Jianghu :: 2.0

Well, the new semester has started, and I’ve been busy, busy, busy. It’s nice to be working again, after the long break, to be honest.

I was really impressed by an article in the Times, Be prepared - take evening classes in facing ruin. It starts off by discussing a recent murder-suicide case in the UK, but gets more philosophical. I’ve certainly faced a few ups and downs over the years, and I have to agree with the writer’s conclusions. In fact, they’re very compatible with Buddhist philosophy; success and misfortune are all transient. Remain equanimous either way; they are not you.

I’ve had a few swings of fortune even over the last week or so - reminders that great opportunities can appear unlooked-for, and that disaster can strike from nowhere. The disaster was narrowly averted; the opportunities are being explored… life goes on.

Most topical for this blog: I’ve come to a complete stop recently when it comes to martial arts. As I’ve often said, I’ve considered the last few years to be research, looking to find the right styles and the right teacher. About halfway through the summer break, I had finally decided that I’d found them. So, with the research over, it was time to get started… And at that point, I had a massive attack of nerves over the task ahead, and a complete failure of belief in my ability to ever progress. Gah! Well, after a couple of weeks, I’m kind of back on track, ready to get started, step by step.

I’ll be recommencing bagua lessons with Master Sun Ru Xian next weekend; I need a bit of time to review first. I don’t think I’ll be re-starting the bagua pan guan bi with Mi Lao Shi, and Master Sun Zhijun; fun though it is, if I’m not going to train all-round with them, I think I’d better concentrate on studying bagua with just one teacher, Sun Ru Xian.

I do also want to get into the yiquan. I knew that the lineage holder, Master Yao Chengrong has his school near my new apartment, and last week I went to see where it was. It was a wet, rainy evening, and the map on the website was only partially helpful. I spent quite a long time wandering around various hutongs, which was pretty interesting in itself. Lots of the siheuyuan near the school are much larger and grander than those near my apartment, with lots of moon gates leading to the street. Perhaps they used to belong to a higher social class, or - I suspect - they were military buildings. The west of Beijing, where I now live, was traditionally the base for the army, whereas the east was for the civil administration; even to this day, the east is a much more fashionable place to live!

Eventually, I found the school, tucked away inside a courtyard. There wasn’t any activity, but that suited me; I hadn’t gone to talk to anybody, just to get my bearings, and establish how close it really was - about 10 minutes’ walk at most, it turned out. Once I’ve got my classes settled down, ie in a couple of weeks most likely, I’ll get in touch and see if I can join a class; looking at the schedule on the website, I would perhaps want to do one evening class and Saturday afternoon, but we’ll see.

So, there we are; I’m gradually coming back up to speed. I caught up with Dragoncache last night; he’s training really hard, as always, with Master Sun Zhijun, and really putting me to shame with his dedication. Oh, I didn’t mention before that Master Sun Zhijun recently got married, to his third wife, I think (the first two having passed away).

Well, this is the Autumn Festival, so I’m going to eat some mooncakes. Have a good weekend, if you’re celebrating the festival (or even if you’re not!).

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!

A bad patch only in terms of my martial arts practice, I hasten to add; things generally are OK.

We all have to find the balance somewhere between job, career, etc on the one hand, and martial arts, meditation, etc on the other. In Singapore, the balance for me was firmly on the right hand side of the equation. Since my move to Beijing, it’s swung well over to the other side.

Hopefully, a bit more of a balanced situation is in site, as the future becomes a bit clearer. It was my intention to return to Singapore after my contract ends in July, but I’ve changed my mind. Much as I like Singapore, it makes absolutely no sense career-wise to go back there; there’s just no opportunity there, whereas in Beijing there’s much, much more happening. I’m also pretty happy with the teachers I have here as well, both in martial arts and in Zen meditation.

In my job, this semester has been crazy; I didn’t have any opportunity to prepare before I arrived, and went straight into teaching, so I’ve constantly been playing catch-up. The university want me to stay on, and I like the job, so I think I’ll be here for at least another year…. I’ll be on summer break between mid-July and early September, so I’ll have time to take the Yiquan course, AND to do all my preparation for the next semester… so I’ll have more time for daily practice once I start teaching again.

Speaking of Yiquan, Hannah’s invited me to her class on Thursday, so I’ll meet her teacher.

