Master Hong Yixiang, master of fighting arts.
He is famous for his knowledge of all Chinese systems, but in particular as a practitioner
of one of the more difficult, Tai Chi.
This park is in the centre of Taipei, capital city of Taiwan.
People have been here since about 3 o'clock in the morning.
Three hours later there are still people arriving and departing.
All over the world, wherever there are Chinese communities, the same thing happens.
They go to the park to exercise, sometimes alone, sometimes as part of a group.
And then their gossip mingles with the dawn chorus.
For the Chinese it is important to exercise where there are trees.
Devotees of Tai Chi find a place and return to it perhaps every day of their lives, to
practice these exercises, which are also fighting techniques.
This was not filmed in slow motion.
Chinese legends say that before the world came into existence, there was energy.
This energy divided into opposites, heaven and earth, hard and soft, yang and yin.
These opposites are constantly flowing towards each other.
They call this energy Chi.
They think it is still moving invisibly through the world, permeating everything that exists.
This group is moving in accordance with this knowledge.
For them the air under trees in the dawn is very good because it is full of Chi.
It mingles with the Chi in their bodies.
Master Hong goes to find Chi under the trees on a river bank.
His wriggling fingers encourage Chi to flow down his arm and across his body and into
his other hand.
He leads a small group of friends in exercises designed to promote a long and healthy life.
Some of the exercises look much the same as we are used to, but the purpose is usually
different.
Here he is deep breathing, exercising the lower abdomen, but also concentrating Chi
in the centre of his body, into a spot two inches below his navel.
Exercises like these were first written down by a Chinese doctor about 2000 years ago,
and they have been used and developed ever since.
Sometimes they have a special purpose.
At one hospital in mainland China, cancer is treated by exercises of this kind.
There are no vigorous movements, nothing which obviously exercises the muscles, body or heart.
The aim is to calmly prepare the body for the day ahead, and especially to balance the
Chi within it.
At about seven o'clock this group has breakfast together.
They have it beside the practice ground in a small Buddhist temple with a tea room attached.
They drink many cups of tea and talk endlessly about the fighting arts.
Master Hong is a person whose presence stimulates thinking.
His own knowledge is profound.
On ordinary subjects, he sits quietly allowing senior students to reply, but when the subject
becomes complex, he joins in.
On working days they separate, but on other days they often stay to practice fighting
techniques.
Master Hong lives in the old area of Taipei, a strongly traditional part of the city.
Many people from all over the world have walked through the narrow streets to study with him.
He doesn't accept every hopeful student who arrives, especially now that he has retired
from full-time teaching.
Danny Reed, a young American translator who works in Taipei, was determined enough to
wait patiently in the traditional manner until the Master would accept him.
Danny is especially interested in the historical and philosophical background to the Chinese
fighting arts.
Like Howard Brewer, another American, he only speaks Mandarin, and Master Hong only speaks
Taiwanese, so his second son translates.
The subjects covered are difficult, especially the problem of understanding Qi, or in Taiwanese,
Qi.
We
and places like this.
If you possess that fear, projects like this
until the idea of Chi is accepted,
it is impossible to understand much of Chinese thinking.
It is of fundamental importance in their medical system
and in fighting. The difficulty is to find ways of explaining it.
The only real way is to do the exercises and to sense it in your body.
Hu Ming is a sculpture, well known in America.
He uses the feeling of chi inside his body as a subject for his sculptures.
He plans his work in polystyrene, then he carves huge rough wooden statues.
Each statue freezes a position in the flowing exercise
and gives the feeling of chi at that moment, the power that he feels inside his body.
These ideas of the Chinese are very ancient.
They are part of the Taoist philosophy of China, first written down by Lao Tzu in the third century BC.
The China that he lived in was developing two main philosophies.
One was Confucianism, which is basically the worship of ancestors and the established order of things.
Opposed to it is Taoism, which teaches the need to live in harmony with natural things.
Many Taoist philosophers went to live in the mountains to meditate.
They were, however, very practical as well.
They were the inventors, the men who developed gunpowder and many other things.
They also developed the theories which harmonized the body with nature,
applying these theories to medicine and to fighting.
It is from the mountains of China that the fighting arts come
and their movements are influenced by the philosophers.
We in the West think of the body as a collection of bones, muscles, and nerves.
