Ready and Steady

Never trust a martial art that has no ready position for fighting. The ready position prepares your offense and defense for the engagement to come. Mine, as you can see from the previous article, is a centerline-based closed guard. That means my sword and backup hand are between me and my opponent. Furthermore, my blade lives in the space directly between me and my opponent, meaning I claim the shortest distance between us as mine, and they have to fight their way past that to get to me. My blade then also has the shortest distance to travel to hit them, minimizing the time they have to respond to my attack.

If you don't have a good ready position, you may not have a reliable tactical platform from which to mount offense and defense. Your weapon may be too far away or out of position, reducing the effectiveness of your offense and defense. If you're really good or really fast, you might be able to get away with this, but why take the risk? When I'm teaching martial arts, I often use all kinds of unorthodox guards to encourage my students to think through the situation. What is the gambit I'm trying to make? What are the tradeoffs of what I'm doing in terms of exposed targets, opportunities to strike, mobility, and blocking ability. Subtle differences in the turn of the hands, the placement of elbows, whether their weight is on the balls of their feet or flat also affect the possibilites that can extend from a fighter's ready position.

Speaking of feet, I've chosen what is effectively a fencing stance for my ready position. If you don't know fencing, imagine it like a Bow stance where your weight distribution is 50-50 and your foot spacing is roughly shoulder width. It's also comparable to the stance you might use during Push Hands practice. The reason I like this stance is because it's very mobile and has a narrower base than a full Bow or Horse stance. In an art where a cut to the knee, shin or ankle is not only possible but expected if your opponent is trying to disable you, not sticking your leg out there in a wide stance seems like a good idea.

But There are 13 Cuts...

Some of you may be confused why there are only eight deadly techniques in the Yang 13 Sword form. A brief amount of research will show you numerous lists that show that Yang sword is built on 13 fundamental cuts. Here's the thing: traditionalists have been very literal in their importation of the Chinese martial arts to the New World. While the literal translation of the names is 13 cuts, as we would understand it in English, these are not actually 13 ways to hurt your opponent. Of these, roughly four are what westerners would call blocks or parries. Of the remaining nine, one is a follow-on technique, much like a wind or transfer in western swordsmanship would follow a parry. That leaves eight actual attacks.

1. Dian
2. Chi
3. Pi
4. Chou
5. Ge
6. Ji
7. Jie
8. Jiao
9. Dai (parry)
10. Ti (parry)
11. Beng (parry)
12. Ya (parry)
13. Xi (follow-on technique)

I call the moves techniques instead of cuts because the word technique is a little more flexible for the way I intend to use it when I break down the moves that I learn. I hope this keeps things clear!

Hadley: The Eight Deadly Techniques

At the end of the day of training in Hadley, they opened the floor to free sparring. Having travelled all the way in pursuit of martial knowledge, how could I pass up the chance to cross steel (or wooden wasters in this case) with other swordsmanship enthusiasts?

 

I won. Well, we weren't actually fighting to win anything, but I was decisively better than my opponents, scoring two to three times for every hit I took. I found that I was much more mobile, that I was faster, and when I chose to be, much, much more aggressive. Part of my advantage could be attributed to years of Wing Chun, where you had to be aggressive to close the distance with opponents who will generally have longer reach, and part is probably thanks to existing fencing experience where the rules favor the aggressor.

 

Having the hitting advantage really opened my eyes to a problem Saturday: not all hits are equal. In fencing they are, but with Tai Chi sword my assumption is that we should be fighting from the perspective of life and death to truly appreciate the art. A slash across the bicep is not the same as one on the inside of the wrist. One will impair you, the other will disable you, and both are pretty easy to deliver to an opponent if you're merely fast enough.

 

I think our future study of Tai Chi sword will have to be accompanied by a gruesome study of deadly cuts and tactics. Choice ligaments, organs and gambits to create opportunities to hit those high-value targets will have to be worked into our analysis of the sword techniques of the gim. Instead of eight ways to touch your opponent as you might frame the fight in sport terms, we must think of eight deadly techniques of warfare and survival...

Back from Hadley

This weekend's trip to Hadley was as much of a success as last week's ambitious attempt to learn the whole Yang form in a day was a failure. It turns out even that attempting to learn the whole Yang form last weekend was invaluable, since it allowed us to have a common language with all of the Tai Chi people in Hadley when discussing moves. We practiced a group of fundamental moves really hard with many different partners, we got to ask a lot of questions that affirmed that we were on solid ground in our development, and at the end I got to duel with a couple of the students who study with Scott Rodell around Washington.

