Quigga wrote:No thanks bud, my own practice is keeping me busy enough. Appreciate the effort tho
D_Glenn wrote:
I’m not really following what you’re saying?
To Bao Fali you must use the Bolangjin or Fanlangjin movement, aka the Zhedie movement. The Bolangjin movement is moving the lumbar from its normal position to rounded with the tailbone tucked. Fanlangjin is moving the lumbar from tailbone tucked back to its normal position. You can do consecutive strikes going back and forth with the two
wayne hansen wrote:
The Folding I mentioned is not just using elbow stroke
It is a whole strategy used with high level body awareness
I am not talking about the tailbone body bow thing
I learnt dragons back in Ba kua that is a whole other animal
D_Glenn wrote:Also though, it’s important to actually have the ability to Fali (issue power), in order to ‘Contain’ it.
BruceP wrote:Yeah, also that one has a 'developed and connected' dantien.
twocircles13 wrote:This is completely off-topic. I’m only including it here because I don’t think it will swim as a topic on its own. I thought Graham would find it interesting. Others might too.GrahamB wrote:That's interesting about Chinese freemasonry - I remember finding a website once about Chinese Freemasonry and it went back a lot further in time than the established 1940s founding - it came in along the silk road. Annoyingly I can't find that now. Esoteric secret societies were very prevalent around the time all these people like Chen Fake lived. It would be almost weird if people like Yang LuChan and Dong Haichuan weren't in one. But we wouldn't know because they were.... secret
Probably 80% of what I know about Chinese secret societies comes from a single source, The Hung Society: Or the Society of Heaven and Earth, 1925. I had access to a copy decades ago through a university library. I don’t remember the printing year, but the book was quite old. I periodically look to see if there is a copy available online. The last time I did it was nearly $200.
However, I just searched and someone has republished it. It’s on Amazon for $54.95 in paperback. This one says it is a new release. There are others too that are facsimile reprints. This one may be too. Here’s the link.
https://www.amazon.com/Hung-Society-Hea ... 1494122820
The focus of this book is the Hung Society preparing for the Boxer Rebellion. It gives some behind the scenes information. The Hung Society did not die after the Boxer Rebellion. The channels it had formed to raise funds for the rebellion morphed into an organized crime syndicate.
One of the premises of the book was that these secret organizations were not cultural cross-contamination from modern European Freemasonry. They had ancient roots. IIRC, the authors had an appendix showing independent Freemason-like rituals around the world pointing ancient sources.
My interest in the book was piqued when I read that initiates had to be "trained in the martial arts” to qualify. There may have been an explanation of how the Society recruited through martial schools, families, and sympathetic instructors. Or this explanation may have come from a different source, and I have just mentally linked them.
The ritual theater connection comes as the initiation rite is described. I would call this ritual theater with the initiates acting a part in the story. We know, of course, that Opera (ritual theater) groups in Hong Kong had ties to both martial art schools and the triads.GrahamB wrote:Esoteric secret societies were very prevalent around the time all these people like Chen Fake lived. It would be almost weird if people like Yang LuChan and Dong Haichuan weren't in one. But we wouldn't know because they were.... secret
Dong Haichuan lived before this time, but secret societies of various kinds were ubiquitous for hundreds if not thousands of years in China.
The Chen Family's place in the Boxer Rebellion is unclear. There may have been divisions within the family or rogue members going one way or the other. The Chen Family History records no members participating in the Boxer Rebellion.
Yuan Shikai became Governor of Shandong Province in late 1899, and by 1900, he had hired Chen Yanxi, Chen Fake’s father, as head of his household security and as a tutor of Chen Family martial arts to his oldest son, Yuan Keding, who was 22 year old, the oldest of 32 children. This started the famous "more than three year” period where Yanxi was absent and could not teach Fa-ke as he started to learn taijiquan.
As organizer and commander of the New Army, Yuan has been called the Father of the Modern Chinese Army. He was part of a modernization movement both before and after the Boxer Rebellion. He supported the conversion of temples, where ritual theater was performed, into modern-style schools. Whereas, the Boxers represented a return to the rituals and traditions of the past.
During the Rebellion, Yuan disregarded a declaration of war by the Empress Dowager against the foreign armies and influenced other governors to do the same. He quelled the Boxers in Shandong by massacring tens of thousands of them, so foreign armies had no excuse to invade Shandong or the other provinces who had taken similar action. Yuan later played other pivotal roles in Chinese history. You might call him pro-China and pro-modernization but not pro-Qing Dynasty nor pro-tradition.
The Boxer Rebellion officially ended in September 1901. Chen Yanxi returned home around 1903 as Yuan’s activities took him to Beijing more often. There is no evidence one way or another of Chen Yanxi’s sympathies. However, as the Qing Dynasty ended and the Republic was established, the Chen Family seemed quick to embrace modern practices and values.
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