The Chinese share this view and base their fighting techniques upon it,
but they add to this other ideas.
The concept of opposites, male and female, darkness and light, always flowing toward the other.
They also develop techniques that channel the energy of chi into their fighting.
Nothing would be taught that conflicted with this philosophy
because it would not be, as they say, in harmony and would therefore be a weak technique.
These slow-moving fighting systems are called soft or internal.
This emphasizes the harmony of the body with the natural world.
In Chinese thinking, if there is a soft fighting system, then its opposite must exist.
The hard fighting system is usually called kung fu.
The teaching pattern in Master Hong's school starts young students on kung fu
before they move on to the soft arts.
It's easier for children to start learning a very precise style with clear movements.
The children are always taught the purpose of the movements.
They are not allowed to treat them as a dance.
They are always a way of fighting.
The children learn to attack and defend themselves with punches, kicks, elbow strikes and various types of blocks.
They also learn how to apply pressure to joints like the elbow and wrist.
The kung fu system is based on using maximum force to overcome an adversary.
The performer moves forward in a straight line and fully extends her arms and legs when punching or kicking.
Little attempt is made to evade or control an attacker.
Instead, she must fight her way through her imaginary opponent's blows.
Properly taught pupils demonstrate precision and elegance in every movement.
They also understand what they are doing.
Here there is a force and focus of the will that is rare in so young a performer.
As the students get older they will start learning the soft fighting arts.
A different training emphasis will relax tension in their muscles.
They will be taught to harmonize their bodies with the spirit of the world,
to feel the chi of their bodies mingling with that of the river and the trees.
They will not progress immediately to tai chi.
There is a long apprenticeship to be served before they can attempt something so advanced.
Master Hong's students are taught in stages.
From kung fu they move on to singi,
the first stage of the soft or internal fighting arts.
Soft never means gentle.
It means that the muscles are relaxed.
Internal refers to the way that power and strength come from inside.
In singi, the legs and arms are never fully extended,
but are kept slightly bent and rounded all the time.
Master Hong explains how the techniques his older son has performed
can be used simultaneously to block an attack and counter punch from either side.
When Master Hong was a student, he began to feel that his master was not good enough.
His master understood this and said to him,
go and challenge the senior students of the other masters.
If one of them beats you, then change to his master.
Twenty fights later he came back.
Nobody had beaten him.
As well as maintaining a calm mental state,
students must learn to use their strength intelligently.
An attacking arm is not just blocked.
They must learn to grasp it in readiness for throwing the attacker
or pulling him onto an oncoming blow.
As in most other fighting arts, the soft systems all have pre-arranged sets of movements
called forms, which the students must learn by heart.
Many of these forms have been handed down from master to pupil for centuries.
Some are performed solo, others in pairs.
Singyi has twelve main forms and each is based on the movements of animals.
Perhaps the most famous single movement in all Asian fighting arts is this double-handed push.
The hands and fingers represent the jaws and teeth of the tiger,
as he is about to kill his victim.
The ancient Chinese observed this action and turned it into a defensive movement
where the attacker is pushed right out of range.
A lifetime of practicing this move and cultivating his inner energy, or qi,
has given Master Hong enormous power.
We got it.
That's it.
On the wall hangs a portrait of Bodhidharma painted by Master Hong.
Bodhidharma is the patron saint of Zen Buddhism and a powerful legend in the fighting arts.
In this picture, he represents the ancients who lived in wild places and studied the animals.
There are twelve that are important.
Each animal has special movements that have been used in singing and other systems.
There is no attempt to copy all actions of the animal,
but the ancients observed certain key movements and developed fighting techniques out of these.
This way of thinking is based on a precise observation of nature.
It was a sophisticated analysis of movement by the Taoists.
Exercises developed from these observations were written down in 200 A.D.
What they looked for in animals was not necessarily the animals' own fighting techniques,
but movements that suggested ways of fighting.
Each animal gives its name to a set of exercises.
Chickens fight some of the time on one leg, and the chicken form uses this.
The chicken also uses its wings, beak, and claws to batter the opponent.
The beak stabs or grabs and pulls.
The wings flap around while the claws stamp and kick out.
A nice guy quipping from the top..
It's light and it can do this.
If the fish jumps down from the top, we can catch it.
The swallow is not a bird that we usually think of as a fighter,
though it intimidates intruders by swooping on them.
