Kumar Frantzis Talks About Pa Kua Chang for Fighting and Meditation

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    Pa Kua Chang Newsletter – Vol. 1, No. 6 Sept/Oct 1991

    Kumar Frantzis Talks About Pa Kua Chang for Fighting and Meditation

    The martial arts background of Kumar Frantzis has been well documented over the years. Those readers who are interested in his background can refer to T’ai Chi from Wayfarer Publications (October 86, December 86, and February 87 issues) Inside Kung Fu (August 90), and Internal Arts Magazine (Spring 91). Frantzis has studied the martial arts in the United States, Japan, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Mainland China for 30 years. He is fluent in Japanese and Chinese and has a broad range of experience in martial arts and meditation practice. His primary instructor in Pa Kua Chang was Liu Hung-Chieh of Beijing. However, he also studied the art for 5 years with Wang Shu-Chin and Hung I-Hsiang in Taiwan. This interview was conducted at the United States National Chinese Martial Arts Competition in Houston, Texas in September 1990.

    Could you talk a little bit about Pa Kua as a fighting art?

    There are hundreds of martial arts and a million ways to rip a human being apart. If you really want to get down to what are the more effective martial arts, then the only conclusive test is all-out combat, with maiming and killing allowed. Forget about sport point tournaments. The Pa Kua schools became very well known, just like the T’ai Chi schools, through success in combat. The T’ai Chi school originally achieved notoriety because Yang Lu-Ch’an was the teacher of the Emperor’s guards. In Beijing that was the most coveted martial arts position. In order to get that position you had to be able to fight and win. You were always on call and the rules were “touch, maim, or kill.” Pa Kua became really famous inside the martial arts community in Beijing because during the Boxer Rebellion the Empress Dowager fled Beijing with a single bodyguard, Yin Fu. The bodyguard who protected the Empress was universally considered the best professional martial artist around. That added a lot of credence to Pa Kua, in addition to the fact that Pa Kua practitioners had just defeated almost all the other martial artists in Beijing during their rabble rousing stage. The most important thing in martial arts is not what style you study (the brand name), but what level of fighting skill the individual has. A world-class racing driver in a so-so car will beat a poor driver in the world’s best car. Only when two drivers are of equal skill will the technology of the car be the determining factor in who wins the race.

    Each martial arts school has its special Kung Fu or “skill technology.” The lineage of Tung Hai-Ch’uan became famous for its special Kung Fu techniques. All students could learn the movements, but only a few learned Kung Fu techniques which had Pa Kua’s unique flavor and power. This Kung Fu is genuinely internal and is a subject of doing, not talking. Many people today, even “famous teachers” in China and the U.S., cannot apply traditional Pa Kua techniques to unrehearsed fighting. Either they perform “movement arts” (the prime example being Wu Shu Pa Kua which is a performing art like dance and not a realistic martial art) or they do Pa Kua movements but use the power, flavor and Kung Fu techniques of Shaolin. Make no bones about it, an excellent external martial artist will beat a poor or so-so Pa Kua person. There are monastic forms of Pa Kua which are purely about Ch’i cultivation and meditation, making no claims to be martial arts, despite the fact that some say they are.

    Even within the internal martial arts family, it takes years of training to clearly separate the Kung Fu’s of T’ai Chi, Hsing-I and Pa Kua so each retains its own separate characteristics, and they don’t become Chop Suey (left overs) instead of distinct Chinese dishes. Each of my three Pa Kua teachers was always after me to separate the three, and it took me almost 20 years of study and practice to do so. Learning the movements alone took two to three years; learning the Kung Fu was much more difficult and satisfying.

    However, fighting is only one part of the art. Pa Kua is also a purely Taoist art. T’ai Chi is different-it may or may not be Taoist, but its movements without question came from Shaolin which is Buddhist. T’ai Chi as it came from the Chen Village was not used as a meditation technique; it was simply a method of destroying your fellow man with extreme efficiency. Only at higher levels could it become meditation. Most people aren’t capable of practicing T’ai Chi as meditation at the beginning or intermediate level. Chen style T’ai Chi was more the equivalent of an AK-47; it was essentially a military weapon.

    The early people in Chen Village were not talking about T’ai Chi as meditation, and certainly the Yang family never taught or even emphasized it. Of course now there is Taoist T’ai Chi, which does emphasize meditation, and it is different. All T’ai Chi has the Taoist internal energy mechanics which can make you very healthy and powerful, but T’ai Chi never really had that meditation thrust in the Chen Village, and much of T’ai Chi taught today does not.

