...".
Moving on to more esoteric territory we come to gogyo (aka wu xing), a mnemonic/philosophical system centering on the 5 traditional Chinese elements (earth, wood, metal, fire, and water) which is translated variously as the Five Phases, the Five Agents, the Five Movements, and/or the Five Steps/Stages. The gogyo system finds multiple uses in the context of the martial arts:
- In Taijiquan and Xingyiquan the 5 elements are used to denote directions and footwork patterns.
- The 5 elements can be interpreted as representing processes or stages of combat; in this context to speak of one element transmuting into another is a way to map out the overall evolution of a confrontation.
- In the context of ninjitsu (as its used in the book), each element refers symbolically to a class of butsu associated with that element.
It's interesting to note that the elements are never interpreted literally; contrary to popular belief gogyo (and its counterpart godai) is not an alchemical system.
Research Supporting The Existence Of Various Supernatural Phenomena
Normally I'd be (mostly) inclined to give the science presented in Keeper a pass; its a work of fiction and there's generally no reason to suppose that an author endorses all the words ey put in eir character's mouths. However, given some things she says in the book's postface5 it's clear that she's a true believer and (probably) intends the material presented to be taken at face value. As I noted above, the plot centers around a ninja-like figure who is killing MMA fighters by stealing their chi, which provides Mostert with ample opportunity to reference the work of various scientists (some fringe-y and some not) while nattering on about biophotons, meridians, and that sort of thing.
Mostert mentions the work of five scientists6 throughout the course of the book: Robert Becker, H. Henrick Ehrsson, Celia Green, Fritz-Albert Popp, and Elisabeth Targ. With the exceptions of Becker and Targ (which I'll get to) these are legitimate scientists doing legitimate work, which would seem to lend credence to any claims which Mostert makes, right? Wrong... in no case does the research which she references come anywhere near supporting the things she implies it does.
Let's start with Fritz-Albert Popp, the progenitor of biophoton theory. It turns out that biological systems emit photons. This is not terribly surprising; we've known for quite some time that atoms, be they organic or inorganic, emit photons when they transition from one energy level to another. There's nothing magic about this, no need to invoke chi or any other supernatural phenomenon to explain it. Even if we accept Popp's (highly debatable) thesis that these emissions are a form of intra-/inter-celluar communication we're still miles away from energy-and-meridians territory. As this gentleman points out there's zero support for the notion that these photons form some sort of coherent energy field responsible for the health of the body.
We find a similar pattern when we look at the work of H. Henrick Ehrsson and Celia Green. Both researchers are mentioned in Keeper in the context of astral projection, but neither provide any reason to believe that such a thing exists. Ehrsson asked a question which is so obvious as to be overlooked: Why does our consciousness perceive itself as situated within our bodies? Well, it turns out that we make use of visual cues in conjunction with our other senses to "localize" ourselves; once he figured this out he was able to induce out-of-body experiences in a laboratory setting7. As with Popp's biophotons there's no need to invoke supernatural causes; this is just the brain being fooled by a clever set of artificial stimuli. Much the same can be said of Celia Green's work; she saw no supernatural significance in out-of-body experiences.
Which brings us to Robert Becker. Becker is an orthopedic surgeon who seems to have done a fair amount of reputable work on the use of electrical stimulation to accelerate healing in various tissues. Keeper, however, mentions some later work he did in which he identified areas of low electrical resistance corresponding with the body's acupuncture meridians, the idea being that the current flowing through this secondary system corresponds to the flow of chi in TCM. The various searches I did to try to find more details on this research all lead back to The Body Electric; as I don't have access to a copy I can't say anything about the validity of his findings.
Last, but not least, is Elisabeth Targ, who is famous for conducting a trial that demonstrated the efficacy of remote healing. What's less well know is that she went fishing for significant results after the fact; I'll let XKCD explain why that's a bad idea. A larger, follow-up study published posthumously found no effect.
In conclusion, with regards to the science in Keeper:
- Biophotons do not imply chi.
- Out-of-body experiences do not imply astral travel.
- Who knows what's up with Becker.
- There's no evidence that remote healing does anything at all.
On Chi And Empiricism
The last thing I want to do is tackle head-on the mind-numbingly inane discourse on the scientific method that pervades the book. It's replete with misconceptions and crude caricatures, the worst of which is the following statement which Mostert places in the mouth of Ashton (the chi vampire):
"The Western medical mind has difficulty with the concept of chi. It cannot be dissected under a microscope and does not fit the empirical model. You can't exactly cut through an artery wall and look at it."8
Lord-o'-fucking-mighty! You can't cut open a battery and see electricity either, but science still accepts that electricity exists because we can observe its effects on the world around us. The "empirical model" is nothing more than the systematic study and analysis of observable effects. To say that something doesn't fit the empirical model is ultimately a self-refuting claim; how can you possibly know that something even exists unless it leaves some tell-tale trace in the physical world? Recognizing again that this is a work of fiction, but Ashton's statement is idiotic even in the context of the book. Here's how you apply an "empirical model": You line up n MMA fighters and observe that, when Ashton pokes them in a particular fashion, they keel over and die in short order. That doesn't demonstrate chi per se, but it definitively establishes that something unusual is going on which warrants further investigation.
Of course it's never that cut-and-dried in the real world; the chi crowd doesn't typically make claims which are so easily tested. What they mean when they say that something "can't be studied empirically" is that their assertions either aren't falsifiable or are, in fact, demonstrably false. As Tim Minchin so elegantly puts it, it's "either not been proved to work, / Or been proved not to work.". People needing further convincing should read Orac's collected writings on TCM.
And don't get me started on the whole "Western medicine" trope. Establishing correlations between cause and effect is not some sort of Western cultural artifact. The recipe for gunpowder didn't just land in the lap of the Chinese; they figured out through repeated observation that when you mix a few things together in the right proportions it makes a lovely big boom.
Anyhow, that's my $0.02. Keeper is marginally interesting as a source of MA esoterica, but not good for much else.
1 Barring the eventual fate of the aforementioned vampire; that's actually an unexpected twist which I'll not reveal here.
2 Notes 145 and 199. Chapter 12 also has an interesting discussion of kizeme (seme practiced at the highest levels) in the context of a duel between kendo masters.
3 Which raises the question of whether there's a word for the opposite of seme i.e. the concealment of skill. In many competitive situations there may be a tactical advantage in having your opponent underestimate you (see "shark, pool"); I see no reason why this wouldn't be the case in the martial arts as well.
4 Which I'm sorely tempted to buy just to see what's in it. If I do I'll make sure to post a review here.
5 "Increasing your chi sensitivity is central to the discipline of martial arts.", p. 307.
6 Six if you count Edison, but he's only mentioned in passing in the context of out-of-body experiences.
7 The paper is behind a paywall, but you can get the gist of it by reading the responses to the paper.
8 P. 102. I also think it's bad from a literary standpoint; I find it implausible that an MD of Ashton's ostensible intelligence would make such an easily-refuted assertion.
