Book Review: The Bodhisattva Warriors

I've noted a number of times before it's hard to find good, well-researched works on the martial arts. As a consequence I'm always on the look-out for quality titles; when I ran across The Bodhisattva Warriors¹ at Powell's I thought that I'd found a winner². On casual review it looked to have a lot of interesting information that I hadn't encountered elsewhere, which is what compelled me to purchase a copy, but a thorough reading ultimately left me disappointed.

A large part of this disappointment stems from the fact that the book fails deliver on the promise in its title. I would expect that a work which dealt with the "origin, inner philosphy, history, and symbolism" of a martial art would spend a fair amount of time on the art itself; it's hard to discuss and analyze a thing unless you've defined it first. But the author, Shifu Nagaboshi Tomio (aka Terence Dukes), spends surprisingly little time discussing specific current or historical practice.

The section of the book focused on physical practice ("The Mandala of Movement") starts with a brief but lucid description of the arts of the Ksatreya caste of ancient India, focusing specifically on Vajramukti (the system of unarmed combat) and nata (roughly equivalent to form-based training). That portion is interesting, and certainly relevant to a discussion of the origins of Buddhist martial arts, but the book then goes off the rails in attempting to make a connection between Vajramukti / nata and Buddhist thought/practice.

The biggest weakness of this book is that Mr. Dukes is an apologist for Buddhism; he doesn't make a serious effort to critically analyze received wisdom. So, when it come time to talk about what Buddhists actually did in ancient India, he says the following:

Buddhism has a long and extensive influence within India, its teaching spreading far into China, Malaysia, and westward into Iran, Turkey, and beyond. Indian history can be classified into four great historical periods in which monarchs goverend their realms according to Buddhist ethics and precepts. We can assume that in all of their monarchical regions the cultured arts of Buddhism were all well know. (p. 172)

Maybe, but even if you accept the basic premise that these periods were governed according to "Buddhist ethics and precepts" it's still a big stretch to assume that the distribution and interpretation of the "cultured arts" was universal. Slightly further on he says:

The Muslim invasions and subsequent slaughter of Buddhist monks and nuns caused many to flee into Southern India, China, and elsewhere. Because of this, much of what we know concerning nata within Indian Buddhism comes to us via Chinese tradition and Buddhist writings. Refugees carried with them living knowledge, not only of Buddhist spiritual teaching, but also of its cultural arts and skillful means of teaching. The Gupta and Pala Dynasty nata would have been among these, and doubtless continued to be developed by subsequent Buddhist masters [Note 34a]. (p. 174)

The problem here is that he's asking us to assume a tremendous amount about the Indian Buddhist nata. He provides enough material that we can be certain that some set of physical practices called nata existed in Buddhist India, but anything further than that is supported primarily by post-diaspora oral tradition and writings. The text is riddled with such logical leaps:

According to traditional and reliable temple accounts, there were several seminal methods of unarmed combat training which came into China from the second to eigth centuries A.D. All of these came from India and thus stemmed directly or indirectly from the martial traditions of the Indian nobility, that is, the Vajramukti method. (p. 207)

He doesn't even bother to provide a citation for that; what do these accounts consist of? How do we know that they are reliable? etc. Moreover, even if we accept the premise that one or more unarmed combat methods came to China from India, it doesn't follow from there that they bore any relation to Vajramukti. Mr. Dukes mentions a "people's army" which existed contemporaneously with the Ksatreya (p. 159) which had its own military practice; absent any good evidence one way or the other it's just as likely that the unarmed combat methods which arrived in China could have had their roots in that tradition.

He also spends a lof time time drawing unwarranted inferences. Take, for example, this passage:

In the countries to which Buddhist nata were taken, particularly Thailand, Korea, and Malaysia, we find evidence of various unarmed martial arts, which were (or are) still practiced with nata movement patterns and techniques, even though Buddhism, itself, has been largely forgotten or replaced by other teachings. It is not difficult to recognize their connection to the Buddhist nata if one knows something of them. (p. 174)

Again, no cites, no notes, no nothing. He's saying "it looks like nata if you squint just right", despite the fact that he hasn't ever defined what nata look like. In a similar vein, he spends a lot of time talking about esoteric mudras (hand configurations) used in Buddhist rituals, seeing the similarities between the mudras and hand configurations found in various martial arts as evidence that the latter descended from the former. He's either unaware of (or totally discounts) the possibility of convergent evolution. There are a finitie number of things you can do with the human body, so the fact that two techniques look similar isn't sufficient to demonstrate a lineal relationship.