    Pa Kua is a different matter; it is completely Taoist. The whole method of Pa Kua is manifesting the eight energies of the I-Ching inside your body and finding the place which does not change. It is about meditation, but Tung Hai-Ch’uan didn’t teach that to everyone, because not all of his students had the capacity to understand it. From this meditation base, the real function of Pa Kua is to make Heaven and Earth actually reside inside your own body. Eventually what is inside of you and what is outside of you will come together, and that is when you have joined with nature – the Tao.

    A picture of a tree is not a tree. The I-Ching represents in written form the energies from which the universe is constructed. However, Pa Kua people are not concerned with these intellectual symbolic representations. They are concerned with directly experiencing these universal energies within their own bodies and minds. If you get these energies inside your own body and mind, you are going to personally understand the realities behind these symbols. The goal of the pre-birth physical exercises and sitting meditations of Pa Kua is to directly experience the energies of the eight trigrams.

    One of the things that makes Pa Kua very unique is the fact that it starts off from that meditation basis. Fighting is nothing more than manipulating those energies for a purpose. Using Pa Kua to really develop a person’s capacity for meditation – to develop the ability to be simultaneously multi-dimensional, to be able to simultaneously manipulate things inside your body and inside your mind as you are practicing – these are things the average human being doesn’t even know exists. Usually only formal disciples were taught these inner meditational aspects of Pa Kua. My teacher, Liu Hung-Chieh, learned it from Ma Shih-Ching (also known as Ma Kuei) who learned it from Tung Hai-Ch’uan, and he taught it to me. When I was studying in Taiwan and Hong Kong I was doing all kinds of energy practices, but I never really learned the real meditation stuff of Pa Kua, and thought I never would because it is a very hard thing to learn and very few people are teaching it. I’m being fairly open with my teaching because I think this aspect of Pa Kua is incredibly valuable and few know about it. It is a real problem that nobody knows about it, since the art could be lost and is currently in its death throes. Future generations would lose its benefits, and the world would lose some of its cultural heritage. Universal peace and brotherhood will ultimately be found through spiritual means like meditation and not through war.

    What are some of the differences you noted between the Pa Kua you saw in Southern China compared to what you saw in Beijing? All the people who held the real lineages in Pa Kua were from North China. They studied in Beijing, they studied with Tung, and they studied with Tung’s students. Many of the people who left Beijing were not senior students, nor were they formal disciples. The best Pa Kua practitioners in China have always been Northern. The reason is very simple – that was where the army was. The Southerners were not military people, the Northerners were. They had revolutionaries in the South, but professional soldiers came from the North. Military professionals generally have more realistic attitudes towards combat than civilians do. When Pa Kua spread from Beijing, many of the people who left Beijing only had a limited amount of Pa Kua training. As a result, Pa Kua was diluted with other martial arts. They may have said, “I really don’t know Pa Kua throwing techniques, but I studied some Shuai Chiao so I’ll throw some of that in there.” I saw it happening a lot. Pa Kua has an incredible technical range, it has thousands of applications and in that sense it is an extremely rich martial art. I’ve never seen another martial art that has Pa Kua’s technical range. But some people would just go and add things. Sometimes the stuff they added made sense and other times it didn’t.

    What did you find in Taiwan?

    In Taiwan it was very difficult to learn the art because most of the people from North China that were very good did not teach publicly and only had four or five students. The internal energy system of Pa Kua was not being taught much in Taiwan. You could see all of these different styles, but you could never see a thread running through them. When I went to Beijing, I saw Pa Kua in its pure form, and I could see its origin and exactly how the other things were mixed into it. Some of the people in the South did get very good, but the vast majority of them, in terms of Pa Kua, did not.

    When you start tracing Pa Kua back to the original teachers who taught Pa Kua in the South, usually you find that they didn’t train that long and that they also specialized in a lot of other arts. In the original Pa Kua School in Beijing, no beginning martial art was taught. You had to already be accomplished in some other martial art. Pa Kua is not a beginning martial art. It is a graduate level of study in the martial art world; it is not primary or elementary school.

    I was a conservative for years and would require that my students learn Hsing-I first because I wanted them to experience the reality of having the power to knock someone out before teaching something that can get more esoteric. As a result, the individuals I required to do that are still some of the best Pa Kua students I have. However, I am trying to adjust my teaching, since I want to bring the art to the general public.

    I understand that Hung I-Hsiang’s teacher, Chang Chun-Feng, also taught his students Hsing-I before they studied Pa Kua. Is this true?

