Chinese martial arts…

Thursday, October 29th, 2009

Zhang Ziyi...

Zhang Ziyi...

I was watching the ravishing “House of Flying Daggers” for the second time the other day, and was again struck by how utterly beautiful Chinese martial arts can be. I find them far more compelling as ‘dance’ than I have ever found ballet, for example – and it does seem to me that martial arts plays the same role in China (perhaps less so in Japan) as ballet does in Europe… I studied T’ai Chi (that is the yin, or ’soft’, side of Kung Fu) for years and so am aware of how profoundly aesthetics informs that martial practice. In T’ai Chi, aesthetics and function are inextricably intertwined… I know this relationship is there in many aspects of Chinese culture. I suspect all of this says something significant about how Chinese culture differs from that of Europe.

On a lighter note, it amuses me to consider how the Chinese have managed to turn ‘dancing’ into a form of warfare *grin*

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hand holding halberd…

Sunday, March 15th, 2009
wo<span>̌</span>

wǒ, shǒu, gē

Continuing my, possibly reckless, exploration into Chinese, I want to discuss the character for the singular pronoun (I, me) wǒ which is the first character shown. Now this is composed of two elements: the one on the left, the 2nd shown, is a pictograph for ‘hand’; the one on the right is a pictograph for ‘halberd’ or ‘lance’. So wǒ is written as a hand holding a halberd…

This seems to me to pose two interesting questions. The first: in what kind of time did this character originate that when anyone, male or female or child, should represent themselves in any text, that they must do so as being armed? The second: what does this indicate about how a modern, literate Chinese person might see himself/herself. Of course, most likely, they just use the character and don’t think about it at all.

I hasten to add that I’m not trying to imply anything here about some kind of inherent agressiveness, but perhaps that there may be some kind of tendency for a person to feel that he or she is a ‘warrior’. Having studied T’ai Chi for several years, I have some understanding of the spiritual values that may underlie this…

Finally, can it be entirely unrelated that  one of the core ways that China seems to perceive herself, and thus projects herself to the outside world, is through martial arts…?

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