And then there are some random, toss-away lines that made me go "WTF?". For example, in talking about the evolution of various schools of Buddhism he has this to say about Sahaja-yana, a type of "left-handed" Mikkyo:

It is said, however, that the aim of this school was to realize voidness by means of what was symbolically designated Mahasukha (Great Bliss) in one's body and mind. Popular in the Bengal region of India, it become [sic] influenced by Hindu Tantrism and rapidly degenerated into a teaching of depravity advocating Maithuna (ritual sexual intercourse) and other titillations. (p. 204)

Huh? Exactly how does rendering judgement on an extinct Buddhist/Hindu hybrid do anything to forward the purpose of the book? There are a number of questionable statements similar to the one above scattered through the main text and endnotes which, taken in gestalt, demonstrate that Mr. Dukes is a polemicist who's primarily interested in defending his interpretation of Buddhism. For example, he really has a hang-up about monks and the use of weaponry, stating several times that no "real" Buddhist monk would ever use a weapon. Evidence to the contrary is either explained away ("the sistrum is not a quarterstaff") or dismissed as the work of non-monks pretending to be monks (p. 216). So who died and made Mr. Dukes the arbiter of all things Buddhist anyway?

That said, the book isn't a complete loss. The first few chapters are interesting in their own right, especially the bits about perception and the Buddhist concept of self-as-process. I found it helpful, in reading those parts, to have first read Zen and the Brain; without that background material the discussion probably would have been to esoteric to be easily comprehensible.

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1 The full title is a mouthfull: The Bodhisattva Warriors: The Origin, Inner Philosophy, History and Symbolism of the Buddhist Martial Art within Indian and China.

2 Of course, my wife will tell you that I'm just a sucker for any thick book with big words on the cover.

Don't Buy Anything From

Further Update: See here for the backstory on the redaction.

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Update: It was Blaine Patton of BP Web Design.

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So you gotta wonder whether spamming my blog really helps Martial Force in the long run. I suppose that people who maintain sites which get more traffic just turn on comment moderation and are done with it. But this here blog doesn't get much traffic (or many comments), so when someone decides to spam one of my threads I can take the time to be properly petty and vindictive.

The neat thing about search engines these days is that they're smart, but they're not that smart. For example, I could say something along the lines of "REDACTED" or "REDACTED" or even "REDACTED". I'm not asserting the truth of any of those statements, but search engines aren't to the point where they can figure that out yet. All they see is "REDACTED" or "REDACTED".

Which is a pity to some extent. For example, I can truthfully say that Martial Force is trying to game search engines by spamming blog threads. If Google were smart enough to figure that out then maybe they could take some sort of punitive action.

So, as long as I'm at it, I might as well mosey on over and take a gander; I've had a bad day at work and feel up to the challenge of mocking someone's website. For example why, if they're Tae Kwon Do specialist, do they have a picture of Bruce Lee on their header? And why is their selection so shitty? I mean, really, they don't have anything you can't find at a dozen other martial arts stores on the web. Except maybe the martial arts greeting cards... don't know that I've seen those anywhere before. Is some 4th Dan really so desperate for cash that he's hand-crafting greeting cards?

Though, you know, I wonder if the spamming is really even their fault. Russel and Ann Shaw are probably decent folk, and spammers don't generally leave their mobile number lying around their website. Possibly it's the guys who designed their website, REDACTED, that's responsible. REDACTED offers REDACTED; if I were going to guess who's the spammer I'd choose an SEO consultancy over the people who run an internet Tae Kwon Do store. Meh... whatever.

Notation: Translating A Form, Part 1

Alright, now I have a free moment to try translating an actual form and see where that leads us. It's not going to be perfect, but that's ok. The only bar that we're trying to clear right now is "better than English", which shouldn't be too hard to do. So I'm going to start by attempting one of the most basic forms that I know and seeing what sort of practical problems I encounter. Without further ado then...

I'm going to start with a very basic form that's mostly just blocks and punches. Here's the first movement:

Assume Front Position and bow. Right foot steps out into Horse Stance. Bring arms together vertically, then Knuckle Roll with Dragon Breathes Fire.