I have a particular guard that I use when fighting with gim. It is my base position, from which I extend all of my moves and to which I return. I keep my non-sword hand in what is called the "sword fingers" or "sword talisman" shape and keep my fingers close to or touching my wrist. I use this guard for four reasons.

1. It is a great tool for maintaining structure--by always returning to this guard, I am pretty much guaranteed that my non-sword hand isn't flopping around in some strange place.
   
2. In its position in front of my body, on center and just behind my sword hand, it is perfectly placed to go into action should I need it for a combined action. For example, I could parry an attack then grab or check the opponent's sword hand as I continue in with a counterattack, preventing the opponent from parrying with their sword.
   
3. If I were still holding my scabbard in my lower hand, it would be well placed to use as a parrying device along my forearm much like a tonfa.
   
4. If my sword hand gets tired during a fight, I can put my extended fingers on the pommel of my sword to increase my point control.

The value of this guard became apparent as I was duelling at the end of the day because I could see the other students register my guard and mimic it as they were fighting me. It was satisfying validation for a self-taught fencer!

Off to Hadley

I am becoming more convinced that the scabbard should be a parrying device in Tai Chi sword. While practicing Sparrow Skims the Water, it occured to me that a low and wide attack like that would expose you to getting stabbed in the face. The sword hand would certainly not protect you well from that, but if you were still holding your scabbard, you could clear your way and cover yourself as you made your upward cut!

...

Tomorrow we get up at 6AM to drive to Hadley, MA for a seminar in Tai Chi Sword. My group figured that if a master was teaching something nearby, especially one of the authors we are studying from, we should go check it out. Scott Rodell is a long-time Tai Chi practitioner and researcher of applied Tai Chi sword techniques. He's pretty much the only person as far as we can tell who is known for practicing fighting Tai Chi sword.

My main concern for Hadley is that we will be brainwashed. In martial arts, there's a tendency to treat martial dogma like religious commandments. Any statement handed down from the Pope/master must be taken as the word of God and obeyed without question. I hope we will have the wisdom to learn from the seminar and the conviction in our own ideas to stick with our interpretations where appropriate.

Upgrade your punch now... new model available

Last night we celebrated the solstice with a cookout. City folk like us often lose touch with the pleasures of the outdoors and the slow pace of cooking food with fire instead of electromagnetic radiation. After the steak tips, after the cold drinks, after the ice cream sandwiches and gentle conversation, Leland told me an interesting story. The Native Americans did not know how to punch until they met the Europeans. They knew how to hit, but in fights they struck with their open hands. This story reminds us that fighting is a kind of technology. There are certain elements that are common around the world because they are the commodities of fighting, but there are some things that are peculiar to certain cultures or certain practitioners that make their art something more.

The story of the Indian punch reminds us that if there’s a move I learn in the form that doesn’t make sense, it might not be because the sources are doing it wrong, but because it’s just a bad move, or because the true application of the move is too cryptic for my humble skill to comprehend.

I’m lucky I’m just trying to learn how to fight with the Tai Chi sword. If I was trying to learn how to historically recreate the fighting techniques of the ancients, I would have a lot harder time because I’d have to verify the historical possibilities. Since I’m not though, if I want to say “Cat Pounces on Rat” should be done like a Fleche because it seems best that way, I can, and hopefully we will benefit from the idea even if it’s not historical.

The Matrix of Swordsmanship

When I was a kid, and because I'm such a nerd, I loved the Transformers. In particular I loved the Transformers Movie, which I proudly owned on VHS and audio casette, and now on DVD and CD. In the movie they had this device called the Matrix of Leadership--the sum of all wisdom from all Autobot leaders who had ever carried it. If someone was picked to be the new Autobot leader, he was given the Matrix and it made him wise and buff.

Martial arts forms have a little of that in them. The form is a physical collection of fighting ideas, much like a living, moving book. Some forms stay fixed over time, with students rigidly trying to preserve the old ways, and some forms evolve over time as each new master revises the set of moves. Some however slowly sink into decrepitude, losing their history, focus, and meaning with each generation. I suspect that much of the fighting lore of the Yang sword forms has been lost through its years of being used as a strictly meditative art.

