Interview with Jarek Szymanski – Part 3

PART 3

Jarek: So, as we discussed last time, it was my first year in Beijing and I was training at least 4-5 hours per day. This was not unusual for me, I was used to hard training – even before I went to China I was training about this much, normally from 7-12am in my Praying Mantis. My wife was not happy with me actually, as at that time we had just had our first child, as you can imagine!

So anyway, one of my favourite haunts in Beijing at that time was Liulichang, which is one of the downtown districts that at the time still had a lot of the traditional stone buildings, and housed a concentration of antique shops and second-hand bookstores.

Liulichang as it looks now – still full of shops selling artworks, calligraphy and second hand books

It was through these bookstores that I met both my first teachers of Daoism and taijiquan. In the case of the Daoist teacher, I was just visiting one of the stores selling antiques in  Liulichang when I got chatting to a guy who said his name was Freedom. I told him that I was interested in meditation and qigong. When he mentioned that he was studying Daoist meditation from a traditional teacher and offered to introduce me, I jumped at the chance.

Because it was only one year after the Tiananmen Incident and the 1990 Asian Games were on at that time, the atmosphere was pretty tense. I met the teacher in the backyard of one of Liulichang’s shops, which belonged to Freedom, where he started to teach me the basics of ‘practical’ or applied Daoism, Nei Dan (internal alchemy) practice. The teacher was actually a member of the Beijing Daoist Research Association. The same teacher also practiced Yiquan and started to teach me some basic stance holding (zhan zhuang) and force testing (shi li). A basic example would be feeling the resistance between the two palms in the open/close force testing (kai he shi li). Actually this feeling is not just between the two palms, once your practice deepens you should feel this resistance between, say the leading hand and the back foot, and so on. The famous taiji master Hao Weizhen also talks about this in his writings, about how you feel as if you are doing the form in water. My bagua teacher also mentioned similar concepts.

The concept was to relax first – using certain visualizations; then find the feeling of resistance between “big” parts of the body to achieve the coordinated movement of the body as a whole. Later on the feeling should be sought between smaller parts of the body – and so on, until one can feel it in every cell of the body. My teacher would compare it to a breaking an empty bottle, sticking the parts together, then breaking it again – into smaller pieces – and sticking them into a bottle again. The process would continue until one could glue atoms together to form the bottle.

Liulichang was also the place where I met Xu Hong, who would eventually introduce me to my Chen style taiji teacher. I was reading a couple of books about taiji (by Yang Yuting and Chen Xiaowang) in one of the bookshops and a guy just introduced himself to me, saying he studied taiji but it was not Yang style. The weird thing is, the night before this coincidental meeting I had had a dream that I would learn Chen style taiji. So I put it down to what the Chinese call yuanfen (fate), and agreed to meet this guy’s teacher. I later found out that Xu was from Dongbei – northeast China – and had trained as an artist but was working as a graphic designer. His teacher, Liu Wunian, lived out in the suburbs of Beijing outside the 3^rd Ring Road, which was considered quite far out at the time – although now of course Beijing has five ring roads!

Liu lived in a very humble single storey brick house. He was a very sweet guy with a great sense of humour. He had originally learnt Shaolin and some of Li Ruidong’s material in his hometown of Wuqing county near Tianjin and then had learnt taijiquan from Chen Zhaokui when he moved to Beijing. I spent the next couple of years learning the first routine (Yi Lu) and push hands from Liu. Liu’s push hands practice was focused more on developing listening energy (ting jin), not as much focus on qinna as other students of Chen Zhaokui. About a year after I’d started studying, a student of another famous Chen style teacher in Beijing visited us and I, as the only foreign student, was of course asked to push with him. During the push hands, he felt like he was losing face and so started to do a lock against my finger joints. It was very painful, and pissed me off. Instead of stopping pushing, I just shoved him with all my force, and flung him horizontally onto a kang in the corner of the room. To my surprise, instead of being angry at me for not using taiji principles, Liu laoshi was very happy that I had beaten the student.

JN: There is a common idea in Traditional CMA that secrets are withheld until you become a disciple. Did the baishi ceremony change the material you were taught?

JS: No, to be honest the baishi ceremony didn’t change what I was learning from Liu Wunian. Generally in martial arts I think that this idea of there being ‘secrets’ which revolutionise the way the practice the art and are reserved only for close disciples is wrong. What makes one martial artist very effective versus someone who cannot use it or apply it is mostly just hard work, eating bitter, training something until it becomes a part of you.

Old picture of Feng Zhiqiang practicing in Tiantan park in Beijing

Actually Feng Zhiqiang – one of Chen Fake’s senior disciples – lived very close to Liu, only about 10 minutes’ walk away. Liu did actually recommend that I try and study from Feng for a short while, and I did have some private lessons with a student of Feng’s called Zhang, but the mechanics of what Zhang was teaching were very different from what I had learned from Liu, so I didn’t pursue that any further. At the same time I continued my practice of Liang style bagua and Shang style Xingyi.

Apart from practicing Chen style taiji, Xu Hong was also very into Yiquan (aka Dachengquan), which he was studying from a teacher named Bai Jinjia (白金甲). This included the standing postures as well as the force testing and friction stepping (moca bu). Xu’s idea was a bit like that of Dai Kui when he was teaching Dai style xinyiquan, in that each student was expected to master a certain part of the art. For example, in Dai Kui’s case, Wang Yinghai was supposed to have really mastered the xinyi footwork.  From what I heard, Bai’s forte was qin’na.

Wang Xuanjie demonstrating a combat pose

Amongst the foreign students at BLCU there were several guys who were also into martial arts. One day during the summer of 1991, one of them, a Yugoslavian guy, mentioned that he was studying Dachengquan from a teacher in Beijing, and offered to introduce me. When he mentioned that his teacher was Wang Xuanjie – a famous Dacheng Quan master who authored one of the first books about the art in English – I jumped at the chance. So we cycled over to Wang’s house, which was a traditional courtyard (siheyuan) in western Beijing, near Xizhimen. The feeling in that place when we got there was very strange. When we entered, Wang was half-lying on a kang, the heated brick bed which is common in northern China, and being attended to by a girl with a shaved head. It later transpired that she was looking after him. Wang Xuanjie was quite old and had run to fat by that time, and didn’t look very healthy. He didn’t show us any of his skill, we just made some polite chit-chat, took photos and then went on our way.