星期三, 八月 17, 2005
As this blog's header should tell you straight away, I rate martial arts as being one of the most important things in my life, and I put my study wushu as highly as my MBA studies. Maybe even more, because the MBA knowledge will get stale even if I remember it - and I find I'm forgetting lot of it as soon as the exams are over. The martial arts work, though, I'm likely to keep on practising, and benefitting from, for life.
I mentioned before that one reason I love being back in Beijing is that this is the heart of Chinese martial arts. Sure, you can talk about the Shaolin temple and Wudang shan being the homes of the external and internal styles respectively, and they are. But, the best practitioners came to Beijing and a lot of the schools they founded, or the post- Cultural Revolution remnants of them, are still here.
I'm not training at one of these, I hasten to to add. I'm at a very new school, catering for Westerners and teaching in English. Like most of the other students, I found it through an advertisement in one of the expat magazines. That doesn't make it any less 'authentic' though; the head of the school is a martial arts instructor with the Beijing police. I was passing through London for a few days some years back, and I picked up a copy of one of the British martial arts magazines - I forget which one - because the cover was about just that: the combat training of the Chinese police.I remember that it pointed out how widespread martial arts training was in China, meaning that the gangsters can be very tough characters even if they haven't got guns, so the police have to train hard. My instructor is one of the guys who trains them, meaning he takes it very seriously!
Like most traditional schools, I don't get trained too much by him personally; mostly I work with the senior student. He's an Englishman, who's been here for nine years, speaks excellent Chinese, and trains hard - every day. He really has the traditional relationship with the master, and has pretty much become part of the family. I expected there to be more of a community amongst the students than there is, though. There's very little cameraderie, or conversation with people who weren't already friends. I'm surprised at this; most martial arts schools I've trained with before have been really social, and I'm not sure what the reason is. One of the little projects I had at the back of my mind when I came to Beijing was to do some kind of study of the foreign martial arts students in Beijing; I guess I'll have to stay here longer and get in deeper (and, note to self, improve my Chinese) before that's going to happen!
So what am I studying? The school teaches the three internal martial arts (Taijiquan, Xing-Yi,and Ba Gua Zhang), plus Shaolin Quan and San Da. All of them include various bare-hand forms, plus weapons, plus applications. I'm focussing on Ba Gua Zhang, which is based on circular motion and is both a kickass martial art and a serious meditative practise. Obviously, some level of expertise is needed for that statement to be true, and I'm not there yet! I've learned one full sequence of unarmed moves, and now I'm working on a second, plus the basic set of moves for the Ba Gua Jian, which is a double-handed sword about 4 feet long. We start each lesson with a workout and intensive stretching exercises, followed by the 8 Brocade Silk Qi Qong set. It's a lot to fit in to two hours, and I wish the lessons lasted 3 hours, as with my school in Singapore. Ah well.
Classes are twice a week, and in between I try to practice in the mornings. This is outside my apartment block, and I'm still trying to get over the embarrassment! I'm always watched by many of the block's contingent of retirees, who probably all get up at about 5am, and have finished their own exercises an hour before I begin mine! I know for sure that there are a lot of good martial arts people in the block; there's one family in particular where the mother teaches the kids Northern Long Fist - bare hand, sword and spear. In addition, there are at least some younger people who are studying for martial arts degrees at the Physical Education University nearby. So all in all, it takes some courage to get up out there, and practice.
In addition to the Ba Gua, I also practice the Taiji Fist (24 moves, a variant of the standard Beijing 24 Yang Tai ji), and Taiji sabre (88 moves). Lately,I've also started trying to revise the Chen Man Chinq 37-move form, which I practised for many years before I went to Singapore, but which I've now forgotten a lot of.
It's a lot to work on, but each one contributes its own benefits. If I'm persistent, though, I'll eventually master them all. Persistence isn't easy; I've not practised for a while due to, on various days, fatigue, illness or bad weather. But I'll keep on trying!