So what do we need? Well, as discussed in previous posts, we need a concise system of symbols to represent atomic actions: blocks, kicks, punches, etc. The question arises as to whether I should develop a list of symbols or just use one which already exists. I think that if I were to try to develop symbols at this point the effort would be largely fruitless; I have only a vague idea at this point of the problems I'm trying to solve. So it seems that I should use a system which already exists.

And here's where we run into problems, because there's bugger-all in terms of martial-arts dictionaries with both English and Asian character sets. The most likely candidates I've found so far are the Japanese Martial Arts Dictionary and 汉英英汉武术词典, but I don't have access to a copy of either. So, absent any argument to the contrary, I'm just going to use Simplified Chinese.

That being said I should note that I'm not a linguist and don't speak Chinese; I'm relying on Google's translation service. There are undoubtedly much better translations than what I'm going to use; the reader is encouraged to chime in with any suggestions. So, here's how I'm going to render the atoms from the first movement¹:

• Front Position: 前线立场
• Bow: 弓
• Horse Stance: 马立场
• Dragon Breathes Fire: 龙呼吸火

And already things are getting complicated; how do I render "Right foot steps out into Horse Stance"?

What's going on in the form is that the performer transitions from Front Position to Horse Stance; that much can be inferred simply by rendering the motion as "前线立场 弓 马立场". But in performing that transition you can step out with the right or the left; how to render that?

One possible candidate is

We could choose to interpret that as a transition via the right foot. But that, to some degree, defeats the purpose of the dan tien line. Horse stance is fundamentally a movement (specifically, a lowering) of the dan tien, so my instinct is that the glyphs for horse stance should live on the dan tien line.

If we choose to go that route we need some clean way of indicating "by way of the right foot". How about

So what I've done here is to rearrange the relative positioning of the attention and dan tien lines. I originally placed them "on top of" the arm and leg lines, respectively, to mimic their spatial relations. But I don't know that that positioning adds anything. The above, on the other hand, makes it easy to indicate "by way of" using something as simple as a couple of lines. Also, I find that it makes it easier to keep the left and right sides straight, since they've visually separated by another line.

A fair criticism at this point is that the lines indicating transition via the right foot are superfluous; in the system that this particular form comes from you always step out to the right under normal circumstances. My response is that I'm looking to create a more generalizeable system, so its useful to be able to indicate such transitions. If a particular system were to use the notation herein being developed it could certainly decide to make such transitions "silent" by convention.

I find also that, since the action proceeds from left to right, I'm envisioning the hypothetical practitioner facing to the right of the diagram as if I'm looking down on em from above. In that case the left and right sides should swap like so

Thus the final rendering of the first movement is

Compared with the quoted text above I think it conveys just as much, if not more, information in a more concise format. We'll see if this is born out by subsequent movements. That's enough for now; I'll attempt the next movement time permitting.

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1 As a side note I recommend BabelPad as a quick-and-dirty way of working with Unicode character sets.

Reflections On Previous Notation Proposal

I've had some time to think about my initial proposal for a notation system. I think I'm on the right track but need to refine the system.

Thinking again about music I realized that a musical score doesn't tell the entire story; there's tremendous room for interpretation within the bounds of the notes on a piece of paper. A notation system for MA should have the same property; it needn't specify the form down to the smallest nuance. Rather, focusing back on the original problem, it just needs to be better than English (or your language of choice) in describing the form. I imagine that a performance of a form based on a literal "reading" of the notation would look rather wooden.

That being the case, I expect that using the notation to describe something like a front ball kick is a dead end. No matter how hard you try, you can't use the notation to convey the nuance of executing a front ball kick correctly, so why try? Rather, basic strikes need to be treated as axiomatic/atomic; when you say "front ball kick" you have to anticipate that your audience knows how to do that.

I also noted, in my previous post, that I know forms which would be difficult to describe using the proposed notation. Some of them are esoteric, but the first form I learned also breaks the system. The problem is that I didn't provide any way to deal with the 3D nature of a form. Most forms don't exist on a single, straight line; they change direction and range over an area.

So we have to establish some way to change direction. Direction, at least in the systems I've studied, is a function of your hips; the direction you are facing is perpendicular to the line defined by your hip sockets. But that's only part of the story; striking/blocking also has direction. Additionally, there is also a direction of "attention", e.g. what am I paying attention to as I execute the form. These three directions are correlated to some degree, but any system of notation needs to be flexible enough to allow each of them to vary individually.