The movements developed by thinking about this swooping action have a special elegance.
From the swallow, the students learn that evading a blow may only mean moving the head and shoulders back just a fraction.
When facing a high attack, he can swoop down and pull his attacker's feet from under him.
Taiwan has been an island of refuge for at least 400 years.
Whenever war swept through mainland China, people on the losing side escaped to Taiwan.
Then the Japanese occupied it from 1894 to 1945.
The population was severely controlled and the practice of martial arts forbidden.
In 1949, when the communists came to power in China, Chiang Kai-shek retreated to Taiwan.
Taipei was his capital city.
Among those who left the mainland with him were many martial artists,
and it was from two of these that Master Hung learned the arts.
He started to practice illegally while the Japanese were still there.
His father employed guards to protect his shop.
Inside it at night, they secretly taught kung fu.
His father, now 92, still owns the same shop.
Master Hung's father was a very successful businessman.
He started with absolutely nothing, but he became the biggest manufacturer of candles on the island.
When electricity arrived, it killed his business, and now he sells every possible sort of incense.
In the morning, he sits sipping a special sort of ginseng tea to strengthen his legs
so that he is strong enough to walk three miles at dawn to his favorite exercise spot.
Master Hung no longer teaches large numbers of students,
but he travels regularly to schools run by his senior students.
One of them uses the grounds of a temple for his demonstrations.
It is a temple that cares for the mentally disturbed, giving them a retreat from the world.
There are religious homilies including the capacious
mission to obey his spiritual
desires and complains for him throughout the woah of theort
templeO
After their demonstration in front of him, everyone expected the master himself to perform.
He decided to do a pagua exercise.
This is the third fighting system that students learn.
Pagua must be the most mysterious of all fighting arts.
It doesn't look like one, and yet it is, and a very dangerous one.
The performer walks endlessly in a circle.
Then suddenly, at arbitrary moments, he flows into movement.
It is based on an ancient Chinese way of telling the future.
There are eight signs called pagua.
These they combine in 64 ways, and these combinations are used in fortune telling.
The performer has a picture in his mind, the eight pagua surrounding the cosmic symbol.
They were turned into a method of fighting now practiced by very few people.
Master Hung is one of the few who can teach it completely, but even he cannot explain
it fully in words.
The only way to understand it is to do it.
The problem in the way of understanding is the mental state of the performer, since it
is not just a set of sophisticated fighting techniques.
Hung Yisiang has a strong relationship with his second son, Zeyhan.
In the past, he might have followed his father's path.
However, he is a television producer.
Zeyhan does not have his father's physical strength, but he shows his father's understanding
of the techniques.
It was a custom of the masters to write their own books of techniques, and it's one of these
that they are studying.
The ingenuity of the thinking behind the fighting arts is shown clearly in these detailed books.
The basis of all fighting is very simple.
Get the enemy off balance, trip him up, push him over, and hit him where it hurts.
After thousands of years, it has been refined into patterns of movements of such subtlety
that it deserves the name of art.
So this is a really light and dynamic way to perform martial arts.
So at them to the boxing, kdWhere is that?
The performer imagines that on the ground in a circle are the eight pargois. He walks
around them in a state of mind attuned to them. Suddenly, as he steps over it, one
of the signs comes into his mind and he acts accordingly. It is as much a mental
state as a sequence of moves of extraordinary beauty and complexity. This
performer was exhausted after only a few minutes demonstration by the intensity
of the demands it made on him. The Chinese said he had used up his qi. The
move that he makes and his apparently effortless skill places him at the level
of a great dancer.
The eight pargois is about a situation where he does not have a direct conflict with the enemy.
If you are a thousand kilograms of force, he must have a lot of
force to overcome you. The eight pargois is a more clever move. If you use
your body more than him, he can go sideways. When you use your force, he can
move away, in a way that is more clever. Because every kind of money has its
characteristics. The qing ying quan is straight. The eight pargois is straight. The fighting idea behind
pargois is that a spinning object throws off anything that touches it. By
constantly circling, he confuses his opponent. Any attempt to attack a pargois
is frustrated by his rich knowledge of evasion and deception.
You can try again.
Again. He is blocking you with a good angle.
That's right.
You can try again.
Your angle is better.
You can try again.
He is using a good angle to stop you.
This is a good angle.
This is a bad angle.
