Bruce's Study in China

so some of you might ask how did I get into ba gua well it started this way back in New York City when I was 17 I had this kind of martial arts mentor named George Hoff who was no longer with us and George always who had been in martial arts and trained security people and army people and all that kind of stuff he said he spent a couple of years in Japan doing judo he always said listen to one guy like you know if you go to Japan you absolutely want to learn something for him about fighting it is this big old fat Chinese man named Juan and he said I mean when it came to like seriously practical stuff that military people would use or you know that she would reuse in real things this was a really good guy okay so I get the Tokyo I go I go to college in Japan when I'm 18 I chose to go there instead of being in the United States because that's really where my heart took me and then I met somebody and I started asking around it turned out that Wong was not in Japan because he had gone back to living in Taiwan and this wasn't the years when he was going in Japan when I was there he had done that earlier I needed would do again do it later so I go to Taiwan and I find out where he is okay this gift basically you know just breaks me economically but it's okay and then I met him and so I go there and I say ba ba ba ba and I give him a letter that's written in whatever whatever whatever and at that time I spoke some Japanese but no Chinese whatsoever and my Japanese was good but it wasn't great yet so but there were people there who spoke Japanese who kind of translated well long story short long says oh okay come on you know let's see what you're doing kid yeah okay so you want all these Karate Championships and you train with these top judo and karate people so but that stuff is only fit for old women and children it actually couldn't actually fight a man with it which is something he said in front of all the whole big Japanese martial arts community Japanese Budokan many years before when the people got up all these famous Japanese martial I be flattened I mean he didn't like you know tides knocked them out in or you know drop them on the ground just kind of you know oh I'm a big fat old man yuk yuk yuk you want to find out kind of thing anyway long story short so long says okay like just go in you know attack me so I'm pounding this mother I mean he's just stand-in there and like you know kicking him you know like in his ribs and his neck and I'm hurting my foot doing it I mean you know and it's like I'm smashing him in the shins I even gave him one or two right between the legs and but he obviously was a master of pulling his balls into his body cuz it'll do any good I was even told a few days ago you have to stop hitting him like this it's not polite to do this to an old man which I'm not so sure was so much it wasn't that as he asked me to do it as you know you know God knows he might have killed me if I continued to anyway at one point in this whole thing what occurs is that he's kind of like half-asleep 'ln I'm kind of you know the fly damn who cares you know and don't ask me why but I must have got a good one in somehow and he just went oh and he woke up you know like I kicked them off right so next thing I know he comes with his hand like this boom which is out of his eight palm change it's been the top of the head and I instantaneously went from the other squatting flat on my feet and I felt like I always you know I'd like a two hundred volt electricity put right on me okay so that's cool and he goes okay you have spirit okay so I come back tomorrow alright so I come back the next day and he says are you sure you want to learn and I said yeah and then he goes okay let's find out so there is a posture in bagua he says stand still pick your leg up in the air turn your waist be like this right those days I was like you know before I had a bunch of car accidents I put my leg up to my waist anyway long story short I'm there for two hours and the message is you give up you can leave and never come back again now this whole thing is going you know to say that my legs were hurting and I was getting cramps and this was like you know ah you know fair comment you know so what happened is that every once in a while he would just go over and he would look almost touch my own and come back and look like this but then when I would fall down to the ground from sheer exhaustion and pain somebody would come over with a bucket of water throw it on me and the next thing Wong comes over is my hair was pretty long in those days and days you know I was young I was 19 long hair and he grabs my hair and like up you go grabs my leg sticks it up in the air moves by hand and then sits back in the chair kind of reinforcing the message that if you do not continue you will be thrown out and not allowed back in anyway somehow I got through this thing for two hours and I must admit that night I had screaming cramps in my legs but this is you know what are you gonna do this is what they called old school training and then after that he started teaching me so I said learning how to walk in a circle and that was the beginning of it then at different times whenever I had vacations and when I was going to college in Japan I would come back and study with him like you know if I had a couple of week gap between this term in that term sometimes even when I only had two weeks I would I would fly to Taiwan go study with him learn something and then come back and practice it you know a lot and he had a top student of his who was in Tokyo who I didn't learn bagua for him I did learn Taichi and so at least I got you know got some feedback from that and then there was another Shanghai guy who you know knew Wong and you know so I kind of got some of the stuff about staining Wong did so at least I could ask some questions when I went back anyway long story short this goes on for my entire college career and so you know this was like at the end of it it's like 71 I come back to America continued to practice ba gua on my own but there is no one to learn from it nobody is teaching it no one knows it and in New York City given what a cosmopolitan area that is that's a rather massive statement but that was in the era before the Chinese really publicly taught Westerners