    Chang Chun-Feng taught Hsing-I along with Pa Kua. In Hung I-Hsiang’s system, you learned Hsing-I first and then Pa Kua. I think Chang Chun-Feng was very good; he was actually the head of a large martial arts group in Tianjin, a port city near Beijing. To be the head of a martial arts group in Beijing or Tianjin, with Pa Kua as your specialty, you had to know your stuff. You couldn’t fake it, there were too many people around who would take umbrage and cause you great bodily harm.

    Has your knowledge of Chinese language and Chinese culture helped your ability to understand Chinese martial arts?

    Most western people do not know much about Chinese culture. Even most of our China experts in the West have not lived in China a long time; usually not more than a year or two. Very few American people speak Chinese. So, what a lot of Western people may tell you about Chinese culture is what they have inferred, not what they have actually experienced by being involved in Chinese culture. This doesn’t mean that their observations are necessarily correct or incorrect; it does mean however that they are not based on direct experience.

    There is a lot in Chinese culture which I think is misunderstood over here. One problem is being able to take the intended meaning out of the Chinese metaphor. No one really understands what the Chinese are talking about. Their explanations don’t make any sense if you don’t have the cultural background to understand their analogies. I think the main problem in the transmission of the internal arts has been communication.

    Most Chinese teachers don’t speak English well. Some can explain simple concepts in English, but once it starts getting complicated; they are out of their depth. As an analogy, I can use simple language in Chinese to convey anything I want to convey. However, I don’t know if I’d want to teach nuclear physics to a room full of college graduates in China, due to my limited scientific vocabulary which would cause me to be significantly less precise than I would be in my native language English. Pa Kua is a subject requiring just such precise language. What metaphors people use and their meanings vary from culture to culture, and they may not make sense trans-culturally. By misunderstanding the nuances of a metaphor, you could waste years of practice time. And learning just by watching without explanation can lead to gross misunderstandings, or worse yet, one can learn only form without any content. This would be like buying a beautiful champagne bottle with no champagne inside.

    I’m doing what I can to act as a cultural bridge. I don’t think my Chinese is flawless, but I am fluent enough and can communicate and learn in it. The language was a tool to learn the things that I was interested in, i.e. martial arts, Ch’i Kung, Chinese medicine and meditation. What makes Pa Kua different from the other martial arts in China?

    Everything in it, from beginning to end – philosophy, methodology, practice – is completely Taoist and nothing else. So it is an ideal way or key to learn about Taoism in a practical way. Taoism isn’t merely an academic subject; Taoism is the relationship between energies that actually exist and their relationship to human beings. An excellent place to begin your studies is to research the relationship between your own personal body/mind/spirit and the energies and natural forces that compose the Universe. Joining Heaven and Earth and the Universe inside a human being is the major goal of Pa Kua. That is above and beyond fighting. Pa Kua is very heavy on reality. Since the universe is a real place, there has to be a tremendous sense of practicality – that is how the Chinese are and how Taoism is.

    The first question a Chinese will ask is, “How do you do it?” They don’t ask what you are doing; they don’t ask why you are doing it. They ask how you are doing it, what are you going to get out of it, and do you think that is really a useful idea. The word “useful”, that is the whole thing. Is it useful spending time on that? If it is useful spending time on it, then you go and do it. In martial arts the Chinese are practically- minded people. If you’ve got to hit a person more than three or four times to finish them, that’s ridiculous – once or twice is usually quite sufficient.

    I am really interested in seeing Pa Kua grow. A lot of the Pa Kua in the United States is at an extremely low level. I know a lot of the American teachers, and I know what they are going through. Why do you think I went to China? Pa Kua has its own very specific system, and I spent 10 years learning it. That is what I did seven days a week for ten years. So there really is a lot to it.

    Taoism is much less ornate than many other religions. When you see a really good Taoist temple, the walls are simple, everything is functional. When you see some Christian cathedrals they are frequently extremely ornate. A Buddhist temple has hundreds or thousands of icons, the exception being Zen temples, which are heavily influenced by Taoism. A Muslim temple has 10,000 square feet of fine filigree. In Taoism, they don’t care about external image; the temples are very plain and basic. Image is not their subject, their concern is essence, only what is inside the individual. And the fact is that Pa Kua is essentially an internal practice. The basic Nei Kung of Pa Kua is the walking. Do they have static postures? Very little; that is not real Pa Kua. When you see a person holding this posture and holding that posture, he is getting this methodology from Hsing-I. They don’t have that method in Pa Kua. Pa Kua moves. Every Pa Kua school has a least one or two Ch’i Kung sets, such as the “Ten Heavenly Stems” or the “Gods Playing in the Clouds”, and those Ch’i Kung sets are always moving. The Nei Kung is done in the moving practice or it is done sitting. This is a very, very big thing in Pa Kua, the whole sitting meditation process. To go to the higher levels in Pa Kua, you have to do the sitting practices. At least that is what I was taught. That is what Tung himself and some of his students practiced.

