Finding Bamboo, Iron and Cotton

筋是功能之本，骸是功能之基，氣是功能之源

Fascias are the origin of capability, the skeleton its foundation, vapours its source.

筋骨之強弱，肌肉之堅脆，皮膚之厚薄，腠理之疏密，各不同

The sturdiness of the bones and the fascias, the firmness of the flesh, the thickness of the skin, the density of the lineaments, are each not alike¹.

Before starting with the Bamboo training, one has to realise where this new realm of training comes from. Being an oral tradition, there are still a lot of training in Chinese martial arts which haven’t been put into writing or systematised. Furthermore, with the decline of such old practices, a lot has been lost, including independent practices, such as animal walks, which disappeared and spread out, becoming a particular training in different styles. Bamboo, Iron and Cotton, BIC, wasn’t an independent practice, just some training for already transformed bodies.
Hence, one won’t find a lot of documentation on the method as a whole, but just remains in some exercises. After briefly mentioning the best known exercises remaining, a short introduction of the method will be made.

I. Palms, Vest and Spinning

The best known remains of the BIC method are certainly the three palms training, the iron vest and the drunken fist.

1.1 Vermillion, Iron and Cotton Palms

朱砂掌，鐵砂掌 and 棉砂掌 are ways of training the hands, often having them hit or play with different kinds of gravel, hence 砂. There are different ways of writing them, 砂 being sometimes written 沙 for sand, gravel, and 棉 sometimes 綿 for continuous, soft, weak, silk floss, cotton wad, a character mentioned in a previous post. There are also other palms with different training. In the BIC method, they are supposed to follow the principles of each stage and come after training the rest of the body.

1.2 Iron Vest

鐵布衫, to make it simple, is a very well-known training, supposedly making one’s body impervious to weapons at its higher stages. It is this mystical skill the Society of the Righteous and Harmonious Fists pretended to have refined to a point making them resistant to bullets during the Boxer Rebellion. They were proved wrong.

Apart from its legendary uses, the iron vest is a way to harden one’s fascias in the BIC method, pushing the locks to their extreme and hitting one’s body in different manners, another method known as 拍打功, the patting-hitting skill.

1.3 Spirits

The drunken fist is also part of the BIC. Drunken fist is a more appealing name for what was called the swaying fist, 擺拳. This very particular way of training which contradicts most of the alignment rules followed previously in the straight, round and locked method². This fist is the embodiment of the bamboo, a lot of expressions such as pressing the bamboo, 壓竹, pulling the bamboo, 拉竹, bamboo blown by the wind, 風吹竹, and so on are used during such training.

All those exercises lead to a particular method, aimed to strengthen the body, the BIC.

II. Introducing The Method

Straight, round and locked are a way to switch from creating power from muscle contraction to a fascia elasticity based one. Keeping low postures allows to learn how to control one’s heartbeats through proper breathing and produce heat by pressuring the organs. The BIC method will use those acquired skills to improve them.

2.1 Improving Elasticity

In a way, straight, round and locked destructure a body used to work with muscle contraction while BIC will learn to improve the new structure obtained. Indeed, once the fascias become the main source of power, it’s all a question of strengthening them. In other words, external makes muscles stronger and harder while internal focuses on doing it for the fascias.

2.2 Improving The Mental

Having learned to control one’s heartbeat by maintaining a proper breathing while holding low postures, BIC will put the body in even more challenging conditions (pain, extreme heat, uncomfortable postures…) to work on deeper breathing techniques.

2.3 Creating More Heat

Vapours are created by heat, BIC, by increasing the intensity of one’s training, will have the body sweat even more. Furthermore, it will be the time to explore how breathing can change one’s body temperature.

The BIC method has, of course, many other avenues of research, only the most common ones have been introduced. In the next post on the subject, the purpose of the bamboo training will be described.

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1 黃帝內經 靈樞經 論痛 Yellow Emperor Inner Classics, Divine Pivot, Discussing Ache. To make the translation more readable, the opposites described in the Chinese text, a bit redundant in English, sturdiness/feebleness, firmness/brittleness, thickness/thinness, and scatteredness/density have been omitted.

2 Which is a simple application of the voiding method.