Buddha: Desire and Frustration

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Here we have a statement of the Four Truths, which are not four principles, but merely one principle, with four statements asserted about it. The principle: desire for what will not be attained ends in frustration; therefore, to avoid frustration, avoid desiring what will not be attained. The four statements: (1) Unhappiness consists in frustration (dissatisfaction, anxiety). (2) It originates in desiring what will not be attained. (3) It ceases when one ceases to desire what will not be attained. (4) The method is to seek the middle way between wanting things to be more than they are or less than they are with respect to the way that they are.  If this be Gotama’s doctrine, surely we are all followers of Gotoma, assenting to the truth of his principle, even if, unhappily, we fail to practice it to perfection.”
The Philosophy of the Buddha

So – basically – want what you have.  Don’t desire what you cannot have.  If you are injured, accept it.  If you might die, accept it.

Awareness in fighting is about acceptance.  Accepting what is allows us to not “gild the lily” but to be open to what is actually happening.  If we are always resisting reality (“It’s not so bad!” or “This sucks!” or “I don’t believe it”) then we are in the habit of deceiving ourselves and this colors over into fighting.  How do we enter a fight calmly and just respond to what happens (not what we imagine to be happening, colored by fear and anxiety).

In Buddhism, they talk of clinging to an outcome.  This is clinging.  How do we not concern ourselves with the outcome of the fight but stay in the moment and respond to what is happening now, without anxiety over what might happen (injury, death)?

In discussions of Zen in the context of sword fighting, they talk of being on the razor’s edge, or the edge of the sword.  Death is on either side and the warrior has equanimity.  To die is simply to return to the “all.”  Can we find that place, on the edge of the sword, and stay there, all the time?

In Band of Brothers, the HBO show about World War II and the paratroopers who jumped behind enemy lines at D-Day, there is one Lieutenant who amazes all the troops with his bravery.  He doesn’t seem to fear death.  At one point, there is an enemy machine gun set up by a farmhouse controlling a field of fire they need to cross.  Everyone is pinned down, under cover.  The Lieutenant jogs across the field of fire like he’s jogging down a suburban street in peacetime and flanks the machine gun.  Later, a soldier name Blythe confesses to the officer how afraid he is and how this is debilitating him.

“Blythe,” the Lieutenant  says,”the only hope you have is to accept the fact that you’re already dead.”

 

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Longevity and the “Centenarian Olympics”

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“Although average global life expectancy more than doubled between 1800 and 2017 – from 30 to 73 years – the report says the proportion of people’s lives lived in poor or moderate health has remained unchanged at 50%.”
WEforum.org

“If I want to live to 100, what do I have to physically be able to do to be satisfied with my life?”
Dr. Peter Attia

Over the last three or four years, I have been slowly shifting the focus of how I spend my “disposable time” from “becoming a capable fighter in the Wing Chun system” to “being a healthy old man” who can also fight pretty well, considering.  Of course, I’m just starting to creep into old man territory (I turn 60 this year) but its best to get ahead of these things.  Does this mean I’m discarding my martial ambitions?  No, but it does mean I’m changing how I pursue them.

Almost all of my “spare time” (time not spent on my job, my relationship, or sleeping and eating) is spent working in one way or another toward a general goal of “self-actualization.”  Dr. Abraham Maslow defined this as a “self-fulfillment…to become more and more what one is, to become everything that one is capable of becoming.”  For me this means studying in a few areas of interest (film, literature, certain sciences, armed and unarmed combat and all that entails) and working toward developing myself physically, mentally, and spiritually.  In practice, this has meant having a semi-strict diet, having a baseline exercise routine, training in martial arts, and working (to some degree) on developing my mind through study.

Of course, all of this has been intermittently successful and more or less rigorous.  I’m more disciplined than many and not as much as some.  I make my priorities and work at implementing them.  I struggle with tendencies toward laziness.

This can all be thought of as a framework.  I have my goals and these activities are the various pillars of my overall plan.  In the last few years, one of the principal shifts has been away from “training toward my goals and just trying to avoid injury” toward this idea of “how do I have a healthy active life for the next however long I have left?” with a side order of “I’m still interested in having as much martial capability as possible.”

One of the key resources I’ve used to guide this shift has been information I’ve picked up from Dr. Peter Attia.  I first heard of him on Tim Ferris’s podcast and then I subsequently started listening to his podcast.  According to his website:

“Peter earned his M.D. from Stanford University and holds a B.Sc. in mechanical engineering and applied mathematics. He trained for five years at the Johns Hopkins Hospital in general surgery…spent two years at NIH as a surgical oncology fellow at the National Cancer Institute…(and) has since been mentored by some of the most experienced and innovative lipidologists, endocrinologists, gynecologists, sleep physiologists, and longevity scientists in the United States and Canada…(He is) a physician focusing on the applied science of longevity…(dealing) extensively with nutritional interventions, exercise physiology, sleep physiology, emotional and mental health, and pharmacology to increase lifespan (how long you live), while simultaneously improving healthspan (the quality of your life).”

OK. That all lines up nicely with what I am interested in knowing!  The thing is, there is just way too much information out there these days!  So I am a big fan of finding someone who has expertise and who has done a lot of the heavy lifting for me.  This is why I study martial arts with people like Greg LeBlanc and Bernard Langan and why I find people like Peter Attia who can vett all this medical information for me and just listen to his advice (with some fact checking and analysis thrown in).