    What is your approach to teaching Pa Kua?

    In both on-going weekly classes in Marin County, California, and three workshops a year in New York City, I emphasize four aspects of Pa Kua: how the internal connections of the body work, how Ch’i is developed, how to use the movements for self-defense, and how to bring to fruition the meditation aspects of Pa Kua while walking the circle and sitting. In regular weekly classes, people begin very simply, and that is when some people, those who are looking for dance-like forms and not internal content, end up going out the door. Students first learn how to walk. First they learn how to put one foot in front of the other and walk in a straight line. Next they learn how to walk in a circle. Each class is fairly spontaneous: I adjust my teaching to the ch’i that is happening that night. Pa Kua is taught as an energy system, it’s internal. The movements are not as important as the ch’i. Most nights we spend some period of time on fighting applications. I want people to start using the palm changes. That is the first really big step.

    The class starts with 5 minutes of standing with ch’i crossovers to open up the right and left energy channels of the body. Then we walk a lot: slow, fast, high stances, low stances, up on our tip-toes, etc. I emphasize stability, the hand and foot in balance, and how to turn. Beginners learn some leg movements and some hand movements when the legs are stationary, just to get the hand, waist and the leg twisting coordinated. I teach Pa Kua more from the point of view of developing the Hsien Tien ch’i, or what they call “pre-birth” Pa Kua. The Hou Tien are just applications, and we do a lot of fighting applications. Once people have built up enough energy, they learn applications so the circle walking becomes more real.

    The first thing that everyone has to get through is the single palm change. This can take years. My point of view is that once the student has accessed the energy of the single palm change, then I can start teaching him or her more movements and changes. Then movements start coming fast, but they can be absorbed easily. If you already have that root, the power of the single palm change becomes part of any subsequent movements.

    We also have Taoist meditation. In the beginning everyone wants to meditate, but the first phase of meditation in Pa Kua concerns the body. The first thing you have to do is make your body energetically capable of making the jump from ch’i to spirit. From my point of view, T’ai Chi (even Chen style) is easy compared to Pa Kua. Pa Kua works you very hard. It works your insides very hard, and it works your outsides very hard. Pa Kua is not easy, but it allows people to scale the heights and go as far as a human possibly can in the martial arts world.

    Practices that are easy in the beginning enable you to get somewhere quicker, but create a glass ceiling which limits your potential. However, to open up the body and ch’i of a human being which has become essentially contracted will take a lot of time. It takes a lot of time to turn a bonsai back into a normal tree. It can be done, but it requires some effort. T’ai Chi is for everybody. Anybody can do T’ai Chi, not everybody can do Pa Kua. It is not something that you could give any man, woman or child. I would say that 10% of the population is capable of doing it. How much of that 10% would want to do it? That’s hard to say.

    My students are trained extensively in Ch’i Kung, done in a five-part workshop series. The Ch’i Kung I teach was spread throughout China in the 1950’s, 60’s, and 70’s as a national health system. All the Ch’i Kung systems I teach are over 3000 years old and successfully survived through every generation because they worked well. After Ch’i Kung, I teach Pa Kua, but I don’t hide things. Anybody can come to learn with me. There is an easier modified way of circle walking which is not the complete traditional way of building all of the root, but you can teach it to anybody, even people who are sick, damaged and all of that. My first teacher, Wang Shu-Chin, used this method with great success on many senior citizens and people with severe health problems.

    If people’s knees, ankles or back are injured, they can’t do traditional Pa Kua mud walking because they’ll rip their bodies apart internally. So I teach them the short 16-move Wu T’ai Chi form, which heals the body. Wu T’ai Chi is wonderful for healing. Once their body is healed, people can go on to Pa Kua, or else they can be taught Wang Shu-Chin’s modified method. Your body has got to be all right. I’m not trying to hurt people; I’m trying to help them. Once I’m sure Pa Kua’s vigorous training isn’t going to hurt someone, I’ll teach him what he wants to know. I have an open door policy right now. At times, though, I consider going back to the traditional requirement that the prospective students have an extensive martial arts or meditation background if they wish to learn the I-Ching meditational or fighting aspect of Pa Kua.

