I just listened to a podcast (Heretics Woven Energy) on the Chinese martial art of bagua quan (pa kua) and feel the people on that podcast had some misunderstandings about this art and, as a result, I feel compelled to put this information on the public record.
One of the speakers commented that pa kua was too simple, and seemed like a subset of some other art like xing yi, and also described it as a grapply art and says ‘I haven’t seen a lot of ground stuff in it either’. As you will see below, there is a very good reason the art doesn’t teach ‘ground stuff’.
I write these lines being the first to admit I do not practice pa kua. Yet, I do believe I was introduced to the art from an authoritative source. In fact, I want to put on the record here, everything my teacher told us about the art. Fortunately, I happened to jot some notes at that time (about 1981).
I have practiced tai chi for health since the early 1980s. For an account, see Use Mind and Not Force: A Taiji Memoir. I learned from Simon Lim, a teacher based in Sydney. Before moving to Australia, Simon studied tai chi in Jakarta, as well as some pa kua, other martial arts and qi gong.Â
In Australia, Simon solely taught tai chi through his modest school at multiple locations. He linked his tai chi teaching with the tradition of dao philosophy, all for better living, so that he espoused tai chi as a tool for teaching, healing and harmonising all rolled together. I forget the Chinese phrase. His teacher in Jakarta, Mr Chen, was a traditional Chinese doctor. At one point, he advised Simon if he wanted to fight other people, it would be much easier for him to go and buy a gun.
Despite his clear focus on health and wellbeing as described above, Simon was still ever the pragmatist. One Sunday morning in his back yard class, one of his students, Robert, commented on how exhausting his work was- he was a car wholesaler and he said it was a ruthless occupation, we might say, dog eat dog. Simon then suggested, ‘Perhaps I should teach you something of the art of pa kua to help you survive in that environment.’ Robert is the only student I know that Simon ever raised this subject with.
So for the next few Sundays, Simon took all of us who were there through the essentials of pa kua. He described pa kua as being at the fire end of the spectrum of martial arts. It has a sharp focus. In fighting, the aim was to shatter an opponent’s internal organs so that a fight would last for less than a minute. Its lofty ambition is perhaps invisible to some.
Simon introduced the classic eight moves- mother, father, chop, push, slap, flick, punch, and elbow, as well as the practice of kicking in eight directions, and the eight-step circle walking. The core idea behind pa kua is to develop both strength and speed. One exercise to develop body strength was to lie on your stomach on the ground and raise your arms and legs as you inhale and exhale. His teacher’s advice to new students was to learn one move, eg the chop, and then go out and get into a fight and use only that one move, chop, chop, chop, up and down, to finish the fight.
The serious students would practice with their teacher six hours a day. Simon’s pa kua teacher grew out of a tradition where a student signed a contract with their teacher that they would stay with them for ten years or else the teacher reserved the right to destroy the art, ie kill the student.
To understand the sort of strength development we are talking about, the eight step circle walking is initially done on the ground, then it is done on eight bricks on the ground longways, then on bricks (or pipes) standing up. This process also applied to the exercise of lying on your stomach described above, firstly the ground, then on a brick etc. In this way, a fighter becomes very light and nimble as well as strong. He half-joked how the next stage for some was to be so balanced they could do the steps on a large washing basket. A fighter was so light and stable and fast, the idea of ‘ground stuff’ makes no sense.
Simon also conveyed something of the colour of his teacher’s personality and experience. He was already in his nineties at that time. He claimed to have had 55 fights and killed 55 people. Simon said his teacher enriched his pa kua understanding from his precious copy of the Yi Jing. He said even if there was a page missing in the book, the teacher could still recite the missing words off by heart.
Simon said his teacher did have weak eyesight, which he thought went back to a time when he was intensively training his senses. He said that for three months he would look at the rising sun every morning without blinking. He likewise honed his other senses for similar three month periods, for example, just focus on the sense of smell as much as possible each day for all that time. With the combination of the hard training and the study of the Yi Jing, the pa kua fighter was expected to be both a refined scholar and a wild monkey.
The podcaster also speculated that, given his perceived limitations of the pa kua art, the founder of pa kua perhaps taught it as an inert spiritual practice. But I think the above description of pa kua with its very clear goal of victory dispels that speculation. But I would like to add one element of the pakua practice that Simon also showed us was where the pa kua student, standing, stretches out their arms at 45 degrees, pointing to the sky, and imagining breathing from their hands to the sky and they repeat this is all eight directions. I find this practice invites the student to enter a more metaphysical state of contemplation where we somehow feel contact with the far reaches of the universe: with our eyes? Or with our mind? Or with the energy in our hands?
Despite difference of opinion with the podcasters, I still must thank them for the way they stimulated these wonderful memories for me of being with my tai chi teacher at his home in Campsie on those weekends where he would both be running a supplementary tai chi class (pushing hands and pushing body) and a healing clinic at the same time.
This entry is an expansion of an earlier poetic account of the pa kua teacher in my verse collection pick up the pearl.