Less Mystery, More Power: The New Nine Dragon Curriculum

Shifu Robert Castaldo tells the Jiulong Journal about recent changes to the Nine Dragon Baguazhang curriculum.

The modern “Rolling the Pearl” curriculum removes some of the mystery and the trial-and-error, to make this esoteric art more down-to-earth so students can grasp it more quickly and apply it sooner. Same ancient principles, same techniques, same power; but hey, this is the twenty-first century. We’ve learned a thing or two.

Excerpts:

The whole purpose of changing the curriculum is to make it more easily understood by everybody ... There’s less mystery involved ... a more direct approach to our goal of being able to apply these principles in practical application.

...

From my standpoint, the most complicated thing for students to grasp—not merely to understand intellectually and feed back to you in a question and answer session, but to understand in their daily practice—is the way that the process builds from the simplest skill, which is the Quiet Sitting—quieting the mind—through the standing, which has very specific skill sets and engrams that it begins to develop, and how to carry those into moving. Students were not making all those connections all the way. They were looking at each of these modules, these skill-sets as separate entities. Eventually, somewhere farther down the line than we would like, the light bulb would go off, the epiphany would happen, and the pieces would come together. So, now we’re trying to make it as clear and simple and easy as possible for body and mind to come to understand how the standing translates into the walking and the walking translates into the circling.

... you have to continually look to your standing and incorporate what you learn there into everything else. That’s a key element. When you can do it in standing, take it into shifting. When you can do it shifting, take into walking. ... All the movements are merely physical shells if you don’t have that undifferentiated, whole-body feeling attached to them. So, when I wedge through you with my arm, if I have any feeling that it’s my arm pushing through you, I’m not doing it correctly. I should feel like my whole body’s moving through you. If I do it correctly, it’s effortless. If I feel stress in my deltoids or my back, I’m not doing it correctly. If I’ve engaged all the muscles of my body, if my shifting has provided power and my waist turn has transmitted up through my torso, then where my arm makes contact is irrelevant. I am just easily moving my 200 lb. mass through you, and that’s a key element for the basic program.

But there’s more! So much more. Go ahead, read the whole thing.

How To Start Training

In the wake of my article on Tibetan energy work, I have been asked how a beginner can get started with this sort of training.

Here are several things you can do:

Learn More

Visit The Gompa online.
The center of Daoqiquan training, with descriptions of the major courses of study. Also see Come To The Gompa.

Read The Jiulong Journal.
Your online portal for the martial art of Jiulong Baguazhang, also called Nine Dragon Baguazhang. Very beginner friendly, including a page on the curriculum and how to start training.

Join the Daoqiquan Yahoo Group.
Covers all aspects of the Daoqiquan system. Follow and contribute to ongoing discussions, search the archives of past discussions. Includes how-to lessons. All are welcome to join and participate.

Join the Jiulong Baguazhang Yahoo Group.
Like the Daoqiquan group, but specific to the martial art of Jiulong Baguazhang, also known as Nine Dragon Baguazhang. All are welcome to join and participate.

Buy the book Combat Baguazhang Nine Dragon System: Forms and Principles, by Dr. John Painter.
The authoritative, unabridged description of this art by its current lineage holder.

Start Quiet Sitting

To get started on your own, buy the book Combat Baguazhang Nine Dragon System: Forms and Principles mentioned above, and read pages 70–74 on Quiet Sitting practice. When you have mastered the breathing technique and posture described, join the Jiulong Baguazhang Yahoo Group and read the post called Challenge of the Nine Dragons.

If you do not own the book, you can probably find equivalent information at either of the Yahoo Groups. Unfortunately, Yahoo’s search facility is not entirely working at the moment, so you will have to hunt through the group’s archives, but full lessons on Quiet Sitting technique have been posted in the past. Once you are a member, you can even post a question asking for help locating these lessons.

Attend a Class or Workshop

If you can visit The Gompa in Arlington, TX, you will be in the heart of the Daoqiquan organization with our most experienced instructors.

For announcements of upcoming workshops at other locations in the U.S. and Canada and in London, England, join either Yahoo Group and watch for announcements.

