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1 C H A P T E R 1 Introduction Iam a student of the Chinese martial arts. Beyond practice, however, I have always been fascinated by martial arts culture and history. I first followed that fascination by reading every book and article I could track down on the martial arts. I borrowed an old copy of the out-ofprint Secrets of Shaolin Temple Boxing by Robert W. Smith from my college library and renewed it at least five times. I faithfully subscribed to enthusiast magazines like Black Belt and Inside Kung Fu. As my engagement with the practical training deepened, I began to sense that the very kinetics of the martial arts—the postures, movements , vocalizations, and facial expressions—embodied a sensibility that was very much “other.” That otherness, naturally, should have something to do with the origins and long history of the martial arts in Asia. When I began training in the mid-1970s, most martial arts schools in North America identified themselves as belonging to one or another East Asian (Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Okinawan) tradition. Beginners were required to learn a set of conventional ritual gestures, expressions, and vocalizations, memorize a few anecdotes about the founding and history of the style, a bit of “philosophy,” and some version of the myth (presented as historical fact) of Bodhidharma and the Shaolin Temple. Fascinating as all this was, it seemed disjointed and incomplete; it didn’t explain much about either the practice or the history of the practice. Popular martial arts books and magazines did little to fill in the gaps. This literature was mostly produced by the same practitioners who consumed it, and it mostly restated and reinforced the existing preconceptions and prejudices of the American martial arts subculture . Perhaps even more disappointing, what few references to the martial arts I could find in works of serious sinology displayed pitifully little real knowledge or understanding of the martial arts and tended to minimize their cultural and historical significance (cf. Henning 1999). I thought, and hoped, that someone could do better.1 2 gods, ghosts, and gangsters The present work is partly a response to that challenge. Yet this is not a book about the Chinese fighting arts themselves. I have left for other scholars many of the topics that one might hope or expect to find in a book about the nexus between religion and the Chinese martial arts. I do not, for example, discuss the important (though occasionally exaggerated) role of Buddhist monks or Daoist adepts in the development and promulgation of martial arts techniques and lore.2 I do not trace the origins of Chinese combat techniques, nor do I explore the traditional Chinese (or contemporary American) relationship between martial arts discipline and spiritual cultivation. The study of the martial arts in themselves and their co-evolution with other aspects of Chinese culture is an enormous (and much-neglected) field of research. No single book, and probably no single scholar can hope to cover it all.3 Yet I hope this book will be received, at least in part, as a contribution to the still nascent field of martial arts scholarship.4 The martial arts are present here in every chapter, from representations of the Chinese knight-errant (wuxia) tradition to the ritual and iconographic styles of Chinese Daoism and popular religion; the narrative and dramaturgical conventions of classical vernacular literature and performance ; and the gestures, expressions, and speech of modern Chinese and Taiwanese jianghu (underworld) society (lit. “rivers and lakes”; for an explanation of the term see chapter 2). Interviews with martial arts masters and years of interaction with martial arts teachers and students have been critical to the framing of the topic. Without reliable research and informed commentary on the martial arts, our knowledge of Chinese society and culture in general is uneven and incomplete. At the same time—here I am speaking to my fellow martial arts enthusiasts in particular—our understanding of the martial arts will remain inadequate until we recognize the ways that they have evolved in China within a unique cultural frame, persistently influenced and enriched by (and in turn influencing and enriching) a variety of practices, such as folk religion and narrative traditions, that are essential components of what we generally think of as traditional Chinese culture. Without better knowledge of the cultural context and historical process, we are left with a partial, even distorted, understanding of our own practice. A Felicitous Conjunction I had already been studying Chinese...

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