Back To Article Brief
Back To Article List
The Art of Standing Still
Author: Antonio Graceffo
In a temple you wake in the morning when the whistle blows. You don't have to worry about what to wear. You put on your uniform, and an instructor leads you on a run. Your simple food, what there is of it, is selected and prepared for you. Your practice of kung fu fills your entire day, and ends only at nightfall when you collapse into a deep sleep.
Lying on your hard wooden pallet you feel exhausted but also contented. And certainly the world of harsh realities and inconvenient annoyances is miles and miles away.
Back in the world, you are flipping burgers, pumping gas, handling clients, teaching school, laying brick, or driving a bus. Your job is long, tiring and draining. After work you battle your car through rush-hour traffic. You struggle to run all your errands in the shortest time possible while keeping a constant eye on the check-book. Home at last, you still haven't finished. There are bills to pay, chores to do, and maybe a family to care for.
taiji in the Park If you manage to rub two minutes together and create an hour of free time, two or three times a week, you practice kung fu. You want to be the best that you can be. But even during your practice the world creeps in. The cell phone rings. Tomorrow's obligations crowd your mind, and your practice falls into a pathetic state of disrepair.
Thousands of miles away, near the birthplace of kung fu, countless thousands gather in parks to practice taiji. Early morning in Taiwan and China is a time of crowded peace and quiet, as the Asians, in spite of making tremendous leaps in the fields of technology and economics, have still managed to maintain their peace, keeping themselves centered, delicately balancing mind, body and spirit.
In New York, people hit a bar till two in the morning, slamming cosmos. The next day they lay on a couch and pay a shrink fifty bucks an hour to tell them that they are unhappy.
Back in Asia, I tried to find peace living in another temple.
Normally we put in a ten- to twelve-hour work day on the monastery farm, in addition to our martial arts training. But on this day, Sifu Pra Kru Ba, the abbot, suspended our work in order to give us a blessing that would help prepare us for our upcoming fight only a week away. Payong and Daischo (my training brothers) and I joined the ten other fighters who live in the temple. Dressed only in our uniforms, shirtless and barefooted, we stood at rigid attention, shivering in the mountain cold. We held the incense to our foreheads and then did our prostrations in the dirt, reciting our prayers.
Pra Kru Ba, who is both a monk and a veteran of more than fifty professional fights, gave us each three lighted candles, which we arranged in a circle about the stone altar. The glow of so many candles gave the ceremony a supernatural feeling. It reminded me of the TV show KUNG FU in which David Carradine was often shown training by candle light at the Shaolin Temple. But this was not TV. This was real. When I trained at the Shaolin Temple I never saw anything like this. The Buddhism was almost extinct at Shaolin temple. But here in the jungle temple, it is alive and well.
Shaolin Class Photo
We knelt for more than an hour reciting our prayers. When we finished prayers, we meditated. The cold, rough stone dug into the flesh of my knees, which were already scabbed and bloody from weeks of training.
During meditation I thought of the origin of martial arts. Sifu Pra Kru Ba said that when he meditated, great instructors from the past would come and teach him. In one of my private audiences with him, Kru Ba had told me that the best fighter would be the one who practiced physically, but then meditated every day, rehearsing the moves mentally. "You must visualize every aspect of the move," he instructed.
When our meditation was finished, my legs would barely straighten. We began our warm up.
"Do you feel enlightened?" asked my master.
"No, I just feel cramped and painful."
Later, in our private time, Kru Ba chastised me about my meditation. "When you meditate," he said, "you look sad." To him, meditation should be an empty - and thus joyful - experience. To me, it was too much standing still.
I never found that emptiness or that joy. I returned to professional fighting, and eventually found myself back in Taiwan.
Although I find it hard to meditate, I still believe it is definitely there. It's somewhere deep beneath the surface. If you look, you will find the path to peace followed by so many Asians, and missed by the rest of us.
Maybe the answer lies in Buddhism. In Taiwan, my best friend Jao Che Wei, son of a taiji instructor, once said to me, "Every time we die, if we are good, we move. I hope this time to move up one or two levels."
In short, he was telling me that Buddhists planned their next lives the way westerners planned their vacations.
Brooklyn & QueensIf New Yorkers were Buddhists, they would probably want to find the shortest, fastest way to become the Buddha.
Allegedly, an American once showed up at a temple in China and asked the Sifu how long it would take to become a kung fu master. The Sifu replied, "It takes about twenty years."
The Ameican scoffed and said, "But I already have a black belt. And I am willing to work twice as hard as the other students."
"In that case, said the Sifu, "It will take you forty years."
Perhaps kung fu, taiji, Buddhism and the search for inner peace all revolve around the idea of wanting nothing. Maybe we have to let go of everything in order to gain anything.
An ancient Chinese proverb says, "The student must become an empty vessel, that the vessel may be filled again."
When I asked Jao Che Wei about his life plans and ambitions, he said, "I do not wish to be good or evil. I do not wish to be one thing or another. I wish only to think nothing. I only wish to be."
In a world where the rest of us were fighting to attain, to conquer, and to have, it is no wonder that Jao Che Wei is one of the most peaceful and spiritually grounded people I have ever met.
He once told me, "Many people want to become the Buddha. But then our head would be completely empty, and we would not care about anything or anyone. So, I only want to become Pusa (the second highest level). This way I could help others."
Although I was following a Sifu at the time and learning more about my passion - fighting - it was Che Wei who taught me the best lessons on peace, and how integrated these concepts were in the Chinese society. When we saw the movie "Star Wars," and Obi Wan Kenobi used the force to levitate objects, it wasn't even fiction for my Chinese friends. Che Wei, taking it in stride, said, "My father can do that."
The Brooklyn Monk his sifu and monk brother Che Wei's mother practiced qigong. His father lived for the practice of taiji. And his whole family practiced meditation. But with many Asians it was hard to say where prayer ended and meditation began.
The simple, repetitive movements of qigong can empty the mind of all thought, desire, ambition, and unfocused mental channel surfing. The subtle flow of taiji is clearly a moving meditation whose end goal is to go nowhere.
Perhaps the answer is that to complete the road to enlightenment and find inner peace, we need only stand still. Whether we call it prayer, meditation, or even taiji, the goal must be to have no goal. Even without any special training or preparation, you could take ten or fifteen minutes a day and simply be, do nothing. If you have no other opportunity, dedicate a few minutes of your lunch break to sitting still and clearing your mind. If you do this every day, you will find that your health, your peace, your well-being, and your practice of kung fu will all improve. ...
|
Choose your martialarm
|
|
|
Martialarm Testimonials
"This is the answer to the only problem I had in my martial arts training, 'How to effectively test a technique?' I can now experiment using full power which I could never do before with my normal training partner." L-Baxter"After training in the various martial arts systems for over 22 years and thinking I had seen it all I was extremely surprised to train with your martialarm product. It is truly excellent and proves once again simple ideas are the best." F-Barrasong
"I just started to train in Karate and also Wing Chun. I wanted to train as much as possible but there are only two classes per week. Since I bought the martialarm I now train everynight! This is great for a beginner who wants to train alot!" J. Evans
Looking for other martial arts training dummies?Purchase the Wooden dummy, Versaflex, B.O.B. training partner and boxing bags.
|