Wu Qin Xi : Traditional Five Animals Frolic : Mystifying Disorganisation

[rideforever]

Ordinarily I do Michael Winn (Healing Tao) Five Animals that follow the Wu Xing Generating Cycle nicely.

 

Today I thought I would try a traditional Five Animals which are ordered as follows :

 

Tiger    Wood    Spring
Deer    Water    Winter
Bear    Earth    Late Summer
Monkey    Fire    Summer
Crane    Metal    Autumn

 

So .... w.t.f ... is this order ?   It is neither the Generating Cycle nor the Subduing Cycle.   In terms of the relationships between elements that this sequence of movements represents, it is :

 

Wood > NOTHING > Water > INSULTS > Earth > NOTHING > Fire > DESTROYS > Metal > DESTROYS > Wood

 

So the traditional ordering of Five Animals is, two destroys, 1 insults, and 2 nothings.   

Am I missing something or has somebody deranged this practice just so much as it becomes completely useless ?

 

 

[Mudfoot]

You could always call wood to water "reversal". The same with earth to fire. 

 

But maybe it is Wu Xing five forms, not Wu Xing five phases? 

Edited April 8, 2019 by Mudfoot

[Song of the Dao]

Micheal Winn: Make More Money through Qigong!
 

 

A discerning person would see him for what he is, but I guess that is why we share with others, so we can see if we are deluded.

On to Five Animals; why are you thinking so much? It is called Five Animals Frolic, so just play. You think the five animals you have chosen are universal to all sects? You are wrong.

[rideforever]

I have recently begun to have the feeling that many people who enter into traditions (of all sorts) actually have zero intention of learning anything and inside them totally hate the tradition, and so what they do is they start teaching it .... except with a few small changes made .... so that it no longer works.  Like secretly pulling out the foundation stones of a building in the middle of the night.
And then they inwardly feel really really pleased with themselves.
And I have this sort of tingle going up my spine ... that this is happening everywhere in every type of tradition.
And so given that much of mankind is either acting in bad faith or through fear, often unconsciously, the only way to find the real stuff is to be quite streetwise and have your wits about you, and to try everything for yourself, and to trust nobody.

Truth might be find in orthodox or unorthodox places, in people with smiling or in violent faces, in expensive or in cheap places.
Truly this world is chaos, it's amazing that any truth ever visited it.
Mankind excels at mixing the light with the darkness, until they are indistinguishable, and everyone feels really really pleased with themselves.

[freeform]

16 minutes ago, rideforever said:

they start teaching it .... except with a few small changes made .... so that it no longer works

 

Yup. 

 

Actually there are several varieties of  this.

 

The biggest one in the West is - ‘this is too complicated to explain to my audience - how will I ever make money... let’s just dumb it down and make it all about visualisation’

 

In China it’s often ‘oh shit that guy looks like he might be getting ‘it’ - how will I keep being top dog if he realises how it’s actually done!?’ And so they throw in an error or take out an essential element.

 

Often it’s a combination of the two - a westerner learning from a Chinese teacher that takes out the bits that make it work... and then further ‘simplifies’ it to be marketable to his western audience...

 

I wonder where Michael Winn fits into this equation

[rideforever]

I love MW, I think he is fantastic.  He is a happy person, and seeks happiness in all things.   He actually has huge experience going back and he has spent a long time travelling in China and trying to avoid the BS over there.
His practices are quite simple in outward appearance ... but then you are meant to feel it yourself inside.   And therefore learn it from the inside.   For instance in his 5 Animals he presents only 1 move for each element, but describes the element and sort of act it out in the body.   This is real learning, because there is nothing there unless you truly embody the element in the practice.  Rather a million different movements that you must follow because of an authority.
And he has that feeling of ... if I am happy, then the universe will flow with me.   Rather than life is suffering, work harder.
Nevertheless if you know what's good for you, you would do his practices as if taught by a strict old man with a whip.