John and I saw this amazing thing when we were learning the form Sunday. There's this move that happens three times in the form. It's first instance is called something like "Cat Pounces on Rat." It's this kick, step, hop and stab bit. It's pretty dainty looking. Now, John and I know western fencing, and as we looked at the series of steps, it occured to us that the footwork pattern matched a fencing move called the Fleche. If you know the Fleche, then you know that it is possibly the most aggressive move in fencing. It can be rediculously fast, and covers a truly upsetting amount of ground from the point of view of the defender.

Imagine: you set in your en garde, blade at the ready, making your plan. Your opponent is well into the grande distance, too far away to hit you even with a advance and a lunge. you prepare to advance, and suddenly your opponent is in the air, shooting at you like an arrow, crossing 6... 8... no 10 feet in an instant to strike you!

Link it back to "Cat Pounces on Rat," and you have the makings of a deadly technique...

But wait, I was talking about the Transformers. Thing is, you can't practice the fleche slow. It's got to be done fast. Yet the Yang form isn't done fast. If you were to break the move down and do it slow, it might, might look like you're prancing. If a fleche-like attack was the original intent of this move, was it forgotten over time? Only by cross-referencing the form with the same form done by other masters and techniques from totally different systems can we reassemble a fully-functioning combat form from what may have become a fuzzy memory of a fighting past. (Dedicated to Wiley)

'Til All Are One!

Like a new and mysterious toy

What's great about learning a martial art without an instructor is guessing what each move might be used for, what the original intent of the creator was, and what the subtle mechanics are that will make what on the surface looks like an insane or impractical move work like magic.

Take boxing for example. In boxing there's a move called a slip. When your opponent throws a punch at your face, don't block or back away, but duck into it. Crazy, right? Why would you like to move your perfectly serviceable face at something very clearly intended to dent it? The magic is, if you are fast enough, astute enough, and gutsy enough, you can use a slip to dodge while closing distance. Their attack slips harmlessly past your ear and before they know it you're denting them. I did it to this big bruiser friend of mine who laughs to this day about the fight where he repeatedly rammed his face onto the front of my punch.

With Tai Chi sword, we're still very far from finding that magic, but as we were going through the form on Sunday, we couldn't help but stop here and there to appreciate some of the possibilities of what we were trying to understand. Take John doing "Little Dipper" here. What might at first pass seem like a showoff pose appears to burst with possibilities after you've done it a few times. Is it a a parry? Is it a cut upwards? Is it a bind? What can you do with your hand there? Maybe you can clear the opponent's sword and give them a good poke in the eye, or maybe you can use that other hand to control the opponent's sword if you've got on a glove or are still holding your scabbard. Delicious, isn't it?

One Small Step for Swordsman...

Well, that was a failure! John and I got together to try to cram the whole Yang Sword form into our brains in one day. First, it was 95 degrees out, and of course I had the poor forsight to schedule it on Fathers Day. In the way I suppose Chinese might forget or overlook Yom Kippur, I tend to forget about Father's Day since my dad passed away when I was young. These days, Father's day is a fuzzy space in my schedule where the family gathers for dinner to honor parents and grandparents in a quasi-confucian style.

I used to have this theory that Confucianism was part of the reason Chinese don't organize very well on large scales. In my limited understanding of the philosophy, I reasoned that there was such an emphasis on honor, respect, and obedience to the family and elders that anyone outside of the "clan" was fair game for cheating and stealing. It was a convenience way to explain the politics and corruption in Chinatown. These days, I'm a little more inclined to believe that clannish thinking if more of a human trait than just a Chinese one.

We spent three hours to learn the first quarter of the 54-stance Yang form today. We started by stepping through the whole form three times, following the moves on our source video as best we could to get the form into our heads in the most general sense, and then we began stepping though the moves stance by stance. We moved briskly from "Unite with Sword" to "Big Dipper," stopping along the way to see the "Swallow Skimming the Water" and the "Wasp Entering the Hive." We were dazzled by the "Phoenix Spreading Its Right Wing," and came to rest with the "Little Dipper."

Suprizingly, it wasn't very hard. The names of all the stances and our abuldant source material made the whole process mostly staightforward. It just took so long to cross-reference each move with the video and sometimes our notes that we found ourselves out of time before we knew it! Thre great thing is we learned so much that we're definitely going to give it a few more goes. It was fun!

