Yizong Bagua/Xingyi in Bellevue, WA

[.Q.]

My name is Philip and I have moved near Seattle, WA after studying Bagua and Xingyi under Luo De Xiu in Taiwan for 8+ years. I am now teaching a Sunday 10:30 AM class at the Evergreen Kung Fu club. For more information, please refer to my blog page: https://baguasf.wordpress.com/class-info/

[JessOBrien]

Good luck Philip, hope WA works out. Nice version of the Hou Tian Ba Gua Line 4.3 on your site. Looks like you've been doing good training.

I also want to read that Xing Yi translation you put up, thank for doing that.
Take care,
Jess O

[.Q.]

Thanks Jess. WA is pretty good so far. Job is actually sane compared to what I was doing. Scenery is beautiful and lots of fresh air. Food is ridiculously priced and often not very good.
What's odd is that 3 times people approached me when I practiced and out of those two of the times they knew it was Bagua. I think that's the total amount of times people recognized Bagua when I trained in Taiwan for all those years. Usually they just say tai chi.

[JessOBrien]

Awesome. Yeah, they know what they are talkin' about up north. Take care and keep posting.
J

[D_Glenn]

Thanks for translating part of that book "Faded Martial World", my teacher has that book memorized and recited it to us during a break, and just reading it again brought some memories back. Lot's of good, essential training sayings in that book. I can't find the thread now but I had brought up the "Bear-eagle combination form."] (熊鷹合形) awhile back, and in Xingyi it's the last thing trained, same as the Kun Trigram is the last thing to learn in Baguazhang, because in both martial arts it's where 'Fan Lang Jin' (reverse/ retreating wave power/ movement of the spine) is learned, and then you can go back through all the other animal xing you know and figure out how to do the moves with both 'bolang jin' and 'fanlang jin'.

Let us know when you translate some more of that book.

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[D_Glenn]

I found my posts, from last year:

There is a bird that the Chinese call the 熊鹰 Xiong Ying (Bear Eagle aka Hodgson's hawk-eagle?) - http://niaolei.org.cn/tag/%E7%86%8A%E9%B9%B0

There's also some youtube videos of it, but you have to make sure it's the traditional character for 'ying' - "熊鷹" when searching google.




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Thanks D_Glenn - that's a great high quality video of it - shame we didn't get to see it hunt and catch that animal. What is it? Looks pretty big... does the Chinese description say what it has caught?

It says it's a http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reeves%27s_muntjac and there's other videos that show people holding the adult birds and it's pretty big. There's some videos where they're training young ones for falconry and they're a decent size.

There was a recent Discovery channel show that caught footage of (what I want to say was this breed) where they hunt in the high mountains and charge down on mountain goats to try and knock them off and let gravity do the killing for them and then go down and eat on the ground.


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There is a bird that the Chinese call the 熊鹰 Xiong Ying (Bear Eagle aka Hodgson's hawk-eagle?) - http://niaolei.org.cn/tag/%E7%86%8A%E9%B9%B0

There's also some youtube videos of it, but you have to make sure it's the traditional character for 'ying' - "熊鷹" when searching google.

The combination of Eagly (Ying) and Bear (Xiong) also had to do with the sound of saying the two names together, namely Ying Xiong which sounds like "英雄" meaning "Hero".

I came across a couple articles on Xingyi animals and that is one of the reasons, but there's several different thoughts on it all and the reason that I thought the actual bird might be an influence is because it kills animals that are too big to fight with, so the hunch is that it snatches them up with it's claws, and arcs back up high using the momentum, then drops the animal, and the fall, hitting the ground breaks bones, ruptures organs, and in the Xingyi texts the eagle is Yang and rises, lifting upwards, and then overturn and the bear is Yin and drops the opponent letting them fall. So they're together because it's Yang and Yin combined.

(BTW those Muntjacs are also called Vampire Deer because they have really long canines that the males use to fight and bite with. - Saw that on "Oddities" TV show, fwiw)

***

So the Eagle is doing the 'fanlang jin' while the Bear part is the immediate 'bolang jin' to finish the attack, or maybe vice versa, but it's a single animal: the Hodgson's Hawk/ Eagle.


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[.Q.]

Thanks for the video on the bird. I kind of doubt "Bear-eagle combination form would be related to that specific bird though, since the name itself already imply that it's a combination of 2 forms. Don't remember if it's in the part I translated but in the book it talks about it combining the standing power of the bear w/ the diving/preying power of the eagle. That's a fantastic book that I would reread every once in a while. We don't go by the book as it's not our branch but it's neat to see the parallels. Too bad the 2nd book is nowhere near as good and went in a bad direction. Guess it can't be helped since the person is actually dead and it's just the writer trying to squeeze money out of whatever material that's left.

[D_Glenn]

Just saying Xingyi Quan, is a huge and broad generalization as there is so many lineages and practitioners. It's this book that helped me remember the context of where I'd also first heard about the Hawk. Xingyi is different from school to school. Using this hawk as the model/shape (xing) is the way that one school in Beijing is doing it, it's not Hebei style but a Shangxi style that had established itself in Beijing in the early 1900s (I think). It's a non-issue though as that school is probably never going to open up their teaching to the public, it's just something interesting, I thought. But there is possibly other Xingyi schools in other Chinese cities who have a similar model, as it's a Chinese Xingyi forum where I later found the video and mention of the hawk.
But most xingyi schools look at it as the Eagle and the Bear model, just combined into one. Both ways are correct because both ways are usable, and teachable to the next generation and you have over a 100 years now of difference/ divergence between schools.

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[.Q.]

That's interesting. Kind of curious how the Bear eagle behaves differently from common eagles for it to be distinguished by some branch.

[D_Glenn]

What I wrote above about the hawk is not quite accurate, as it's a cliff or mountainside hunter and charges/ rushes (chong), like a bear, then uses it's claws like push/ shove and slight grasp to try and knock it's prey off the side of the mountain, which can take numerous attempts as the prey they hunt is very nimble and sure-footed on the cliffs, but then eventually gets knocked off and then ideally falls to it's death, then the hawk has to go down and eat it on the ground, like in the video, because the prey is too heavy for it to lift. Very different from other hawks and eagles that prey on lighter creatures like rabbits and fish.

The larger, older hawks will also use a similar charge and puffing up of feathers to scare younger hawks away from their kills on the ground and then get a meal but without doing any of the hard work.

[.Q.]

I've read about a bird that did that but did not realize it was the bear-eagle. Thanks.

[zack]

I recently got to take some classes with Philip and I got a lot out of it. We covered a variety of different exercises, some throws, strikes and entries. I would recommend contacting him for a class if you are interested in Yizong Bagua/ Xingyi in the Bellevue area.