Tokyo Manga has a short, insightful interview with the ex-alcoholic, ex-paratrooper, youngest brother of the Dalai Lama. After what seems to have been an intense life, he’s found peace. However, he’s probably not on Steven Seagal’s Christmas card list.

I’m not sure if I’ve mentioned it before, but about a year ago someone asked why I study martial arts. It was someone I’d met through Facebook, someone I don’t know in real life, but who is herself involved in martial arts (Sunmudo, actually!).

I couldn’t answer. In fact, it left me incapable of continuing the conversation, and we’ve barely been in touch since.

“Why do you study martial arts?”.

Such a simple question! But whenever I tried to grasp the answer, it slipped away from me. It was there, but I couldn’t see it, only the shape of its absence. I’ve thought about it almost every day since, sensing how close it is. I couldn’t find the answer, though…

Ever since then, whenever someone’s asked, I’ve given the usual glib answers - but I’ve known that they’re not the real reason.

Why am I studying martial arts? I began to wonder, myself. This elusive question… It seemed to cause a mental paralysis. I could function perfectly well as long as I didn’t think about it. As soon as I did, though, my reasoning ability left me; there was a hole that I could never quite focus on…

A year….

Then today it hit me. It’s been my own personal koan. Aren’t there Zen monks who spend their lives contemplating one specific question, waiting for it to finally wear down their intellectual, rationalising mind, until they break through beyond into direct experience?

I’m studying martial arts because I want stillness and an empty mind. Clarity. A mind like a clear pool, where all the silt has settled.

Meditation does this. Regular sitting practice, in my own experience (never mind books, or what people say), has shown me this. After my first Vipassana retreat, I had a taste of it, and it lasted for almost nine months. It wore off. Right after that, I began my MBA, and that knocked my meditation practice into a cocked hat; I’ve never managed to get it back on track.

I’m working on fixing that. But even so… anyone can be calm when they’re on retreat. The hermit is untroubled… but in the city, how do we maintain stillness of mind? Of course, regular sitting practice develops mindfulness; meditators do get stronger, and can maintain their calm mind in daily life. What about when we’re faced with existential fear - like, for example, finding yourself broke and stranded in a foreign land? (Not that I’m in that situation, I hasten to add! It’s not impossible to imagine, though!)

The key to this breakthrough may have been in that visit to the Yiquan Academy. After the zhan zhuang, I was pushing hands with a bigger, stronger, opponent who was doing his best to push me backwards into a coatstand. The zhan zhuang, though, had left me calm, centred, able to observe and react impartially, without emotional engagement.

It only struck me later: that is what I’m looking for. That is why I’m studying martial arts, and the internal martial arts in particular.

The health benefits aren’t the reason, though they help.

The ability to defend myself isn’t the reason, though it will be great if I ever get that good.

I’m studying to try to reach that calm, to maintain that clear pool, even when someone is trying to knock me silly, or flatten me. When I’m faced with the really big fears. When there’s nowhere to go but through. Meditation in motion - just like it said on the tin. Baguazhang, taijiquan, and yiquan - they’re all getting me there. I just didn’t realise it till now.

Meditation training with extreme prejudice, perhaps.

Do you think I’m crazy yet? Or are you perhaps thinking, everyone knew this, what’s the big deal? Well… I could have repeated it to you before, because I’ve read it in books. Now, though, I’ve directly experienced it - and it went so deep it took me a while to realize what had happened.

Wow.

Now I really can’t wait to get started with the yiquan.

Phew, something’s going on, that’s for sure - I had vivid dreams last night that woke me up every hour or so, drenched in perspiration even though I had the aircon on low at 23C….What were those dreams? Of course I don’t remember them, but I DO remember that they seemed to me about my past lives… Not in the reincarnation sense, but the people I’ve been in this life - the country boy on a scholarship to a school where everyone else seemed more talented and cosmpolitan… the techie… the politician…. the consultant…

And now here I am lecturing in Beijing. Time to count my blessings, I guess, and to take stock of the path that’s led me here. I’ve been stressing out about this for a while, particularly since the trip to Pingyao. Two of my companions on that trip were fellow-students on my MBA; one now works for one of the biggest-name investment banks, the other for a major global advertising firm. I, on the other hand, went to work for a startup that was going to make me rich… if it hadn’t tanked instead. Unexpected market changes, no blame anywhere; it couldn’t be helped. So I’ve been lecturing… It’s certainly no way to recoup what I spent on the MBA, although it does offer opportunities. Looking at it conventionally, there’s no doubt that my star has fallen far, and sometimes that worries me.

