From nv91-asa@nada.kth.se Sun Nov 14 12:26:57 1996 Status: RO X-Status: Received: from compassion.hotmail.com (compassion.hotmail.com [206.86.127.245]) by mail.nada.kth.se (8.6.10/8.6.10) with SMTP id MAA26604 for ; Thu, 14 Nov 1996 12:26:51 +0100 Received: (http://www.hotmail.com 21649 invoked by uid 0); 14 Nov 1996 11:26:48 -0000 Date: 14 Nov 1996 11:26:48 -0000 Message-ID: <19961114112648.21648.qmail@hotmail.com> Received: from 206.86.127.204 by www.hotmail.com with HTTP; Thu, 14 Nov 1996 03:26:48 PST From: "Peter Sears" To: nv91-asa@nada.kth.se Subject: The master Speaks... Content-Type: text/plain The Master Speaks: A treatise, most complete and correct,on the fundamental differences in Do styles and their training methods. By the most serene and august Master of the House of the Blue Dragon, Morry Chang. As told to our most abjectly terrified scribe, Pete Sears. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- It has come to my attention, that I have been ruthlessly slandered. I must humbly beg forgiveness for the calousness and crudity of my student, John Patterson. Even I ,his humble master, had no idea that he possesed the flexibility and limberness to insert his foot into his large western mouth. Please pay no attention to his assertions that I am a sadist or a goat or even an OLD goat. He misunderstands these pearls of wisdom that fall from these aged lips. I fear there is no remedy for his ignorance but perhaps I can undo the damage by talking a bit about the various training styles of the martial art One Finds,in the evolution of thought that there is 4 separate and distinct steps. 1)a situation or problem. 2) a practical and pragmatic solution 3) a sophistication of principles 4) a discovery of the spiritual principles. It is this way in most intelectual constructs. I will give an example: 1) the dishes are dirty 2) I wash the dishes, the dishes become clean. 3) By examining the method by which I do dishes. I discover a means to cut the time it takes to do the dishes. Also I discover that I can utilize the time while the dishes are soaking, to do small jobs around the kitchen. The time it takes to do the dishes is the same but by the time I am finished, the entire kitchen is clean. 4) While washing the dishes, I conceive of dish-washing as a spiritual activity.by extracting order from chaos (a jumbly pile of stinky dishes become neatly stacked, clean, and put away.) I am mirroring the spiritual work of my soul. In giving my heart ease from a simple problem I am pointed in the way to acheive simplicity and thus ascencion. O.K. Perhaps I am overstating the example a bit. I certainly have never reached nirvanna by washing the dishes. But by the same token, I do find that many who wash dishes for a living do develop a philosophical turn of mind. Some of you may now be asking, Why is this relevant? What is the old man blathering on about? These ideas are necessary to understand the evolution of the forms of Martial Do. The Yogis: Deep in the old days, way back in the pre-history of China is where we find the Root of Do. It is spoken of as a time of legend, when Do was the natural state of all. It was those times when earth and heaven were as one. In those days, we were all dreamspeakers then... As the gauntlet asserted itself we began to see that the world was very different. there were all these spirits that had to be entreated and propitiated, and we realized that we werenıt as close to them as we once were. and that their aid was by no means a sure thing. It is rumored that the final straw came during a war in what is now the Yenching province when an entire monastery was destroyed by nephandi. In those days, Wars were often fought by people and spirits on both sides. The monastery had made several sacrifices to a great dragon spirit. During the battle, the Dragon spirit decided to leave because of an amount of damage that it had sustained. No entreaty could entice it to return and the monks were slain. Those few surviving monks were thought to have been the first Akashic Brothers. They were determined to discover a form of magick that wasnıt dependent on spirit but on the power within each individual mage. The beginnings of this search for inner power founded the path of the Yogis. Yogi Magick is spiritual in itıs basis and this is reflected in the forms of itıs Martial Do. Yogi magick is the basis of Ninjutsu. Unlike the common western perception of Ninja and their chinese antecedents the Tau-Tau, Ninjas were and to some degree still are Spiritual warriors. Some of the ancient secrets of Ninjutsu find their roots in in controlling ones spiritual aura, entering the umbra,and finding usefull ways to use spiritual energy in combat... Many of the animal forms of Kung-fu find their roots in the exploration of the early yogis among their spirit friends. Also the art of Kenjutsu is an outgrowth of continued experimentation on this path. One would practice with ones weapon until it became an extension of the masters spirit.