To find a Jiulong study group near you, review the list of branch schools (see left margin). Contact a school’s leader to ask about workshops and classes.

Find Another Style in Your Area

If you cannot visit a Daoqiquan location, you can probably find other systems of internal martial arts or qigong in your area, even in the Yellow Pages. Look for the following keywords: tai chi, xing-yi, bagua, kung fu, qigong, meditation, internal power, internal martial arts, healing arts.

You will need to be clear about what you want (effective self defense? tournament sparring? relaxation and health?), and ask your prospective instructor whether he or she teaches that. It might be best to ask, “what is the goal of this class?” to get an unbiased answer, before you have said what you are looking for.

Once you start training, watch how the curriculum is presented. A solid system should include general principles that you can understand and apply in a variety of situations, rather than a grab bag of specific techniques to memorize (especially if those techniques seem to embody conflicting principles). A solid system will also pay attention to your breathing and posture. If your instructor teaches you how to sit and stand before anything else, you are definitely on the right track!

Unfortunately, it is very hard, especially for a beginner, to judge the quality of a system or teacher from the outside. There are no “industry standards,” and even words like “kung fu” or “qigong” are extremely general terms that include many, many different systems that can vary greatly. On top of that, you may not be able to clarify your goals until you have begun training and discovered what appeals to you and what doesn’t. In the end, it is simply up to you to use your own judgement and common sense.

Life is short, so if you are drawn to this sort of training, get started! Find something that looks appealing and fits your schedule. If you like it, and it improves your life, and you are not getting hurt, then ... you win!

Walloped By a Tree!!

My article has been published in Kung Fu Magazine's ezine:

“Lessons Learned From a Passing Tree: a first experience of elemental energy,” by Bernie Jackson

It recounts my experience this past June at the annual Gathering of the Circle workshop in upstate New York. While meditating in front of a tree, something really weird happened to me!

Crossing the Great River: article by Bobb Maio

My friend Bobb Maio, who is a study group leader in Jiulong Baguazhang, published this article in Kung Fu Magazine a little while ago:

“Crossing the Great River to Avoid Being Double Weighted,” by Bobb Maio

Crossing the Great River is a basic and very important principle of movement. Bobb Maio explains it well and includes entertaining stories from his experience as a martial arts student and instructor.

Founder’s Day 2009 in Arlington, TX

A couple of weeks ago, I drove with a friend to Arlington, TX for a martial arts event called Founder’s Day. We had a formal ceremony Friday night (Oct. 2), followed by kung fu training Saturday and Sunday in a principle called The Five Circles.

Founder’s Day celebrates the birthday of Lama Zurdwang, a Tibetan shaman who founded a system of martial arts and health practices about 430 years ago that today is known as Daoqiquan (Dow-chee-chwan). Lama Zurdwang’s original principles were passed on to the Li family of China, who used them to become a formidable bodyguard clan. Over the ensuing centuries, the Li family continually applied Lama Zurdwang’s principles to meet the challenges of the times, until the last practicing Li descendant immigrated to the U.S. in the 1950s and began to teach the system to an American boy in his back yard in Texas. That American boy grew up to become Dr. John Painter, who today is the Daoqiquan system’s formal lineage holder and teaches it at his Arlington school called The Gompa.

Modern Daoqiquan includes internal martial arts (tai chi, bagua, xing yi), external martial arts (animal style kung fu), meditation and health practices (qigong forms), firearms techniques, and more. It is truly daunting to think of it all at once! I only study the bagua part, whose full name is Jiulong Baguazhang, or “Nine Dragon” Baguazhang. Bagua can be thought of as a cousin of tai chi that specializes in circular motion.

Founder’s Day always begins with a Friday night ceremony. There is seated meditation, a lecture on Daoqiquan’s history, and a “bitter tea” ceremony. Daoqiquan training follows, Saturday and Sunday.

This year’s training was on the Five Circles, one of Lama Zurdwang’s original principles. The Five Circles are five basic ways to move. Imagine reaching your right arm ahead and to the left at 45 degrees. It does not just leap straight out, but it traces a great circle, standing vertically in the air like a wheel. Reaching out, the arm traces over the top of the circle, and it returns under the bottom of the circle. This is Circle Over. The other four are Circle Under, Circle Across, Circle Up, and Circle Down.