Oh, you may remember that a few weeks ago I met a young martial arts teacher who’s based at Beijing Language and Culture University; he’s just emailed me to let know that he’s put some videos online. Here’s one; there’s more on YouTube:

I’ve just come back from a short trip to Pingyao in Shanxi province. Pingyao used to be a centre of private banking in Qing-era China, and was a very wealthy place. However, as the country developed, the growth of a national postal system and national-scale banks rendered Pingyao’s pre-industrial system irrelevant. The city declined into poverty; in fact, it became so poor that the inhabitants could not afford any of the products of the 20th century, or to do anything than patch up their buildings and just get by. As a result, it’s hardly changed since the early 20th century, and its Ming- and Qing-style architecture is almost entirely untouched.

The poverty of the last century is evident, with many derelict and semi-collapsed buildings. However, its UNESCO status is gradually bringing tourism, along with the money - and social problems - that accompany it. We stayed in a hostel close to the old government building, which was OK, but not necessarily somewhere I would recommend or want to stay again. We took an overnight train from Beijing, which was noisy and uncomfortable. There weren’t any available tickets for the return trip, though, so we ended up hiring a car and driver to take us to the provincial capital, Taiyuan, from where we caught a coach back to Beijing. The less said about that trip, the better!

Don’t think I didn’t enjoy it, though! It was an adventure, with good company. As for Pingyao, I love it. In the early morning, it’s beautiful; the streets are empty except for locals going about their business, and it looks exactly as it must have done in centuries gone by; it’s surely the closest I will ever get to time travel

From about 8am, the fleets of coaches started arriving, and the main streets were crowded with throngs of tourists, almost all of them Chinese. There were a couple of local performers dressed up in Republic-era clothes (a mixture of traditional Chinese and western), who specialised in posing as rickshaw men, with tourists sitting in the rickshaw dressed in period costume. It was interesting to see Chinese tourists flocking to have their photo taken, where Westerners would surely be too afflicted by post-colonial guilt!

After about 5pm,the crowds melted away, and the streets became wonderfully quiet again. Pingyao in the summer evening is almost perfect. In the mellow evening air, you’re free to wonder around streets that are lively but not crowded. The only illuminations are from red lanterns hanging on the buildings, and from the shopfronts and restuarants. The old gate towers are also gently illuminated and visible from almost everywhere. I would love to go back just to spend a few more evenings there.

The old walls are still complete (after a little restoration), and we walked around one quarter of their length. It didn’t take long - Pingyao is very small! For the first time, I realised how intimate these old cities were; I wonder what it was like to live your life within a walled city…
On our last morning, we looked at our city map and decided to visit two temples: the Temple of Confucius, and the Dragon Temple. The Confucius Temple was very, very noisy and crowded when we went in, but most of the crowds didn’t go beyond the first couple of courtyards; as we went deeper in, there were more and more gardens and trees, and it became more tranquil. There always seemed to be a barely visible door or gate which, when investigated, led to another hidden courtyard and garden. There were lots of sparrows in the gardens; that reminds me, another lovely feature of Pingyao is the number of swifts (swallows? what’s the difference? Don’t ask me…) which sweep through the streets, darting around just above the heads of the pedestrians. The Dragon Temple, just outside the city walls, was a whole other story. After leaving the Confucius temple, we hired a tuk-tuk to take us there; the driver was astonished - “Why? There’s nothing there?”. He was right - and wrong. The temple was a gutted ruin, with what must have been the main altar open to the wind, the windows empty and broken, and a wholly desolate atmosphere pervading the whole complex. Tucked away in the back of the compound, a few temple buildings had been converted into housing and, though we didn’t linger, the poverty was clear. According to a sign on the outside wall, the compound had once housed an elementary school, but there’s absolutely no sign of that now; the only presence there is decay and collapse. We saw only one sign of life: an aged man sitting in the courtyard as if he’d been in the same spot for the ages; he barely acknowledged our presence, and certainly showed no surprise at the sudden appearance of this noisy group of Westerners. As we left, though, he came after us and locked the door behind him. It was almost as if he’d been waiting for us. I wonder how long he’d been there, and what tales he could tell about this temple’s past. Here, for the first time, I felt the damage and destruction wrought on traditional Chinese beliefs.

Pingyao used to be a centre of banking; banking means money, and money needs protection. There are a couple of museums in the premises of old-style security companies. These were family businesses just like the one Michelle Yeoh ran in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. There’s also a martial arts museum. In the Chinese way of doing things, the English signs in these museums weren’t particularly helpful, but it seems clear from what I read that these companies were specialists in xingyiquan and baguazhang, which I found extremely interesting. I took a lot of pictures, which I’ll try to post here in the hope that someone can give me more information! I knew from Master Zhou, of course, that his own line of bagua descends from convoy guards, but it was fascinating to see it here, in the buildings where these companies’ own headquarters.

OK, plenty more to say, particularly about my fellow travellers, and the train of thought this trip and other recent encounters have started, but I’ll save it for another post.

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….