And yet…. here I am in Beijing. I enjoy my job. It gives me daily opportunity to cultivate a compassionate outlook, to develop humility, and to seek to improve myself. It’s interesting. I’ve got the chance to train bagua with one of the big names in the field, Sun Zhijun, and to be honest I think I’ll be one of the last to have that opportunity. I’m developing what seems to be a more traditional relationship with my other bagua teacher, who’s also going to teach me Shanxi short staff and other styles… I’ve got a good Ch’an meditation teacher who speaks English, can put Ch’an into the context of traditional Chinese medicine and Daoist thought, and is well-connected with the monastic community here in China…I’ll soon have the opportunity to start training in Yiquan’s highly regarded methods… I may not be earning much money even in Beijing terms… but it’s enough to live simply and comfortably, while paying for my training…. I’m meeting interesting people…

I have feeling that if I can stay here for a couple of years, that’s all I need to make the breakthrough, to make significant progress on the questions of “Why am I here?”, “What is my true purpose in life?” and on starting to clear my karma… cultivating water-nature and wu-wei… After that - which coincidentally will be around the time I turn 40 - it will be time to start a new chapter, and right now only one option is looking like it will make sense… but a lot could happen before then.

So yeah, it’s a long way from when I was a cutting-edge geek and rising political player with a comfortable amount of cash in the bank - but I’m happier and more content than I’ve ever been. Lao Zi would approve, no doubt!

My association with the Kwan Yin Chan Lin Zen Centre in Singapore goes back to the summer 2006, when I first attended a Dharma talk. They belong to the Kwan Um Zen school founded by Zen Master Seung Sahn, who wrote some of the best books on Zen, and on Buddhism, that I’ve yet read (YMMV, of course). On that occasion, as I wrote, the Zen Master was accompanied by a Buddhist nun: a Polish woman with whom I had a brief but very interesting conversation after the talk.

I’m just made contact with her again via Facebook, and we’ve exchanged a few messages. She mentioned that the Kwan Um School have a meditation centre, Mu Sang Sa. It looks very peaceful. What’s interesting, for me, is that it happens to be in the South Korean city of Daejon. Daejon’s the only place I’ve been in Korea - I went there for my first job as a freelance internet consultant, and it was that trip which convinced me that I had to leave the UK and move to Asia, though it took a couple more trips and some exposure to Singapore to actually bring the move about. Guess I have some sort of Karmic connection with Daejon…

As it happens, I’m already contemplating a trip to Korea in September; depending on the prices, I’m thinking of attending the LIFT Asia Conference. If I were to go, I’d been thinking about combining it with a visit to the Golgulsa Temple to see some Sunmudo. Maybe a trip to a zen centre at Korea’s “Silicon Valley” might also be an option….

I had my second ch’an meditation class with Wei tonight. A chat about various things, including mountains near Xi’an that are popular with Buddhist and Daoist recluses, followed by a half-hour zuo ch’an session. Wah, I was tired; about twenty minutes in, I started nodding… but got woken up by the chime of a bell - Wei was observing carefully! He says I’m still putting too much effort into breathing, and my chest moves too much; I should breath more shallowly, and be perfectly still. I do not find this easy to achieve. He’s dead right, though, about not trying to breathe; once I stopped worrying about breathing from the dantien, the block that’s kept my breath at my chest gradually went away, and I found the lower abdomen, especially at the back, was starting to expand perfectly naturally. I could of course just meditate on my own - except that I probably wouldn’t, and it’s good to get feedback, and it really is important to have some support from the sangha (in the broader sense, he’s not a monk!). This afternoon, though, I went to the Lotus Centre supermarket at Wudaokou and bought some cushions to sit on so that I can at least try to meditate more at home…

As with all of my teachers in China, we have some communications problems, but this is of course my failing; more effort needed to improve my Mandarin…

Walking home, I came back through the university gardens. Even since last weekend, the leaves are all fully out, many more flowers are in bloom, and the moon is almost full; as the Irish might say, it’s a grand evening, to be sure.

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