Voiding The Lady, Martial Arts Writing

彈歌
斷竹，續竹；
飛土，逐宍。
Song of the Pellet Bow
Cutting bamboos, joining bamboos;
Flying mud, chasing meat.*

性是功能之本，命是功能之基。
Nature** is the essence of capability, lot its foundation.

十里不同音。 
A different pronunciation every five kilometres. 

Voiding the interpretations of the Lady of Yue is actually quite simple, the text is coming from an historical novel. Furthermore, the method used, deciphering enigmas, is certainly not a way to translate Classical Chinese. Still, it had to be done because this text is used as a reference in book compilations and some television series about martial arts, often introduced as one of the first martial arts writing.

Doing so also gives the opportunity to clarify where the martial arts texts are coming from: there are in fact most of the time close to vernacular, quite far from Classical Chinese.

I. Voiding

The validity of the text as a real martial one and the method used to interpret it can both be easily criticised.

1.1 A Novel

Spring and Autumn Annals of Wu and Yue is usually seen as a historical novel and the Lady of Yue is actually a good example why it is so. Indeed, a woman who lived in the deep forest, met an old person who later became a gibbon and able to fluently express herself in the language used at court can only be a literary creation. Therefore, the text may relay common martial arts themes and theories, but this is just a personal interpretation of the author of Spring and Autumn Annals of Wu and Yue. In modern times, it would be like giving Jin Yong’s** martial themes developed in his novels a true martial value.

Still, the fact that it has become a text which martists refer to make it a good example of how an old text could be interpreted (too known schools texts being avoided by the author, see About This Blog) and, more especially, of one of the methods used by them, hijacking anything which could be used as a training tool, written language included. 

1.2 Not A Translation

Though it was already mentioned in Changing Doors, “will try to explain its most interesting statements as if solving martial arts enigmas”, it may seem necessary to reaffirm that the previous explanations were in no way a translation of the text, which would have been a total different type of work. Indeed, decent martial arts riddles always contain more than one meaning and try to be very adaptive to their audience. Such method, where there is always more than one translation, hence interpretation is a more accurate term for martial art riddles, cannot be used as a pure translation tool. Indeed, martial arts riddles come from an oral and ever-evolving tradition meant to be used between two people at an opportune time, something very far away from a written text with a quite specific meaning. Hence, the poem quoted, even if also coming from an oral riddle tradition, can only be understood and translated if one understands in which local and historical context it was written (this greatly limits whatever polysemy characters may have through time and space). The second quote is a martial saying and knows, on the contrary, many versions with different characters linked to what can be called the capacities, “功能之”, series, each having many interpretations, some quite far from what would directly come to mind. It may have evolved from an original version the author of this blog still hasn’t been able to find, to become the various modern Chinese vernacular versions put later into writing. Hence, applying the martial riddle solving method to a Classical Chinese text is actually not really appropriate, the two systems being quite too far away from each other.

Voiding the Lady leaves then the open question of what could have been the use of writing in a fundamentally oral tradition?

II. Martial Arts Writing

In China, martial arts and internal practices have mainly been an oral tradition for two reasons. The first one is known, those practices are like craft and the attached know-how is so essential they can only be efficiently taught from one person to another, no book can replace that. It is actually about saying the right thing to the right person at the right time, which writing cannot really provide. The second, though obvious, is usually less spoken of: for a long period of time the diglossia created by Literary Chinese left but little opportunities for martists to put into writing their tradition****. 

From the different challenges martists faced with writing, one can understand how they came to use it.

1.1 Challenges

One just has to consider the following facts: 

- In 1949, eighty per cent of the Chinese population was illiterate. 

- The introduction of the Seven Military Classics of ancient China in military exams during the Song Dynasty led to them becoming more a retake exam for people who couldn’t pass the civil ones and less an opportunity for martial artists*****. 

- The third quote, often used in many parts of China, illustrate how numerous are the Chinese dialects, even till now°. Writing was like facing the equivalent of ancient Europeans who had to use another language, sometimes very far away from theirs: Latin. Indeed vehicular Chinese could be very far away from the local dialect. 

- Illiteracy and dialects led to some martial art schools having more than one name, confusion on the pronunciation of characters being the main reason. 

- Martial writing actually appeared, though later, in quite a similar way as Bianwen, 變文, the vernacular and prosimetric popularisation of the Buddhist doctrine in as early as the Tang Dynasty. 