Peter came up with a useful framework for this set of concepts he calls the “Centenarian Olympics.”  He shares my goal of being as healthy as possible as long as possible but he has thought about it in a lot more detail with a great deal more (Western scientific) knowledge to back up his conclusions.  The way he went about it was to reverse-engineer the question.  How long can we hope to live?

Well, the most you can expect is in the ballpark of 120 years (Jeanne Calment lived to 122).  Most people don’t live much past 79, in the US.

statue of Neptune

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“Think” and Win Fights

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“”I am afraid of fighting. I am afraid of being beaten and losing. But I am more afraid of surviving as a cripple than dying in a fight.”
Fighter in the Wind, a biopic of Mas Oyama, founder of Kyokushin Karate

When I studied Tae Kwan Do back in High School, my teacher (Sergeant Dennis H. Frye) described seeing a 16mm film of Mas Oyama knocking out a bull with his bare hands and chopping off a horn.  I retold that story many times in my teens and early 20s  (in my story, I was shown the film by Sgt. Frye).  Now you can see that film on Youtube (although he wrestles it to the ground by the horns and the chopping off of the horn is not shown but done with a film edit) .

I was pretty “good” at TKD, which in my training emphasized head kicks (roundhouse), spinning kicks, and the side kick, with a little bit of punching — drills up and down the school in synchronization, like in Enter the Dragon.

Over time, recalling what we were doing, I would get confused, since since Sgt. Frye also referred to what we were doing as Karate.  Now I know Tae Kwan Do was a blanket term for the fight training that was going on in Korea at the end of  WWII, which had a lot of Karate influence (Karate itself being an amalgam of White Crane by way of a Chinese manual and a local form called “te”).  I guess everything influences everything.

One of my treasured moments from those Sgt. Frye classes was a time when I was doing round house kicks (and I was fast and whippy and flexible at age 16) and he asked me if I was “locking out fully.”  He had to ask because I was doing it so fast he couldn’t see.  I slowed it down just a bit, pausing at the lockout, and he said “someday, you’ll make a hell of a karate man.”

It was difficult to repress my smile!

When I look at the documentary below (about Mas Oyama), most of what I see is what we did in my school, including the breaking.  But we didn’t punch the makiwara (the post wrapped in rope) since we trained first in a Air Force community center and later in the elementary school gym.  But we also lacked something else, at least in my experience.

My problem with the training I received was that I never had any confidence in it!  And as I got older, I realized that this confidence is the key factor in fighting, the most important factor.  If you are going to do a hardcore striking style like Karate or Wing Chun, you need to figure out how to train in such a way that you can develop your confidence in the power of your strikes (and kicks) to damage the opponent and shot down their offense.

Because in real fighting, milliseconds count.  At my peak, I could have done that Jean-Claude Van Damme trick of kicking the cigarette from your mouth.  I could roundhouse someone in the head standing at Wing Chun bent-arm distance.  But the problem was – would I (in a real fight situation)?  Could I?  Kicking someone in the head requires a certain cold-bloodedness on the one hand and a certain belief in oneself on the other.

You will find that in this blog, I circle back around to this idea over and over (and its is one of the reasons I call my book Wing Chun Mind).  Its similar to Gary Lam’s Geng Ging idea.  You can think it, but can you do it?  You can hit the bag in the gym, but can you hit a person in the face?   It’s not the same!

This is the big advantage that people who spar with head gear regularly have over the rest of us.  They are used to that action of hitting the head of a human being (and one who is moving and trying not to be hit).  We can simulate this in class, but its not the same!  Even sparring is not the same, because in sparring, there is only a tiny fraction of the emotions happening.  In real fighting, you are afraid or angry and these emotional responses kick off a “para-sympathetic nervous system” response.  This creates a whole complicated series of changes in your body chemistry which both assist (you don’t feel the pain) and detract (its harder to see, you are impulsive, you may find yourself running without planning to run).

“Each of us has his cowardice. Each of us is afraid to lose, afraid to die. But hanging back is the way to remain a coward for life. The Way to find courage is to seek it on the field of conflict. And the sure way to victory is willingness to risk one’s own life.”
Mas Oyama

“Subjecting yourself to vigorous training is more for the sake of forging a resolute spirit that can vanquish the self than it is for developing a strong body.”
Mas Oyama

So how do you proceed considering all of this?  You train.  Training works on not only your body (endurance, reflexes, skills) but on your will.  Pushing through your fear in a confrontation is an act of will.  Training when you don’t feel like it is an act of will.  Training also gets you used to the scenario, “someone is throwing an attack my way.”   And even when you don’t spar, in most forms of training, every once in a while, accidents happen.  You get hit.  You get a little bit used to being hit.  You get used to chasing a moving target with your attacks.

“There is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so.”
William Shakespeare

This is the trick and its one you might want to keep thinking about as you train.  Modern Sports Psychology has proven the effectiveness of visualization.  So visualize yourself in fights.  Try and be realistic.  Fights can be incredibly fast and vicious.  How can we simulate these conditions in class?  You can only go so far, even with sparring.  This is the great thing about some of the best movie fights.  This is the useful thing about all the Youtube streetfights.  Imagine yourself in the middle of a wild fight just kicking off.  What do you do?  It’s fast!  The opponent(s) are young and strong and you are having to cope with some wild energy.  Has your training prepared you?  In the old days, and not just in the Hong Kong challenge matches, people would learn to fight in brawls or wars or both.  Most of us don’t have those “teachers.”  So we have to use our imaginations.  Train.  Then picture yourself in the fight, winning.  Rinse and repeat.