chuangzu

Tai Chi and Shamanism

By chuangzu, in Daoist Discussion

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chuangzu   

chuangzu
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I have heard various stories about the origins of Tai Chi Ch'uan, some say a Taoist monk Chan San Feng, some say the Chen village story. This is the conventional wisdom. I was wondering, who taught Chan San Feng, who taught the Chen village people? Did they make it up themselves? perhaps they were influenced by other people who have not made it through to the historical records.
 
After all the recent history of China, The Opium wars, the Boxer Rebellion, the fall of the Empire, the Communist era, the Cultural revolution, have seen to it that the past was not just forgotten but was ruthlessly suppressed and records weren't just lost they were destroyed.  Our teacher Chee Soo told us about the origins of our style, it is the Lee style from Shandong, perhaps you have some similar stories you would care to share that might help us shed some light on the matter?
 
Firstly we were taught Tai Chi 'dance'. It was different to the Tai Chi form of named sequences we also learned, this is what appeared in the book, the 'dance' was not in any book, it was mentioned but not in any detail, it was "not a dance as most Westerners would imagine it." I asked the Old Man how the Tai Chi we did today was different to what he first learned, he said it's exactly the same. He called this Tai Chi dance "Tiao Wu", I didn't know what this meant but more recently I have become more interested in the Chinese language so I looked it up.
Han character Tiao 跳
跳 (radical 157 足+6, 13 strokes, cangjie input 口一中一人 (RMLMO), four-corner 62113, composition ⿰⻊兆)
jump, leap, vault, bounce, dance
 
Ideogram Wu 舞
(指事): 無 + 舛 (“steps”) – originally a dancer holding two dangling animal skins, roughly 革 + 大 + 革, with dancing steps 舛 below – see 無#Etymology for earlier forms. 
Top now simplified to 無, and this character is in fact the origin of 無.
 
Wu could be cognate with wu 舞 "to dance". Based on analysis of ancient characters, Hopkins (1920, 1945) proposed that wu 巫 "shaman", wu 無 "not have; without", and wu 舞 "dance", "can all be traced back to one primitive figure of a man displaying by the gestures of his arms and legs the thaumaturgic powers of his inspired personality" (1945:5). Many Western Han Dynasty tombs contained jade plaques or pottery images showing "long-sleeved dancers" performing at funerals, who Erickson (1994:52-54) identifies as shamans, citing the Shuowen jiezi that early wu characters depicted a dancer's sleeves.

 

 

 
It would appear that this kind of dancing is somehow related to Shamanism, and I found a page on Wikipedia about people known as Chinese Wu Shamans: 
Apparently these Shamans were using dance in order to achieve altered states of consciousness and to contact the spirit world.
Shaman is the common English translation of Chinese wu, but some scholars (de Groot 1910, Mair 1990:35) maintain that the Siberian shaman and Chinese wu were historically and culturally different shamanic traditions. Arthur Waley (1955:9) defines wu as "spirit-intermediary" and says, "Indeed the functions of the Chinese wu were so like those of Siberian and Tunguz shamans that it is convenient (as has indeed been done by Far Eastern and European writers) to use shaman as a translation of wu. In contrast, Schiffeler (1976:20) describes the "untranslatableness" of wu, and prefers using the romanization "wu instead of its contemporary English counterparts, "witches," "warlocks," or "shamans"," which have misleading connotations. Taking wu to mean "female shaman", Edward H. Schafer translates it as (1951:153) "shamaness" and (1980:11) "shamanka". The transliteration-translation "wu shaman" or "wu-shaman" (Unschuld 1985:344) implies "Chinese" specifically and "shamanism" generally. Wu, concludes Falkenhausen (1995:280), "may be rendered as "shaman" or, perhaps, less controversially as "spirit medium"." Paper (1995:85) criticizes "the majority of scholars" who use one word shaman to translate many Chinese terms (wu 巫, xi 覡, yi 毉, xian 仙, and zhu 祝), and writes, "The general tendency to refer to all ecstatic religious functionaries as shamans blurs functional differences."

 

 

 
Our style is from Shandong which is in Northern China, more specifically Weihaiwei which was a British colony from 1900-1930. There is a book "Lion and Dragon in Northern China" written by the Governor of Weihaiwei Reginald Johnston who was also incidentally the tutor to Puyi the last Emperor of China. https://archive.org/details/liondragoninnort00john It mentions special Yin and Yang xiansheng, and many reports of Taoist temples and various ancient practices, he says that this part of China was a sort of backwater where there were outdated practices that did not appear in any other parts of China.
 
Shandong is also the place where the Boxer rebellion originated, it was a movement which sought to champion traditional values and expel the foreigners from China. At the centre of this was the Righteous Harmony Fist society.
In many cases in this region martial arts were not taught openly and were certainly rarely seen by Westerners, even Chinese only had access to them through secret societies. These sprang up in some cases as the relics of lost dynasties which had fallen out of favour as China grew and was unified into one kingdom. 
The Boxers believed that through training, diet, martial arts and prayer they could perform extraordinary feats. The tradition of possession and invulnerability went back several hundred years but took on special meaning against the powerful new weapons of the West.[8] The Boxers, armed with rifles and swords, claimed supernatural invulnerability towards blows of cannon, rifle shots, and knife attacks. Furthermore, the Boxer groups popularly claimed that millions of soldiers of Heaven would descend to assist them in purifying China of foreign oppression.

 

 

 
This is a similar idea to the 'ghost dancers' of the North American tribes, who were also attempting to call upon the spirits of heroes and warriors from the past to expel the foreign invaders. They also used dancing as a way to call upon the spirit world. 
...proper practice of the dance would reunite the living with spirits of the dead, bring the spirits of the dead to fight on their behalf, make the white colonists leave, and bring peace, prosperity, and unity to Indian peoples throughout the region.

 

 

 
Also we can see in the Navajo 'skin walkers' that taking on animal characteristics was used as a way of developing martial arts techniques, probably more like special ops or espionage rather than conventional warfare. 
In the Navajo culture there is a clear distinction between a witch and a medicine man. Medicine men practice healing arts, blessings, and the removal of curses. Any Navajo practicing the witchery way is believed to be evil; the intent of such practice is purely to harm others. Skinwalkers are considered to once have been medicine men who were able to reach the highest level of priesthood. These healers, instead of using their abilities to help people, would use their power for works of evil and take on animal form, inflicting pain on others.

 

 

 
These Shamanic practices may be similar to the Chinese Wu Shamans and the Boxers practices because the Northern American Indigenous tribes are all descended from 11 people who migrated from Northern China during the last Ice Age as genetic studies have shown. Even if this is not true it is highly likely that both the modern Chinese and the North American tribes have common ancestors and shared common beliefs and practices, and these were of Shamanic origin.
I recently saw a movie called The Revenant and there is a scene where they are drinking from the sky by sticking their tongues out, this is very similar to a technique Chee Soo showed us for gathering what he called 'macrocosmic energy' from Heaven.
 
Another thing Chee Soo said is that although we have the modern names of Tai Chi sequences originally the individual stances were named after animals. The Chinese character for Wu shows a person dancing with animal skins. In ancient times people worshipped Nature, they looked to the sky, the Earth, they believed all things including animals and plants had a spirit. It is the dancing and drumming and chanting the Shamans were doing which altered their consciousness and brought them more in tune with the Natural forces around them.
 
Nowadays we have Science, we rely on machines and technology, everything is written down, but we are becoming cut off from Nature. Tai Chi originated in a different time when people viewed the world in a different way, if we are to fully understand it maybe we need to look at things the way they did.
 
Your thoughts?
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