But these circles are not about the arm; your whole body moves (turns) to power and support the arm. You can forget the arm entirely, letting it hang at your side and using your shoulder. You can forget the shoulder and use the center of your body, etc. It is an extremely simple concept that is very difficult to do properly. However, done properly, the whole-body technique imbues these circles with incredible power that has to be seen (preferably, felt, as you are tossed through the air!) to be appreciated. Essentially, the muscles of your legs and torso are far more powerful than your arms, even if you have big arms. When all of those muscles work in concert, they give these techniques far more power than they “ought” to have.

For me, the weekend validated my last few months of home training and showed me what I need to do to make more progress. My circles are more “connected” than ever from the arms to the power of the legs and the turning of the waist. However, since I rarely have the opportunity to train with a partner (the closest fellow student is over two hours away), I am not yet able to use this power dynamically with all the variables that appear when I am facing another person. To make more progress, I need to train more with other people and make more creative use of training dummies (heavy bags, swinging poles, etc.).

Until then, should the need arise, at least I have arm muscles!

Knocking Stuff Down: the first cool thing I did with baguazhang

Really, the first cool thing I did with baguazhang was to stand and meditate. But I'm going to skip over that for now, because that is harder to write about and less visually impressive.

Instead, I will tell you about knocking down a big, heavy thing.

I had been training Jiulong Baguazhang for six months, keeping it very slow and basic. That means all I did for this "training" was to stand very still for about twenty minutes a day. While standing like this, I had to work on various postural things and mental images, learning to align my body properly so that some day, later on, when I was ready to generate power by moving, I would have good structure to support this power. Think of a suspension bridge or a cathedral with a flying buttress. It's all about structure, right? Good structure provides power, even without motion. That's why we stand and meditate. You have to do it regularly and pay attention to the details, because you are trying to teach your body to hold itself this way even when you are distracted. Certain mental images/feelings help this process, because your body learns to produce the structure when you call up the feeling. It's really more of a feeling than an image, but I'll leave that for another post.

After six months of this standing, in late 2002, I attended a seminar in which Dr. Painter taught us some basic principles of movement. That is, I began to learn how to hold this structure while moving, to generate power. It was fun and amazing, and I was eager to start practicing so that perhaps after another six months I could generate some real power.

Well, it did not take six months. It was more like six hours!

I went home the second evening of this weekend seminar, I went down to my basement where I keep a floor-standing heavy bag, and with one relaxed push, I knocked it over!

Remember those old toys, the "Weebles" that wobble, but they don't fall down? They were egg-shaped plastic things with cute people drawn on them, very heavy at the base, so they always stood upright. My heavy bag has 260 lbs of sand in its base (and I weighed 180 at the time), with just some foam and hard plastic up high, so it is very Weeble-like. When I used to practice karate, I had punched and kicked this thing for hours, and it had barely moved. That was the point: the Immovable Object. I only ever toppled it a few times, with my strongest forward thrust kick.

But that night after my first seminar, I stood facing it, with my best-aligned structure. I took one step out of my stance (what we call a "dragon step"); I visualized pushing through it and far past it, beyond my house, and down the street; and I thought about "taking its space." Physically, I pushed firmly but gently a little above the bag's center while stepping boldly into the place where it had been, confident that it would just get out of the way. Bang! Down it went.

I could not believe it. It felt magical and impossible to get such a result with such little effort. But I had not prayed to some God of Force Generation or danced a silken kung fu streamer around an ancient maypole; I had merely used good body mechanics and effective visual imagery, trained into my body by daily meditation.

It is easy to see how people could develop magical fantasies about this kind of ability, especially in an ancient era without a rigorous study of physics, but what really powers all this stuff is structure, structure, and more structure. To me, this makes it even cooler than magic: "For my next trick, I will be using nothing but plain old physics ..."

Discovering Nine Dragon ("Jiulong") Baguazhang, 2002

The road to Jiulong Baguazhang was long and circuitous and full of amazement.