but it turned out that I'm in Tai Bay and I'm looking at this ba gua teacher and at bagua teacher and my friend had a who I knew from Japan a British guy and he had a girlfriend named often and for whatever reason and she said she started going around looking for someone who ba ba gua teacher and anyway so she gets hung to kind of a green I go in one night and so he has a nice bar with a bunch of people and this innocent that match I'm doing and then now he says okay and his style of bagua was a style that was really they taught almost all the principles of Bhagwan out of all of them but a big chunk of him through shing e cuz there were schools in China where the shinging and the bagua just kind of goes together and asked his style he did Wang Shi Jing winning to a bog why did straight Bhagwan if he deshaney destroyed shinging and then there was no mixing but that was the nature of the school and that was a changing school that came down from Gao Xiang anyway I trained that for years and then whenever one was in town I would go down and take a train dammit I John which is I don't know I can remember an hour two hours three hours whatever it was and I would study with him and I would do things but if I made the mistake goal of a sudden of doing the stuff the way that Wang did it in front of hyung yeah got in the doghouse for a while let's just put it that way it was not appreciated anyway it was kind of like this rivalry that was going on especially because Wang Shi Jing and Hong's teacher we were like really good friends but they belong to kind of like different schools but they belong to the same religious organization which kind of made the whole thing very complicated at the end of this period of studying with hyung he's young around 75 at some point I I went to Hong Kong again on one of my many attempts to get into mainland China which was quite impossible during the Cultural Revolution utterly impossible during the Cultural Revolution I mean if I had actually gotten into China during the Cultural Revolution the chances of my coming out alive would be astronomical and I'm in this hotel room in this the hippy hotel the poor hotel cuz money was shall we say on the low-end so I get there and it turns out that first of all they're totally flabbergasted the fact that I spoke Mandarin you know that I actually spoke Chinese fluently and they said I told him bah bah bah bah what I liked I said oh you'd like ba gua well there's just this ad that came in the paper was in the paper one week and one week only and it said ba gua you know however he described himself from Beijing coming and will be teaching ba gua at such in such a place anyway it turned out was later on with Leo home Jays other disciple beside me and I go there and I watch him doing his bagua on this roof and whatnot and as soon as I saw it I said this is the real stuff you have to realize anybody who was studying ba gua in Taiwan because everybody ever come from the mainland there was always this idea that there really the best to the best of the best were in the mainland they just never got out but when I saw this guy doing ba goo I said this is for real so I studied with him for like a week or two while I'm still you know however long it was maybe it was a month I honestly don't remember before I'm going you know I'm flying back to the west after this point I'm going back and forth Taiwan Hong Kong Taiwan Hong Kong I would learn so much stuff in Taiwan it'd be some missing pieces and I would go to Hong Kong and I would get the especially the energy stuff and the very direct stuff in that style of Beijing ba gua so it was like you know you go to step one two three four five in this place you kind of hit a wall then you go to a place you get steps seven eight nine ten and then you kind of go back and then you just keep on moving forward because in Taiwan the way it was especially as it it wasn't like Western education where they just teach you boom boom boom boom this is it it was like you're always trying to ferret it out and very often things which should have been said the first week aren't said for five years later that was pretty common so this goes on for a couple of years and during that period of time I'm still going to Hong ishan school and I'm doing a lot of stuff with the senior students I'm actually living with one of this best senior students and I'm also studying ba gua with a lot of other people just kind of doing cross research a lot of things popped up where I was able to hang out for brief periods of time with other really top Bhagwat people but it isn't like you just like a smorgasbord you just keep on eating a dish I mean you have the main thing you do and every once in a while you go see other people for what that's worth because if you're really going to do it you got to spend the time when someone's going to show you how to do it anyway from this whole business we now flash-forward and I come back to the states and it's somewhere around 1983 I'm not exactly sure oh sorry it's around now somewhere around 1981 or 80 I don't remember and my friend who I'd gone back to see in England he had gone to the the Peking Institute the Beijing Institute of physical education shaving before and he had learned how to the basic Tai Chi form not the weapons to push hands but it's a very basic thing anyway through a bunch of stuff he did I got myself invited because he talked to the people there and I had people from Hong Kong talk to people in the Beijing sent of physical education China had just the United States only had made an embassy inside chine teen 79 so you couldn't have gone much earlier period so I then went to the college of physical education and my they didn't split this with a ba gua went well by wah gave me a letter that look I'll introduce you to this you know to my teacher but the fact that I matter is they teaches virtually nobody I mean people from China keep on showing up at his doorstep and he just as I forget her not now I'm busy or you know whatever he gives some reason so I show up at his door and for whatever reason he invites me and and then during that summer for the first about six or eight weeks I'm going in the morning I'm doing the stuff in the in the Beijing instant of physical education where I became the first American certified to teach