    Usually I’ll teach in New York City three times a year, teaching Pa Kua there twice a year and the other time teaching Ch’i Kung, which directly develops the ch’i of Pa Kua. New York is right now designated Pa Kua area on the East Coast. I live in Marin County, in the San Francisco Bay Area, but some of my original students are in New York, such as Frank Allen who teaches there. I went back to teach Pa Kua there because I’m from the town, and I know the people. The physical realities of self-defense are more appreciated in New York City than in laid back California!

    In Pa Kua, you don’t care about visual externals, you care about what you are doing inside. Some people concentrate on movements. Movements alone will make you a good dancer or a good Wu Shu performer, but that is all they will do. If movement alone could cut it, if that were it, modern dance or ballet could be the spiritual and healing art of the century. But they are not. It doesn’t mean what they do isn’t great, it simply means healing and spirituality are not their focus. Pa Kua, on the other hand, is a subject of meditation, a subject of ch’i development and a subject of realistic physical and psychic combat.

    Some of Pa Kua’s literature talks about the different types of ching that are developed in the different palms and whether it is the tendon type or the bone type. Can you explain this?

    Let me explain how I learned the system. In beginning Pa Kua the ways in which you mold your palm and fingers, as well as the palm changes, are about developing and lengthening the tendons. It involves getting what is contracted to expand. This occurs first when the tendons start to stretch, allowing the joints to open. Then in the middle palms you start working on the fascia. Once you open the fascia, the shoulders, back and knees start to open up. Generally all these areas are compacted, and your small muscles are about 40% shorter than they ought to be.

    The next stage in the Pa Kua palms is that they start to open up the internal organs, next opening up the spine, then opening the central channel of energy in the body (which includes the bone marrow), and then eventually opening the energy centers inside the brain. After this, all ching derives purely from spirit. Some other of the Pa Kua palms are directly concerned with opening up all of the different energy channels inside the body, and you’ve got a lot of them. Rather than just the 14 meridians and collateral channels, you’ve got thousands of them. Every time you think you’ve got them all, one will pop up somewhere. After that starts occurring, some of the palms result in your body becoming empty, and some result in your body expanding out forever. It just keeps going on. In T’ai Chi all movement comes from the waist: your arms and your legs basically follow the waist. In Hsing-I movement starts from the hand, and the waist and legs follow. In Pa Kua the foot starts it all and the waist and arms follow the foot. The way the internal components link up is different in each of these three arts. Hsing-I is the easiest one because it starts from the hand. Pa Kua is a little trickier because starting from the feet is more difficult. As you go through the Pa Kua palms you will find that each does different things to you. They work with your body differently; they work with your mind differently. Some directly affect the psychic state, some your physical state, some your emotional state. There are about 200 separate palms, i.e. the way the palm itself is positioned, such as the dragon claw palm, the willow leaf palm, etc. My teacher taught me the final palm the day before he died. I’m willing to share what was passed down to me because it is a transmission: it isn’t mine, it’s part of the human cultural inheritance. I’ll hold it for a while until someone else gets it, then they’ll hold it for a while and give it to someone else.

    #130535

    Anonymous
    Guest

    Thanks for uploading this interview.
    It is fascinating that so much theory behind the Chinese internal martial arts has been lost in translation on its journey to the West and seemingly so often unknowingly to those teaching them.
    Both Bruce’s determination to seek out authentic teachings and his willingness to pass on what he has learnt deserve recognition and our respect.
    Ba gua is obviously not an easy sell in our quick fix society so kudos to Bruce for persevering over the decades. A labour of love, I guess.

    I’d also like to pay my respects to Erle Montaigue, who died last month at the age of 62, who also did a great deal to promote the internal arts.

    #130536

    Anonymous
    Guest

    “Let me explain how I learned the system. In beginning Pa Kua the ways in which you mold your palm and fingers, as well as the palm changes, are about developing and lengthening the tendons. It involves getting what is contracted to expand. This occurs first when the tendons start to stretch, allowing the joints to open. Then in the middle palms you start working on the fascia. Once you open the fascia, the shoulders, back and knees start to open up. Generally all these areas are compacted, and your small muscles are about 40% shorter than they ought to be.

    The next stage in the Pa Kua palms is that they start to open up the internal organs, next opening up the spine, then opening the central channel of energy in the body (which includes the bone marrow), and then eventually opening the energy centers inside the brain. After this, all ching derives purely from spirit.”

    I find this intersting. We’re first developing out tendons, then our fascia, then our internal organs, then our central channel, then energy centers, then our spirit. What a progression!

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