It began—if you want to go all the way back—in 1987, when I was a freshman in college. A friend of mine invited me to an evening class on campus in Kenpo karate. Kenpo, as far as I can tell without being an Asian scholar, is a Hawaiian hybrid of Japanese karate and Chinese external kung fu. It resembles the fight scenes you see in movies, its techniques are quite effective when properly mastered, and it is a lot of fun. My college class, I can now say with hindsight, was very well taught, involving sound principles of motion and thoughtful training techniques.

Also during college, I spent two quarters taking a T’ai Chi course. Several of us Kenpo guys did that for adjunct work on stance strength and balance. Today, we might call it “cross training”! Well, through the ensuing years, I kept coming back to that glimpse of T’ai Chi. There had been something about it ... On the one hand, it had been entirely non-martial—that is, not at all focused on fighting or self defense. On the other hand, we had occasionally done some very cool meditation-like exercises involving guided imagery and what seemed to me like self-hypnosis (I was actually reading curiously about self-hypnosis at that same time). We stood outdoors in the late fall and warmed up our hands through pure thought. You could put your neighbor’s hand on your neck and feel it unnaturally warm! I learned to begin my T’ai Chi form by letting my hands float up in front of me, “as if they were floating by themselves,” and by George, it did feel like they were floating by themselves!

Then college was over, and grad school came. I got really skinny and even more sleep-deprived, and there was no more jumping around in karate outfits. Then I got a job, a Silicon Valley startup job with wall-to-wall Herculean hours that I gave with scarcely a thought. Eight years and 60 pounds later, there had been not an ounce of martial arts ... unless you count nine months of half-hearted Aikido training which I once took on Quixotically just to get out of the office, but that’s another story.

Finally, about age 30, I got back into it. This time it was Kempo with an “m,” same basic idea as college. Except very different. In college, they made you sweat for your next belt. They would push you on your test until you were sure you must have failed, all the while carefully managing you against your limit. When you learned you had passed, you felt like the luckiest person alive, and every time you tied on your belt, you knew you had earned it. But at my new school, students flailed half-heartedly through their tests. We tested in groups, not individually, so the more clueless ones would hesitate and watch those of who had studied, to jog their memories. No matter, everyone passed. I worked out with brown belts who couldn’t do a whole lot. To be sure, there were some very capable students, too. Any school is what you make of it. Those who trained hard were indeed competent. However, those who didn’t train so hard were glibly promoted and made to feel competent, which seems like a bad idea to me, if not downright dangerous.

Add to that the fact that this new school was pretty light on principles of movement. There was less use of the lower body as an integrated part of the whole, more reliance on upper body and arm power, and even many of the experienced students just didn't have the grace and power that I had seen in my first school.

So I was disillusioned. I had earned a brown belt in about 18 months, was within a year of the coveted “black belt” (everyone say Aaahhh!), but life was getting busier at home with a third child on the way, and I found that I did not value the training or the impending belt enough to continue!

I stopped. I thought. I read. I returned to those T’ai Chi experiences, and I pondered the rumors about “soft styles” of kung fu having real power with mysterious meditative roots. I am not much of a New Ager, so I didn’t know whether I believed any of that stuff, but when I stumbled on a teacher not ten minutes from my house, a guy who taught an obscure type of kung fu called “bagua” (full name: Jiulong Baguazhang) and taught it for real-life self defense, I had to check it out.

The rest of the story is what this blog is all about. I discovered, in slow, gradual steps, that the rumors were true. There are indeed “soft” styles of effective kung fu, with meditative roots and harmless-looking moves that are nonetheless devastatingly effective at generating mechanical power and defending oneself against determined attack. As an electrical engineer, my skepticism was with me all the way, and I am happy to report that none of this required taking up a new religion or believing in fairies! Yet, it also brought me to the frontiers of knowledge in medicine and consciousness, like a guided tour of Stuff No One Understands Yet, which—to the truly science-minded—is a triple chocolate fudge sundae. It has been a great ride so far, with a lot of great people, and I am looking forward to more!