You missed my point... -- Martial Arts Discussion Board

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Date Posted: 16:46:34 11/22/02 Fri
Author: Goktimus Prime
Subject: You missed my point...
In reply to: blah 's message, "you are wrong about mooncake" on 00:56:27 11/22/02 Fri

>its called mooncake because its traditionally eaten as
>a celebration of the full moon of the mid-autumn
>festival.
>the springroll got its name because it was a common
>snack for people 'touring the countryside' or 'chunyu'
>in chinese. the word 'chunyu' literally translated is
>'spring tour'. you should learn some chinese history
>before making such comeents, these words have been
>used for hundreds of years.

I know that. The point I was making is that Chinese often name things after relatively arbitrary notions and are very poetic in the way they name things -- hence why it is not always a wise idea to take traditional Chinese texts in a literal sense.

As you pointed out, Spring Rolls (or "harumaki" in Japanese) were named so because they were rolled up snacks eaten... I suppose ideally in Spring, but people tend to eat them all year round. It is not to say that these are bundled up rolls of Spring... it's not to say that we can snap these things in half and expect tonnes of cherry blossoms and sunshine to pour out, which would be what one could expect if we were to take the "spring roll" name at such a literal level.

I'm personally a skeptic about the stories of martial artists having mimiced animals to develop a fighting style. Why would anyone do that? We are, physiologically, unlike other animals. We are primates -- and the only primates to walk with a fully upright gait. For example, it is not physically possible for a human to ever fully fight like a Praying Mantis, because we don't walk on four limbs and our upper appendages do not hyperextend, nor do they contain multiple hooks that stab into the back of our prey. Nor do most Mantis styles involve dragging the opponent towards ourselves and ripping them apart with our teeth (although I've heard that there is one obscure style of Mantis which does drag the opponent in and uses biting attacks at very close range). Contrary to popular myth, Praying Mantis was not developed by some dude staring at a mantid. Praying Mantis clearly contains moves from styles such as Changquan (Long Fist) and Bagua (Eight Trigrams) etc. - which is evidence suggesting that the Mantis style would have been derived from these forerunning styles; and by historical reckoning, some four hundred years ago in the Shandong Province. It was more likely then, that observers later took notes on the Praying Mantis Fist and poetically described the fighting style as resembling the way that a mantid fights with its uses of hopping and grappling.

A more modern example of how people like to poetically describe things like this is in modern sport. Ian Thorpe is often nicknamed the "Thorpedo" -- which aside from being a pun on his name is also a poetic comparison with a naval torpedo. Of course, Ian Thorpe may be one of the fastest swimmers in the world, but that is NOT to say that:
(a) He learnt to swim by watching footage of torpedoes.
(b) He swims like a torpedo. For one thing, his feet don't rotate round and round like a propellor.

So why am I pointing this out? Because some people DO read and take poetically written Chinese texts literally without considering why it was written in such a way. A classic example of this is the way some people insist upon the mystical/supernatural aspects of Qigong and are reluctant to draw comparisons with modern scientific understanding. That's not to say that I don't believe in Qigong, on the contrary I do practice it, however, I interpret it through the eyes of modern science, rather than through mystical/supernatural insistance. Yes, the texts do describe it as an energy flow circulating around the body's meridians etc etc. -- but people need to understand that Qigong texts are firstly based on the Chinese understanding of medicine (which is more holistic), and more importantly, that the Chinese courtiers who wrote these texts would have had a very limited understanding of Western science/medicine (considering that these texts tend to trace back to around the 1880s). And of course, it was merely part of their cultural nature to compose literature in a poetic fashion, since the Chinese so loved to make literature into a form of art (which is what poetry is all about).

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Replies:

Re: You missed my point... -- OneDragons, 04:12:59 12/19/02 Thu
- poetic comparisons -- Goktimus Prime, 15:26:47 12/20/02 Fri
  - Re: poetic comparisons -- OneDragons, 18:31:30 12/20/02 Fri