( In this way, the weilder learned mastery and in doing so would invest his weapon with a portion of his soul. in this way it became a weapon against other spirits...This is the reason for many of the silly customs about swords that blossomed in japanıs feudal era.) Many of the types of training require both physical work and spiritual work. Kata becomes both teaching exercise and Ritual. Striking exercises become ways to learn to focus the spirit as well as the power of the fist. Yogi Dojang often become very easy to access from the umbra and to it because of the nature of the of the spiritual work involved. Many of the purification forms come from this art,( I.e. Chi Gung, literally ³breath work², Pa Kua,which is an internal art that stregthen the internal organs, and Tai chi, which has obvious spiritual elements.) Yogi martial arts tend to be excellent method for fighting spiritual enemies as this was the first use they were put to. Yogi Do practitioners tend to think of combat in 3 and sometimes 4 dimensions as opposed to the usual 2. Spirits attacking from the floor or ceiling rarely find them surprised. Also ritual purification is a natural part of the training and even those who donıt go into some sort of priesthood are still capable of performing an exorcism. Lest you begin to believe that Yogiıs are some sort of internal priesthood some of the fiercest Ninja of the Togakure ryu and some of the more legendary Demon hunters are from this group. This group maintains very cordial relations with all asian dream- speakers particularly those of the shinto priesthood. Etiquette note: If you meet a dreamspeaker who demonstrates abilites with Do, Forego the usual hostilities directed at those having knowledge they shouldnıt. Often these dreamspeakers are very carefully vetted by akashic authorites and only grudgingly allowed to learn Do at the feet of a close compatriot who is willing to accept responsibility for him. In other cases the dreamspeaker in question might be one who actually predates the Akashic Brotherhood. (there are still a handfull of them left.) As you can imagine,tangling with these mages might be the last thing you do. Scales of the Dragon: As the Akashic brothers began to break away from traditional forms and experiment with new ways of drawing forth their abilities, their was a backlash against the spiritual forms. It was felt that they still relied on spirits too much. We did not live in the spirit world. We live in this world, filled with war,conflict and suffering. The keywords that one needs to understand about Scale martial Do are these: Practicality and simplicity. Here is an example; I can execute beautiful aerial kicks. Generally I do not bother. Why? Because they take a long time time to deploy and often require a running start. My opponent does not care that they are beautiful and that I spent many hours perfecting them. I will not gain much more power in my strike. and in the time i manage it, i could throw four punches. and heaven help me should I miss or slip! Not that I would mind you. Scale Do is all about the Scientific direction of force and being flexible in the face of danger. it is an art devoted to survival. Tae Kwon Do,Jiu-jutsu,hard styles of Karate, Kobu-Jutsu(weapon study), Jeet Kune Do and some of the foreign adaptations like Savate,Capoeira,escrima and Muay thai kickboxing are all descendents of this form. Training in this form is designed to be completely unfair, because people only fight fair in the dojo. This is not to say that there is no spiritual work in the path of the scale. This is where the begining of the codes of the Shih (chinese knight) and the Code of Bushido come from. A warrior must wrestle with his soul in moments of peace for there is no time for contemplation of good and evil in the midst of a fight for one life. One has to understand that their is more to life than combat. there is life, art,family, and all the things that are worth fighting and dying for. The Great Miyamoto Musashi was possibly the greatest swordsman who ever lived. So great that he eschewed using real swords because the lives of his opponents had become precious to him if not to them. He beat many of his challengers with only a pair of wooden Bokken. he was also a master strategist and a poet,author, and painter. Now he was prepared to die in each battle and yet lived a life sweet and rich for his love of it. there is a lesson in this for each scale who loses sight of the path. Orange Robes: Now I have some problems with the Orange Robes So I will do the polite thing and extoll their virtues...first. These Magi typify the tendency towards sophistication and the creation of patterns. The Yogi were heavily mystical and often inscrutable in the extreme, Scales of the dragon had potent martial arts but often their education in the ways of Do were anarchic and darwinian. (forms that didnıt work were immediately dropped, Master that didnıt survive to pass on their teaching were useless in the eyes of others.) Often great and potent lore was lost and in some cases remains lost to this day. The formation of the Orange robes was the next logical step in the Evolution of Do. their contribution was two-fold,both martial and social. (which some might argue is the same thing.) Martial contributions run to the natural sophistacation of martial arts as a whole. The Orange robes are solely responsible for the complete develop- ment of many previous theories. Chi control became an exact science under their gentle ministration as did chinese healing. The rudiments of Atemi(or pressure point striking) that were discovered by the Scales, eventually yeilded the full art of striking that which is weak with natural weapons of the body.