Delight Your Enemies, then Slay Them

One of the interesting things about Asian martial arts is the the tendency to give artistic names to moves. Is "Great Star of the Big Dipper" a cryptic clue to to the shape and kinesthetics of the move or is it just the product of a really, really bored master who had nothing else to do between classes? For example, Yip Man pared the Wing Chun wooden man practice set from something like 143 moves down to 108. Was that really necessary? Were there really 35 superfluous moves in the set? And is it just a coincidence that 108 is an auspicious and lucky number in China? Yip Man was just hanging out one day and said to himself "my students will be a lot luckier if they practice 108 moves each day." The theorum would therefore be lucky=standing at end of fight.

Let's give the masters some credit though. Let's approach the techniques as if their names are more than just fancy. I've seen pictures from different masters performing this move, and it seems like Big Dipper might refer to the shape of the stance. It's this thing where you're on one leg with sword above your head and free hand out in front of you. What might the Great Star part refer to then? If it refers to Polaris, the north star, then as the cup of the Big Dipper circles from the handle around the bowl, if you follow the line up and past the top of the cup, it points at the North Start. Does that mean your sword should be arced high and the tip should point at somewhere on your opponent? It could imply that this stance is a setup for Zha (downward pointing) a high stabbing attack from Tai Chi.

Only practice may tell...

Muscle Memory and Martial Arts

A friend asked if trying to learn the Yang form in one day undercut the value of muscle memory in martial arts. The idea of course is that muscle memory helps you execute the moves with greater speed, power and precision than if you were untrained in the art.

Yes. Muscle memory is great, but in my opinion, only if you've understood the applications of the moves you're practicing. Without knowing the goal of a punch, how can one make an "informed" movement? It'd be like giving an alien a hammer and asking them to learn how to use it but never informing them what the hammer is used for... Is it art? Is it a weapon? Is it a shifter for a car transmission?

What complicates things even more is that my interpretations of some of the moves I've been studying in books and videos are already diverging from the prescribed uses from the masters. What does this mean? Are the masters wrong? Am I just totally ignorant at this point, or will my hypothesis hold true that few people really know what they're practicing when they practice their Tai Chi Sword forms?

I'm no genius, but I am skeptical...

The Yang 13 Sword Form

In two weeks I'm going to attend a seminar by Scott Rodell, a Tai Chi teacher who teaches practical Tai Chi Sword. To prepare, I've decided to learn the whole form this weekend so I have some context to learn from during the seminar.

Last night I popped in a DVD of the Yang form I have and plan to watch the whole form every morning and evening to get a feel for it before the weekend when I try to physicaly learn it.

Getting my head around the Yang form is tough. It's really, really long. Depending on how you count it, it might be around 60 stances, but each of those stances might have two or three steps in them. Comparatively, the Mantis form I know is about 35 moves, and the Wing Chun wooden man form I know is like 150. It took a year and a half of classes to learn the whole wooden man form, and now I'm going to try to learn the whole Yang sword form in one day.

Ack.

100 Days of Swordsmanship Starts Here

Welcome to 100 Days of Swordsmanship, a blog about learning how to fight with the Chinese straight sword, or Gim (Jian if you're a Mandarin speaker). The gim is a classical weapon seen in many kung fu movies. Chow Yun Fat wields one called the Green Destiny in Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon, Jet Li has a cool one with a hole in it in Hero, and Zhang Ziyi has one in House of Flying Daggers. It's a one-handed, double-edged sword with a small, stylized guard and sometimes a silk tassle hanging from the end of the pommel. Traditionally the tassle was silk and the blade was layered steel, but today we see more nylon and floppy spring steel because those are cheaper and look cooler when you're practicing for tournaments.

I have recently begun self-directed study of the gim, having been a kung fu enthusiast for many years and having recently learned western fencing. What I began to suspect in my research is that while there are perhaps millions of people who practice using the gim as part of their Tai Chi, I'm not sure there are very many people who actually know how they might fight with it if say, nuclear war or global warming made it necessary to slay our way to the supermarket or protect our dwindling supplies of Chef Boy Ardee from raiders.

So, as my contribution to the martial arts community and possibly all humanity in the case of nuclear war, I'm going to attempt to build a working knowledge of how to fight with the gim. I will attempt, with the aid of friends and masters willing to attach themselves to what very well may be a hair-brained scheme enough rational, reasonable, and practical content to publish a... something by the end of the summer. Right now it's just a bit before the beginning of summer, so my project is going to be called (as you have already read) 100 Days of Swordsmanship.

Stay tuned! Updated, uh, frequently I hope.