- To simply understand the versatility of martial writing, as opposed to Literary Chinese, one can compare adages, 諺語, where the number of characters used is not determined and in which words can be changed, to proverbs, 成語, more literary, which are always made of four characters and cannot be modified. Hence, the monthly adages translated in this blog are listed as sayings and not proverbs, and some of them have more than one version (as, also, the second quote). 

- Internal arts theory revolves around a cornerstone “There is only one permanent principle, change”, which happens to be also an oxymoron. Writing is like setting in stone, something not really appropriate. 

1.2 Uses

Nowadays, martial arts books are more a set of a few principles at best, illustrated with techniques. Old ones were more about principles to try to explain a method. Facing teaching a craft around the theory of changes did not favour using writing, especially when most of the martists were not really literate, if not totally illiterate, and had to write through a Franca Lingua not close to their dialect. Hence, the first extensive texts started to appear while written Chinese was slowly moving away from classical and closer to vernacular.

Basically, martists used writing in similar ways folk culture did: 

- Riddles are, of course, one of the extensively used methods of teaching and correspond to a long folk tradition in China. But there would have more than one level of understanding. Indeed, a good martial riddle knows more than one solution and a few traps. 

- Deciphering a character in a special way (see 武術 War for Peace). This practice led to the misunderstanding between 气 and 氣. Indeed, for a martist, the image of, not a bowl like it is often described, but of rice in a just cooked pot, contains a lot of themes used in training: water and fire represent the Feminine and Masculine principles and their interaction, the rice the fact that one is working on essence, vapours that heat, hence the Masculine principle, has to take over, and being in a pot with the lid on, pressure, another important part in training. This, in a way, perfectly illustrates the versatility of internal practices as far as writing is concerned in the sense that it is literary incorrect to state that 氣 represents vapours on a bowl of rice but correct to explain it as such if one wants to make a point to his/her students as far as training is concerned. 

- Creating a new character was also another possibility. The aim was the same, illustrating some training principle(s). Creating new characters was made by other dialects like Cantonese, minorities like Sawndip, or very few times powerful people like Wu Zetian, the first Chinese empress, or known ones, Jackie Chan being one of the latest people to do it. Hence, looking at hand written old martial texts, one sometimes can spot what seems to be a wrongly written character. Without the proper key, it just becomes that. 

- If the use of characters as a syllabic script, like the one of the Nüshu or the Japanese man'yōgana, does not seem to have been used, homophony was a way to avoid outsiders understanding what was talked about. Still, between the dialects and the evolution of pronunciation through times, it would be hard to decipher homophony in an old text. This is therefore limited to contemporary transmission.

Nowadays texts being more a description of techniques and a few principles, the old riddles and else methods are a thing of the past. Furthermore, a lot of old schools strictly kept an oral transmission, which makes that they are numerous texts about the 气, but only a few describing internal arts methods. It is also striking, but it’s probably a by-product of the leisurely transformation of old arts, that what was supposed to be explained in a simple and understandable way, even for complex notions, has now and then been replaced by the use of quite hard to grasp concepts sometimes not even fully translated.

*This poem is also coming from the Spring and Autumn Annals of Wu and Yue. It is interesting because there is nothing classical about it and it is actually one of the few written transcriptions of an oral tradition of enigmatic poems/folk songs coming from remote ages. The cryptic meaning is in fact a good example of one of the methods used by old internal practices which, after all, also come from folk culture.

**To be understood as one’s self-nature in the present translation.

***Louis Cha, a Famous Hong Kong martial arts novels author, who unfortunately passed away very recently.

****The emergence of boxing manuals at the end of the Ming and the beginning of the Qing dynasties is often seen as due to an openness of the Chinese society, few make the link with the development of more and more vernacular literature.

*****Indeed, this was introduced at a time during the Song Dynasty, where the elite started to think that the civil sphere should predominate over the martial one. And it was easier for scholars to learn and pass the physical exams, such as archery and horse riding, than for the martial artists to learn to read such classics and write about them. Most of the people who passed those exams refused to go in the army and immediately took the opportunity to be enrolled in a scholar course. In practice, martial exams became a second chance for those who repeatedly couldn’t pass the civil ones.

°Even until recently, jokes about misunderstandings between close-by countryside and town people due to their different but close dialects were common in China.