(not just hands and feet, but elbows and knees and sometimes even the head.) Kempo finger strikes and much of Jiu-jitsu and Aikido come directly from their work. Often Orange robes spend entire lifetimes teaching and perfecting arts. Their training is often very Kata based and one can learn the nuts and bolts of half a dozen martial arts by studying them. Often when an Akashic brother finds something new he turn it over to the Orange robes for study. Their other contribution to martial arts as a whole includes heavy study of mental states and their applications. It is said that many of Musashiıs ideas about mental state in battle and in meditation were taken from akashic study.Of course some say that it was the other way around, Me I donıt take sides in fights that can have no winner. It was however, the Orange robes that pushed Mind magick as being inherently superior to other magickal spheres and thus worthy of being the primary focus of akashic training. The reasoning being that it is truly impossible to master anything until you master yourself. Other might think different, Me, I donıt take sides in fights that can have no winner. The other main development of the Akashic Brotherhood was some of our social structure. As creators of Patterns it should come as no surprise that Orange robes quickly became heads of monastaries, heads of Kwoon and Dojo, Heads of libraries, and in some cases heads of state. They provided the social element that the more primitive Scales and Yogi lacked. They became teachers,arbiters,philosophers,healers and a host of other things. They developed doctrines that taught that a warrior could retain his honor without throwing his life away on every minor challenge and even instituted and propogated the philosphies of others if it would enable even the sleepers to grow spiritually. I personally know many female Orange robes who are trying to reverse millenia of sexism and misogyny in the east. I hope that they succeed, because I know,after four centuries of life, that in all this universe, there is nothing finer than women. My problem with the Orange Robes stems from my own personal belief that Confucianism is the path of the control freak, Also I find that Orange Robes can be as conservative and hidebound as any technocrat.(living in an ivory tower will do that for you.) and also their training methods take forever to teach simple principles. For instance, If I show my student,John patterson, a hip-toss, I show it to him, explain how it works, get him to show it to me, make sure he practices it and then go on. It is up to him to learn the flexibility of mind to when to use it and when not to. However and Orange robe Master will show a student a hip-toss, then he will show the 72 variations of the hip-toss, then he will test the student on the names of the 72 variations in chinese, japanese,korean and half a dozen other languages and also the history of the hip-toss including the names of all the Brothers who have discovered the hip-toss variations in order that the Orange robe student may teach others the hip-toss without embarassing his master with his own ignorance. Then and only then will the student be allowed to go on to another move. As a Rabbi friend of mine is fond of saying: ³Shah! Enough allready!² Blue skins: Finally we come to the end of the natural progresion. Where the Yogis sought to break away from the spirit, the Blue skins seek to become more fully spirit, to bring the inherent spirit inside out. Do becomes spiritual work(art) in addition to practical work (self defense) Blue skins are not responsible for the creation of any form of martial art and yet they often have created the philosophical underpinnings that makes those arts work. They see value in all forms but become attached to none as they know that the martial arts are merely the external expression of the Eternal will. Blue Skin training is often a mystical quest disguised as martial arts training. much of the point of Blue skin Do training is to find the natural rhythyms of the Drahma by finding the natural rhythyms in nature. Blue skins often undergo tortuous exercises designed to harden them to the elements. Where a Scale or an Orange robe might strike a Maka Wara board to toughen his hands. a Blue skin would strike earth,rock,sand, and in some case hot coals. To toughen themselves against the elements I have seen Blue skins, Attend sweat lodges, practice kicks and punches in raging storms or in the seashores, I have seen them perform Kata under heavy waterfalls and seen them brave cold and heat for days at a time. As Nietzsche put it. If it doesnıt kill you it will make you stronger. Of course Physical strength and stamina is just a by-product of this process. Blue skins often use hunting games as a way to train. The reasoning being, that very few people struggle for their lives or souls in a nice warm dojo with a soft floor. Many times the aspiring student is given a headstart and then is hunted by the other students. the Law of the jungle is one of the Drahmaıs principles. Being mystically inclined, the Blue skins rarely feel the need to kill and dislike unecessary force but will not for a moment hesitate to use what is necessary and they can kill and feel no remorse.(to be fair, usually only Nephandi recieve this treatment, Blue skins feel that nephandi have dishonored their own souls and to them there is no greater crime. As you can imagine, talking to a blue skin can a lot like talking to a Garou with Zen-like detachment. Enlightening, or frustrating, or both. As a Blue skin becomes more adept. he strive to allow his souls true will to come forth more easily. their martial arts become more and more effortless,(in contrast to the actual training.) They become strong, hardy, animalistic,and faster than thought. Repeatedly I have seen Blue skins pull off Do manouvers and Do magick with what appears to be incredible ease and when asking how they did a particular stunt ,was stymied by the response ,³I have no idea.² They strive towards a mystery, the mystery of being and who knows... maybe some of them reach it. As ever, I hope this will help to enlighten those who wish to learn and those who should know better Kinesys@hotmail.com (note the "Y" Somebody beat me to my own name! Arrrgh!) --------------------------------------------------------- Get Your *Web-Based* Free Email at http://www.hotmail.com ---------------------------------------------------------