I don't do his practices so much now, but ... that's my choice.

 

In all areas I try to try everything and with respect and full effort, and then I make my call.   

MW offers some rare things, but not every thing.

 

Jeez there is other guy spiritual guru who gazes at people ... and that's it.   And surrounding him are countless people who talk about how amazing he is.   Humans are a total madhouse, it's hard to stay afloat.
Nevertheless I suppose I'll have to try it and see if it does something.
Luckily I have been with the same Zen teacher for 9 years now, and whatever other stupidities I entertain myself with I always begin and end with him.

 

Anyway just going back to WuXing .... look either the theory works or it doesn't.   Hence the HT/MW approach of doing the 5 Animals according to the Generating Cycle is sound, and it works in my experience.   I would hate to thing some people notice that the practices don't correspond to the theory .... and just keep doing them mindlessly.   That is truly to lose hope.

 

And yes @Mudfoot  there are two pairs of reversals in the sequence.   If the entire thing had been reversed or the entire sequence had been the Subduing Cycle, then ... something would have perhaps been produced from it, perhaps something negative, but something noticeable.
But as it is ... it seems like it's meaninglessly constructed (or destructed).

Anyway I did it this morning and apart from a couple of small elements I will take with me, the MW one is far better.  And frankly the choice of animals for the movements is quite strange, and the MW ones make far more sense to me.

I can quite imagine that a thousand year old practice is full of errors, as they are in all traditions.

 

But the MW version is not hard enough or excertive enough for me, and relies too much on visualisation.   Perhaps I would find yet another one, someday.

 

Edited April 8, 2019 by rideforever

[Mudfoot]

24 minutes ago, rideforever said:

 

And yes @Mudfoot  there are two pairs of reversals in the sequence.   If the entire thing had been reversed or the entire sequence had been the Subduing Cycle, then ... something would have perhaps been produced from it, perhaps something negative, but something noticeable.

If the entire cycle had been in reversal, it would have been one of the classical interpretations of the Wu Xing cycle, with the focus not of bursting through it or controlling it but gently allow the changes to take place. 

 

But I only say that because that’s how it is done in my tradition, as well as in the five element one needle acupuncture tradition that my teacher favours. 

 

But yes, it sounds like the method you describe has issues. 

[Song of the Dao]

1 hour ago, rideforever said:

I have recently begun to have the feeling that many people who enter into traditions (of all sorts) actually have zero intention of learning anything and inside them totally hate the tradition, and so what they do is they start teaching it .... except with a few small changes made .... so that it no longer works.  Like secretly pulling out the foundation stones of a building in the middle of the night.

 

It's just greed.

[rideforever]

I always loved this guy, 12 Animal Xingyi
 

 

[OldDog]

It's not personal, just business. Marketing. Subliminal messaging.

 

It's funny. Play the video without the sound and see what the message is.

 

A Chinese white satin shirt with frog buttons, a kindly fatherly looking older gentleman, hand gestures ... counting fingers suggesting options, choices ... open palms up suggesting offering, giving, sharing ... palms drawing into the chest ... etc,etc. Doesn't matter what he is shilling for. You know you want to have it.

 

Same technic used to sell the latest pharmaceutical. Young healthy looking happy nodding people engaged with their fatherly/motherly health provider appropriately clad in a white lab coat with stethoscope. Ask your doctor if our drug maybe right for you.

 

Ooops! Sorry! I was overcome by a wave of cynicism.

 

 

[Aetherous]

4 hours ago, rideforever said:

Today I thought I would try a traditional Five Animals which are ordered as follows :

 

Tiger    Wood    Spring
Deer    Water    Winter
Bear    Earth    Late Summer
Monkey    Fire    Summer
Crane    Metal    Autumn

 

So .... w.t.f ... is this order ?   It is neither the Generating Cycle nor the Subduing Cycle.   In terms of the relationships between elements that this sequence of movements represents, it is :

 

Wood > NOTHING > Water > INSULTS > Earth > NOTHING > Fire > DESTROYS > Metal > DESTROYS > Wood

 

So the traditional ordering of Five Animals is, two destroys, 1 insults, and 2 nothings.   