Another difficulty in the way of understanding Pargois lies in the challenge of demonstrating
it.
Many of the actions cannot be done slowly and gently.
They only work at speed when the full momentum of bodies can be used.
Le Heng was very cautious indeed, choosing simple movements that he could control.
He always nakag فfft to maintain his bright gasoline state.
It should work.
Any chance of us lucking it in?
Doş
Hot!
Hongyi Xiang is also a doctor of traditional Chinese medicine.
His techniques are based on a belief in the need for the organs of the body to work in
a balanced way with each other.
This he achieves by adjusting the flow of qi around the body.
The best known way of doing this is by acupuncture.
But there are other ways of stimulating the flow.
Qi is thought to flow in special channels or meridians through the body and on these
meridians are points that are sensitive to pressure.
Master Hong put suction cups on a number of points following the pattern of the meridian
down the spine.
The Chinese think that if your body is damaged then the flow of qi is blocked and this leads
to many complications.
For this reason they consider that even minor sprains and bruises should always be treated.
Master Hong usually treats his students when they suffer inevitable damage in training.
To reinforce the effect of the cups, Master Hong gives a pressure treatment to some of
the vital points.
These techniques also have a fighting implication.
There are points on the meridian that doctors never use for healing but the advanced fighting
masters know how to strike them.
A blow on a vital point can cause great pain or even death.
The end of the treatment comes with the use of radiant heat.
A cigar shape of burning herbs moving over the skin warms the meridian.
That many of these techniques appear to work is undeniable but how they work remains a
mystery.
The Chinese turn the argument round.
Since they do work then qi must flow through the body.
Master Hong's life is built around this belief.
Tai qi is the most sophisticated of the Chinese fighting systems.
Only after Master Hong's students have mastered the other arts are they finally allowed to
learn this.
A person practicing these movements slowly becomes aware of the articulation of his own
body.
It is possible to feel individual bones, muscles and ligaments as they move within arms and
legs.
There must be no tension anywhere in the body.
Everything must be fluid.
The balance of the body is focused on the crucial point just below the navel.
When these movements are used for fighting the relaxed muscles can suddenly flow into
action.
Nothing holds them back.
It is strange to see such gentle movements transformed by placing a person in front of
them.
The fighting purpose then becomes clear.
It also becomes deceptively simple compared to the elaborate movements of Paguai.
When you reach this level of skill there is no conscious mental effort in fighting.
In fact they say that the really great fighter looks like a beginner.
His movements are so simple.
The arm would be broken by the downward force of the fist acting against the rising leg.
For instance standing horizontally and keeping a quite unlike his opponent the low arm
So whoever gave money to Shang,
their lives were looked after...
they were treated seriously.
That is what happened...
in the end, his enemies lost a
gang of men except for some young boys
at Great Valley Spring.
But basically they have a
grin and grace in their faces.
粘,粘,平,均一緊。
這裡就水,這裡,這裡。
越拔越,越,越,越,越。
這裡拔那,
那硬就很,
這就,
要,要,要緊。
你,你,你,你咧,
似乎,似乎,
講咧,講咧,講咧,
什麼,什麼,講咧,
你,出咧咧,
安排還是不?
咧,親上咧,
啪,啪。
筍,這筍咧就,
你,看,
爛了。
爛出人的。
爛出人。
你看,不是這個。
嘎嚕嚕嚕嚕,
嘎嚕嚕嚕嚕。
爽 是嘎嚕嚕嚕嚕。
嘎嚕嚕嚕嚕嚕。
唉,唉,唉,唉。
停,停。
停。
Instead of free sparring,
the soft Chinese fighting art has exercises
is where the aim is to tune into the opponent's mind.
They almost go into a state of trance,
yet they are ready to strike instantly.
Oh.
That's enough.
Oh.
Master Hung's knowledge is not only theoretical.
He has experienced real fights.
Yet for him and many other people throughout the world,
the same movements need not have anything to do with fighting.
They are about health and attuning one's body and mind
to the natural creative forces of the world.
Next in the way of the warrior we learn about his skrima,
the martial art of the Philippines,
and that's at 7.30 next Monday night.
But now sneak preview.
Glimpses of some top-notch martial arts
coming up on SBS.
And then at 8.30,
Voglia di Volare,
Longing to Fly, Part 2.
Stay tuned.