Northern vs Southern arts

Discussion on the three big Chinese internals, Yiquan, Bajiquan, Piguazhang and other similar styles.

Re: Northern vs Southern arts

Postby GrahamB on Sat Mar 31, 2018 1:52 pm

Bao, I often wonder on the value of replying to your posts. I think you are often just being wilfully obtuse.

I just posted a picture of genuine scroll from 168BC showing images of people doing movements that are clearly in the baduanjin... So, who should I believe - you or my lying eyes?
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Re: Northern vs Southern arts

Postby Bao on Sat Mar 31, 2018 2:37 pm

GrahamB wrote:I just posted a picture of genuine scroll from 168BC showing images of people doing movements that are clearly in the baduanjin... So, who should I believe - you or my lying eyes?


What you posted is Daoyin. Daoyin is a type of exercises that has Daoist origin, not Buddhist origin. 168 BC is 6- or 700 hundreds years older than Bodhidharma. The Baduanjin myth says that the set has been invented in the Shaolin Monastery. The chart you posted just proves my point further that the Baduajin is not likely something invented by Buddhists or influenced by something from India. But rather something inspired by the same old Chinese exercises that is one source of Chinese martial arts as Shaolin Boxing. What I argued against from the start is merely that Bodhidharma should have invented anything any physical exercises or brought anything from India that has to do with Shaolin boxing. I don’t quite understand why people who practice Chinese Martial arts won’t accept that Shaolin arts are of Chinese origin and much older than Bodhidharma. :P

I merely give facts. I don’t care if you don’t believe in historical facts or in historical sources. If you can find something better or a real historical source or evidence suggesting that the Baduajin or Yijinjing has a history earlier than the 1800s, pls post your source. Just because something is a commonly accepted view or because “everyone” believe something doesn’t make it true.

Also, if someone invented an exercise in the 1800s or 1900s the logical thing would obviously to take Shaolin exercises and qigong folk exercises that people would associate with old Chinese exercises and Shaolin. This is speculation of course, not a fact. But I can’t see anything strange that the Baduanjin looks like Daoyin exercises. There are a lot of drawings and paintings of Daoyin, neidan and Hua To’s five animals discovered much earlier than 1975.
Last edited by Bao on Sat Mar 31, 2018 2:38 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: Northern vs Southern arts

Postby GrahamB on Sat Mar 31, 2018 2:59 pm

Wrong. The buaduanjin myth says it was invented by General Yue Fei. You couldn't get more nationalistic Chnese than that.
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Re: Northern vs Southern arts

Postby Trick on Sat Mar 31, 2018 9:06 pm

It all originated with the Yellow Emperor even football
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Re: Northern vs Southern arts

Postby Subitai on Sat Mar 31, 2018 11:18 pm

All I said about Jet was that his movie had the same effect on the youth of many Chinese, as Star Wars did in the USA. Don't read too much into it. You have to have been a USA kid growing up with star Wars to understand.

My comments about Jet Lei come from an opinion of my si hing Gene Ching. Is he right or wrong...I default to his opinion because of his research and interest in our field.

I find the comments about the lack of written evidence on Shaolin laughable. Shaolin was burned down a few times!!!!!!! In fact just about every regime change had something to do with burning the predecessors out.

Everything I said (earlier Post)about 1500 yrs of Shaolin history and the traditions handed down by many schools throughout Asia is common beliefs in many lineages.
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Re: Northern vs Southern arts

Postby HotSoup on Sun Apr 01, 2018 9:38 am

Subitai wrote:Everything I said (earlier Post)about 1500 yrs of Shaolin history and the traditions handed down by many schools throughout Asia is common beliefs in many lineages.


No question about that. They do believe in it. The thing is, people love believing in nice stories, but it's not enough to make those stories true.

Our brain plays a nasty game with us by believing what sounds nice, because once we realize that many respectful martial artists and our teachers believe into something that has no verifiable proofs (or even further, the facts saying it cannot be true at all) we shall start questioning the rest of their believes and eventually what they teach us. For some people this way of thinking is taboo. However this is the only way the traditional martial arts can survive in modern times — by sieving out all outdated and excess believes of the past and finding out what actually is true. Otherwise, the lack of credibility will stay the sword of Damocles of TMA for ever.
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Re: Northern vs Southern arts

Postby Bao on Sun Apr 01, 2018 11:00 am

Subitai wrote:I find the comments about the lack of written evidence on Shaolin laughable. Shaolin was burned down a few times!!!!!!! In fact just about every regime change had something to do with burning the predecessors out.