Am I missing something or has somebody deranged this practice just so much as it becomes completely useless ?

 

I think that's the original order of the animals, as far as we're aware. Also, in the original version the exercises were different, and were more like calisthenics. It's unknown if they were required to be practiced in that order, but we do know they were listed in that order, so might as well be.

Later on in history, people attributed wuxing correspondences to the animals, and changed the order, as well as changing the exercises themselves.

It totally makes sense to attribute the wuxing to it, even if the original version didn't mention that. That's just how the Chinese culture looked at these things back in the day - if an exercise had five of something, it had a correspondence to the wuxing or a correspondence could be made.

It's good to think of things in context. Maybe later practitioners designed their five animals exercises in a certain way, so that if you do them out of the order they prescribe, it's not as good. Doing the later exercises in the earlier order isn't right...if wanting to do the earlier order, it'd be correct to use the earlier exercises.

And to keep the modern wuxing attributions in mind, but to set them aside because the original version didn't mention those ones.

In order to figure out the correct wuxing correspondences for the old version, we'd have to be an expert at how the other texts of that time and slightly before it did the same thing. Do we know that at the time, they were looking at the bird as fire, or metal? Do we know that they were looking at the tiger as metal, or wood? What did others of that time say about the element of the bear, or the deer? I don't know the answers.

Edited April 8, 2019 by Aetherous

[rideforever]

40 minutes ago, Aetherous said:

It's unknown if they were required to be practiced in that order, but we do know they were listed in that order, so might as well be.

 

Just looking again, in Hua Tuo's original explanation the five animals were simple animal movements that he spoke of as being necessary for the body to function well, chose one exercise and do for long time until sweating profusely.  It seems he is more interested in mobilising the body and takes cues from how other animals live in general, turning their head and moving limbs.  He seems to have been mainly interested in mixing herbs and concoctions, and in surgery.   Not in qi or martial arts or alchemy or feng shui, all of which are missing from his interests.
He was probably regarded as "modern" and paid well, and didn't bother with "all that old magic stuff everyone is bored of".

So it seems that the Five Animals Qigong is in fact a WuXing / FengShui tradition, different to Hua Tuo's, although perhaps inspired by his "five animals", but in fact being completely different.   Some practitioners today wishing to invoke the WuXing in themselves through Qigong are actually doing the wrong thing by using Hua Tuo's movements, as that is clearly not their goal or function.  He did not use them for WuXing, but individually for general body health.   He does not even seem to connect his movements to acupuncture which he also did.

Therefore the MW/HT practices are (more) correct as they are bodily expressions of the shape of qi in the phases (e.g. expanding, rising or contracting) using well known animals as an aid of explanation, and integrating the Healing Sounds and other Feng Shui and alchemy concepts into one practice.

 

I suppose you could do Hua Tuos movements for "health" reasons, even all five of them, in that case I would do them exactly as he described in his notes and therefore not with WuXing intentions.

 

Option 3 is to try to convert Hua Tuo's movements into WuXing by re-ordering them, it's possible, however I believe MW/HT are way ahead of the game here.   

 

In fact what I would personally do is do MW/HT, but I would add in some small details from Hua Tuo's movements such as the liver elements sudden grabbing forward movement.

 

 

Edited April 8, 2019 by rideforever

[Aetherous]

52 minutes ago, rideforever said:

So it seems that the Five Animals Qigong is in fact a WuXing / FengShui tradition, different to Hua Tuo's, although perhaps inspired by his "five animals", but in fact being completely different.

 

Yes, I think that's the case as well. Probably good to use the order they prescribe it in.