the complete simplified the Chinese complete simplified system of Tai Chi which was the young style throughout all of China was the first one that happened to other people had gotten like bits and pills only we've got the whole thing and then in the afternoons I would go and study with Leo and then at some point however many weeks it was I didn't remember six seven eight honestly can't remember that I then moved into the city so I could be nearer to Leo and then I would start visiting him twice a day for about three hours each time and this went on till I left then I came back to the states had a car accident broke my back kind of got that at least enough working where to go went back to Hong Kong and Amoy in southern China did the old young style and then at the very very end of 83 you're somewhere around there can't quite remember anyway wherever it was all these years are somewhat of a blur at this point that I then went to Leo and I showed up at his door again and he took me in and then he just really taught me for essentially most days six hours a day in some days three hours a day except every once in a while for a short period of time he would say look I need to rest and regenerate or I'm doing a retreat or something and I would just go back to the West you know for a couple of weeks or a month where I was dealing with issues with my grandfather who was to die in the middle of that period and just going back every once in a while teaching a little bit in case you know when you live in a foreign land like that you never quite know what the future brings but during that period of time he then taught me the complete system of ba gua from two points of view the first one is he taught me the chanting well he taught me anyway his backgrounds a whole nother thing I've written about in my books it's a rather he was one of the amazing ones he was one of the probably the only person in Beijing who was directly connected with one of the students that founded the martial arts style of ba gua you know with ma Xiao Qiang and he was an indoor student he actually learned his entire Chi energy system the one that came down from Dome which is a pretty rare event then it also turned out that he also like you know we won the top fighters in the first national competition they had in China where they closed it down because too many people were dying and they just chose at the end by vote who would win based on you know who not only looked like they could beat everybody but who was the most likely one to have just enjoyed killing as many people as they get away with this then but then beside his involvement in Tai Chi which I'm not gonna go is also a whole thing that's not going all that stuff just stick with ba gua that he then we're after he became declared enlightenment ent Buddhism and after he had learned to complete mu style of Tai Chi from the founder of the Wu stop he then went to such one province for ten years where then he engaged fully with the Taoist meditation tradition Leo and China was known as what they call a Taoist in mortal living but--or when in Buddhism would be called the living buddha during that period of time he didn't just learn the the martial art of ba gua he knew before he ever went there what he did is he actually learned the basic circle walking method through which the entire a Jing was made manifest at a spiritual level to human being and so what we would kind of go through depending upon the day was any one of those days we spend three to six hours together that you know we would do the martial arts stuff but then it would very rapidly morph into the meditation stuff and these two things were flowing back and forth to me Cho and so toward the end it was much much more the meditation stuff because the way he put it to me is that after a very short period of time he said like what do you want I want more cheese is looking at Chi for a small elephant like you know you and being really doesn't need that much more I mean you you know the way we would say in New York you're a strong boy and that's it but he said what you will need to understand is the heart mind what you will need to understand is what I guess in Western you say is the core of your soul that's what you do and you really need to understand the nature of change in how it happens in the entire universe so these are very different statements in just the fact you can move and you know knock somebody down or something we're actually as the phrase goes we were we were going for bigger fish anyway this went on this type of training with him went on for about you know three plus years three and a half years whatever it was if you count the first trip and long story short this is where I learned the bagua that I teach and both in terms of the bhagwat as a martial art lineage and a Qigong lineage I learned it very directly as I said I was lucky enough to learn from one of the old ones who actually was in the direct line from it and not a derivative of a derivative of a derivative but the straight stuff and then on the other side I was also lucky enough to be taught the bagua meditation tradition that really is from the aging in Taoism which is a pretty rare event and I would have to say that at the end of the day I think that's actually a dramatically more important thing for the human race then the bagua is a martial art system because you know in any era when we have machine guns bombs you know instruments where people with you know two days of training can probably kill a town martial arts is one thing and its usefulness in terms of Chi in the health of the body and all that yes that does make Magua a very magical thing but I think that getting down to the roots of what I would call the human soul or the essential question of human happiness coherence and satisfaction and just ease with living inside the universe I think that's a much bigger and more important issue so in these modular programs I've tried to at least get the basics that are going to allow that final process to begin

Channel: Energy Arts

Views: 12,200

Rating: 4.8211384 out of 5

Keywords: tai chi, qigong, chigung, meditation, taoism, i ching, tao te ching, taoist, chi qi, energy healing, tui na, bagua, hsingi, xingyi

Id: qc7IkE0psfQ

Length: 18min 2sec (1082 seconds)

Published: Mon Jan 28 2019