Bodhidharma’s direct predecessor did not live in the Shaolin area. Other places are more well known for Chan Buddhism than the Shaolin Si. That no one of the monks that Bodhidharma taught in the monastery preserved an important tradition is not likely. Especially not if you believe that Shaolin was invented in the Shaolin Monastery and derived through Yijinjing practice. Why would Shaolin survive and not the Yijinjing or any reference to Bodhidharma? The history of the patriarchs are preserved in many books, how they lived, what they ate, what they studied. It’s all preserved in a literary tradition. Shaolin and Yijinjing is not part of this tradition.

BTW, they didn’t even know exactly where the Shaolin temple had been located when they re-builded it. Everything there is new, a reconstruction made out of an equal amount of myth and facts.

Everything I said (earlier Post)about 1500 yrs of Shaolin history and the traditions handed down by many schools throughout Asia is common beliefs in many lineages.


The question about this is when all of this became a belief... Maybe people just watched too many movies? :/
Last edited by Bao on Sun Apr 01, 2018 11:01 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: Northern vs Southern arts

Postby Trick on Sun Apr 01, 2018 12:18 pm

And the corridor of wooden men and huge steaming urn that brands a dragon and a tiger on the forearms on graduation day?? ..Please at least let this still be true....
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Re: Northern vs Southern arts

Postby zrm on Wed Apr 04, 2018 6:20 pm

GrahamB wrote:For example, what we call "Yoga" in Europe and America was actually 1920s European gymnastics exported to India, washed through an Indian cultural filter and sent back to us. I'm pretty sure it's fake in that sense, but it seems to fulfill a need.


Huh. So you're inferring that what Iyengar teaching in the 1930s was partly of European origin?



Or was this just a passing reference to some of the modern crap that is taught today?

As for Shaolin, where does Buddhism originate from if not India? What about arts like Kalaripayattu? Are we seriously suggesting there is no cultural cross over between the religions and martial arts practiced at the Shaolin Temple and those practiced in India, solely based on the fact that stories about the Yinjinjing or the Buddhidarma may bot be literally true?

Origin stories about the Buddhidarma, Yue Fei, Zhang San Feng etc. should just be considered as metaphorical references to the origins of the philosophical underpinnings of these arts. That people tend read into these stories too literally and make it a matter of faith is neither that surprising or worth arguing about. That the stories aren't literally true from a historical perspective shouldn't necessarily detract from their intended meaning.
Last edited by zrm on Wed Apr 04, 2018 6:21 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: Northern vs Southern arts

Postby zrm on Wed Apr 04, 2018 6:32 pm

Bao wrote:BTW, they didn’t even know exactly where the Shaolin temple had been located when they re-builded it. Everything there is new, a reconstruction made out of an equal amount of myth and facts.


I believe there was one building remaining from the original temple after it got burnt down in the 1920s. I believe they built the rest based on a historical floor plan recovered from Japanese buddhist monk. The monk had copied the original floor plan before it burnt down in order make a mirror temple in Japan.

My shifu taught students there for a short time in the early 1980s around the time of the Jet Li movie. They were rebuilding it at that stage and nobody lived there. He said it sucked. There was no running water and no facilities. He was essentially sent there as a punishment for upsetting some government official.
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Re: Northern vs Southern arts

Postby MaartenSFS on Wed Apr 04, 2018 10:36 pm

I just wanted to say that this has been an interesting read and that I've heard the same thing that Subitai said from many, many people here in China. I personally don't put much faith in the Shaolin or Zhang Sanfeng, Yue Fei etc. myths..
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Re: Northern vs Southern arts

Postby GrahamB on Thu Apr 05, 2018 12:19 am

zrm wrote:
GrahamB wrote:For example, what we call "Yoga" in Europe and America was actually 1920s European gymnastics exported to India, washed through an Indian cultural filter and sent back to us. I'm pretty sure it's fake in that sense, but it seems to fulfill a need.