So here's what I'm thinking: I need to add a couple of lines to the "staff" that I proposed earlier. Rather than 4 lines there will now be 6 lines. The first line from the top is the "head" line. We use this line to indicate changes of attention (though I suppose it could also be used to indicate a head strike if need be). I've also added a line between the hands and feet that represents both the hips and the dan tien; since the relation between those two regions is more or less fixed there's no need for them to have separate lines. We use this line to indicate changes in direction and also sudden/unusual shifts in mass. For example, I know a form that involves jumping, turning, and landing in a new stance; the "jump and turn" portion of that can be indicated using this line.

But that still leaves the issue of indicating the direction of a block/strike. I'm inclined to think that direction should be

• Indicated as part of the basic strike notation.
• Measured in relation to the center line that runs perpendicular to the line defined by the hips e.g. the performer's direction.

Most actions are executed with 0 degrees offset from this direction vector; to keep the syntax clean its not necessary to indicate direction in those cases. Its only necessary to indicate direction of action when it deviates from this center line. For example, if I execute a "front punch" it goes straight out and comes back parallel to my center line; this is the standard, default behavior, so there's no need ot indicate anything special about it. However, if I'm to execute "spear hand to left 45 degrees", this needs to be noted.

In addition to having a direction strikes and blocks also have a target. It's important to have some mechanism to indicate target because a single strike can often have multiple targets which make sense. At the same time most strikes also have a "canonical target" e.g. they're typically delivered to a particular area. Again, going back to the "front punch", this strike is usually delivered to the chest/solar plexus, but it can also be delivered to the face, the stomach, or even the groin.

I'm still toying with notation for all of this. I figure that the best way is to try translating a form and see what seems to work best. More as I have time.

Book Review: "Chinese Martial Arts Training Manuals: A Historical Survey"

One of the things I've noted before is that its really hard to find good books on the martial arts. It's doubly hard to find critical texts given that the martial arts as a whole doesn't have a strong history of self-criticism. Even the non-woo-ish books tend to present their material without feeling the need to question or defend the presentation.

So I was quite pleased to find Chinese Martial Arts Training Manuals: A Historical Survey by Brian Kennedy and Elizabeth Guo one day while browsing the MA section of my local bookstore. It is exactly what it claims to be, a historical survey of Chinese MA training manuals spanning a period from the late 16th century to the mid 20th century. More importantly Kennedy and Guo aren't rooting for a particular school or style. Rather, the seem genuinely interested providing solid information regarding the evolution of the martial arts in China.

The book is divided into two sections. The first part, which I found most interesting, is a general history of Chinese MA and training methods. It has all sorts of good stuff including a commentary on the academic study of the martial arts, a investigation of the historical evolution/understanding of 'qi', and a discussion of the amount of pure BS that is to be found in historic manuals. They also introduce a interesting character, Tang Hao, an early historian of the martial arts who did quite a bit of primary research in the field.

The second section is a review of various exemplar manuals. Its interesting to see how manuals have evolved over the year and how they compare to modern publications, but I found this section to be less useful overall than the first.

As I said above, I think this book makes a good addition to a MA library because of its critical nature. One of the recurrent concerns of MA practitioners (in the US at least) is that we've inadvertently ruined a noble discipline due to the commercial nature of most of our studios. In reading this book you quickly realize that Chinese martial arts was as a whole never some pure, spritual practice unsullied by commercialism or pragmatic concerns. The way we "do" the martial arts in the US is certainly no worse than historic practice and may indeed be (a slight bit) better because we're more open to empirical/historical inquiry than past practitioners have been.

One improvement that I might suggest to Kennedy and Guo for a future revision would be the inclusion of a "Further Reading" list of some kind that's accessible to English speakers. Some of the sources cited in the text are available in reprinted form from Lion Books, but being reprints rather than translations they're all in the original Chinese. I, for one, would love to read Tang Hao's works, but I've had no luck finding English translations.

Back. W00t!

Turns out that I'd much rather write about the martial arts than spend time on my MBA. Most of my free time is being sucked up by another project so it's unlikely I'll get around to my grand MA synthesis any time soon. But I've continued to ponder the idea of a MA notation; that's a smaller chunk that I might actually may manage to make progress on.

On Indefinite Hiatus

With regrets I'm putting all of my blogs in mothballs for the time being. Between a new job and school I really have no time for them anymore. My hope is that I'll be able to return to them at some point in the future, but I'm not holding my breath. Thank you all for your participation.