Huh. So you're inferring that what Iyengar teaching in the 1930s was partly of European origin?



Or was this just a passing reference to some of the modern crap that is taught today?



It's actually quite easy to find this material - just do a google search for "gymnastics yoga origin".

The first article you'll find is this one:

https://www.yogajournal.com/yoga-101/yo ... ater-truth

"The Ancient & Modern Roots of Yoga
One scholar's quest to trace his practice back to its source ultimately gives him a glimpse of yoga's greater truth."

I think it's pretty common knowledge to anyone who does a bit of research. It goes back to a Danish guy called Niels Bukh.

The pale winter sunlight shone from the high windows of the Cambridge University library onto a dark leather book cover. In the hall full of silent scholars, I opened it and leafed through picture after picture of men and women in familiar postures. Here was Warrior Pose; there was Downward Dog. On this page the standing balance Utthita Padangusthasana; on the next pages Headstand, Handstand, Supta Virasana, and more—everything you might expect to find in a manual of yoga asana. But this was no yoga book. It was a text describing an early 20th-century Danish system of dynamic exercise called Primitive Gymnastics. Standing in front of my yoga students that evening, I reflected on my discovery. What did it mean that many of the poses I was teaching were identical to those developed by a Scandinavian gymnastics teacher less than a century ago? This gymnast had not been to India and had never received any teaching in asana. And yet his system, with its five-count format, its abdominal "locks," and its dynamic jumps in and out of those oh-so-familiar postures, looked uncannily like the vinyasa yoga system I knew so well.
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Re: Northern vs Southern arts

Postby wayne hansen on Thu Apr 05, 2018 12:30 am

Iyenga invented most of what he taught
Don't put power into the form let it naturally arise from the form
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Re: Northern vs Southern arts

Postby Trick on Thu Apr 05, 2018 12:42 am

What about that "stomped" wear and tear floor and that wall painting with dark and fair skinned monks mixing it up in Kung fu'ish sparring....are these part of the original temple?.....If remember right I recall reading that Doshin-So(founder of Japanese Shorinji Kempo) witnessed those wall paintings(early30's maybe?)
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Re: Northern vs Southern arts

Postby Trick on Thu Apr 05, 2018 12:55 am

GrahamB wrote:
zrm wrote:
GrahamB wrote:For example, what we call "Yoga" in Europe and America was actually 1920s European gymnastics exported to India, washed through an Indian cultural filter and sent back to us. I'm pretty sure it's fake in that sense, but it seems to fulfill a need.


Huh. So you're inferring that what Iyengar teaching in the 1930s was partly of European origin?



Or was this just a passing reference to some of the modern crap that is taught today?



It's actually quite easy to find this material - just do a google search for "gymnastics yoga origin".

The first article you'll find is this one:

https://www.yogajournal.com/yoga-101/yo ... ater-truth

"The Ancient & Modern Roots of Yoga
One scholar's quest to trace his practice back to its source ultimately gives him a glimpse of yoga's greater truth."

I think it's pretty common knowledge to anyone who does a bit of research. It goes back to a Danish guy called Niels Bukh.

The pale winter sunlight shone from the high windows of the Cambridge University library onto a dark leather book cover. In the hall full of silent scholars, I opened it and leafed through picture after picture of men and women in familiar postures. Here was Warrior Pose; there was Downward Dog. On this page the standing balance Utthita Padangusthasana; on the next pages Headstand, Handstand, Supta Virasana, and more—everything you might expect to find in a manual of yoga asana. But this was no yoga book. It was a text describing an early 20th-century Danish system of dynamic exercise called Primitive Gymnastics. Standing in front of my yoga students that evening, I reflected on my discovery. What did it mean that many of the poses I was teaching were identical to those developed by a Scandinavian gymnastics teacher less than a century ago? This gymnast had not been to India and had never received any teaching in asana. And yet his system, with its five-count format, its abdominal "locks," and its dynamic jumps in and out of those oh-so-familiar postures, looked uncannily like the vinyasa yoga system I knew so well.

The tradition/inspiration goes further back to the Swedish Ling-Gymnastic and further back to "grandfather of gymnastics" Gutsmuths - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johann_Ch ... _GutsMuths
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