For Shaolin Ways Episode 5: The Eight-Section Brocade, click here.

Baduanjin, a.k.a. the Eight-Section Brocade, is one of the most popular forms of qigong in the world. Dating back to the Song Dynasty (960-1279 CE), there are innumerable variations now. My Brocade roots lie within Shaolin style. The first time I was officially taught the Brocade was at Shaolin Temple under my master, Shaolin monk Shi Decheng. However, I’ve always been one to study beyond my school, so I’ve learned many versions, each of which had concepts that I found valuable.

O-Mei Brocade

In the nineties, I trained under Master Tony Chen. He had an eclectic curriculum predominantly based on his O-Mei roots (O-Mei was his spelling of Emei, one of the sacred Buddhist mountains located in the southwestern region of China from where he hailed). His version of the Brocade was unique, components of which he would use for warm-up or cool-down exercises, and occasionally as preparations for applications.  Being a Sanda and Muay Thai Champion, as well as a Police combat trainer, Tony was big on applications. 

The Brocade is not typically considered a martial form of Qigong, despite the 7^th section, Grasp Fists with Angry Eyes, Increase Qi Power.  Those are always punches recited in slow motion, ala Tai Chi, but I’ve not seen it propounded as a self-defense method.  Tony had a distinct variation for the 4^th section, Five Toils, Seven Wounds, Look Backwards.  Most practitioners stand straight like a tree and turn their head to ‘look backwards’, but Tony’s version was done in stance.  It was a twisting movement, alternating from bow stance, transitioning through horse stance, and ending in bow on the opposite side. The head is turned and the arms, which are usually kept by the sides, are held wide in a large arc.  Tony could implement this as a violent takedown, reminiscent of an Aikido technique. It didn’t quite feel like part of the Brocade, but it was a great stretching exercise and I kept it for a long time as part of my daily calisthenics. I still revisit now and again.

Because the Brocade is one of the most common forms of Qigong, it is practiced by countless advocates so there are a lot of variations. And over the years, Kung Fu Tai Chi ran numerous articles on the Brocade. We published a very martial variation back in 2004. "The Eight Section Brocade of General Yue Fei: Qigong for the Warrior" by PengCheng Chen and Feng Wu.  It came out in two parts, Part 1 in the January+February 2004 and Part 2 in the March+April 2004.  It’s a great version, but you must have extremely strong good legs to be able to execute such deep stances. Given the attribution to General Yue Fei, this version is very martial. 

Similarly, the Brocade propounded by Grandmaster Tu Jin Sheng’s instructional video, Eight Pieces of Brocade, also has a more martial vibe like General Yue Fei’s version or Master Tony Chen’s version. All of them promote strong stance work.

Just prior to the 2008 Olympics, the Brocade became an integral part of my practice. I remember it well because my life changed. I contracted pink eye at the Tiger Claw Elite Championships and while getting meds from my doctor, I asked if that might have been somehow related to my increasing neck pain. My doc found that curious and ran some tests. The result was that I was diagnosed with cervical arthritis. My Doc asked me if I’d ever been hit in the neck. As a lifelong martial artist, that was likely, however I don’t recall any specific incident that would leave me scarred for life. I went through years of treatment – physical therapy, drug therapy, even acupuncture – with little improvement. I started to do the Brocade daily because it had some simple neck calisthenics. And it was my redemption.

The great thing about the Brocade is that it’s self-moderated. If I’m feeling strong, I can go deep with my stances and do more repetitions. If I’m not well, I can do it lightly and softly and there is still benefit. And I had an unexpected side benefit. I’ve suffered from crippling allergies ever since I moved to California as a kid. I went through every therapy imaginable. After I started doing the Brocade regularly, that went away. I still get allergy attacks, but they have been more tolerable. And if I become lax in my Brocade practice, both my arthritis and allergies re-emerge.

IHQF Brocade

Perhaps it was a peripheral result of Modern Wushu’s failure to become an Olympic event in Beijing, but in 2008, China began aggressively promoting Qigong. An organization called the China Health Qigong Association had emerged. This was soon renamed the International Health Qigong Association, and now it’s the International Health Qigong Federation (IHQF). Initially the IHQF followed the model of Modern Wushu: standardizing forms, certifying coaches and oddly, staging competitions. Those competitions even included nandu or ‘difficulty movements’, akin to the skills in gymnastics. I have a hard time with the idea of Qigong competitions. Like Yoga, the notion of these meditative disciplines as a competitive sport just doesn’t seem authentic. However, I do endorse this Qigong standardization.

That might seem contradictory because I’m a strong advocate of diversity and variation. I’ve been outspoken about my general disdain for some of the standardization imposed by Modern Wushu. That betrays my traditional roots. However now, I’ve changed my opinion on a lot of this. I used to reject Nanquan because it felt like such a simplification, even a caricature, of the colorful southern styles of Kung Fu. I’m not attached to this notion anymore. Traditional Hung Gar practitioners will continue to practice traditional Hung Gar, regardless of Modern Wushu. And Modern Wushu, with all of its grace a poise, can use something a little more macho. It’s martial arts, after all.

In a similar vein, I also rejected the Modern Wushu version of Taijiquan because the nandu seemed antithetical. When the serenity of Tai Chi was disrupted by some explosive flying kick into splits, that felt jarring. But then I realized how difficult it is to do what top level Wushu Taiji competitors do. Combining nandu with Taiji energy requires such quick contrast and now it’s one of my favorite events to watch. That defensive stance about martial modernization is limiting. Perhaps as I’ve grown older, I’ve become more accepting. Modern Wushu is just another practice and who am I to judge?

The standardized versions of Qigong have their usefulness, particularly when it comes to research. For example, if you’re studying something like improvements in immunity systems using the Brocade, you might get different results depending upon which version you use. The Shaolin Brocade is different than the O-Mei Brocade, likewise for the General Yue Fei and Grandmaster Tu versions, and so many countless others. With the IHQF version, a standard can be isolated for scientific research. What’s more, if you know a Brocade, it’s not hard to learn the IHQF version. That’s completely different from a traditional Kung Fu practitioner trying to learn a Modern Wushu 720. Only the competition Qigong has nandu. It’s not required for the standardized version.

I learned the IHQF version at some workshops that the Tiger Claw Foundation sponsored. It came at the right time for me as my Brocade practice had solidified. We helped disseminate that IHQF version in "The 8 Section Brocade" by Annie Rose November+December 2009.

Now I had three major versions: Shaolin, O-Mei and IHQF, plus a lot of odd notions from materials I had seen or read. I fused them all together into my own interpretation. Each had some valuable qualities to my needs. My eight sections expanded to fifteen, so I often said that I practiced Shiwuduanjin (Fifteen-Section Brocade). It took me up to half an hour to recite, assuming I did eight repetitions on each side (I figured I should preserve eight somewhere for Feng Shui).

Return to the Shaolin Brocade

In 2017, Shi Decheng visited the San Francisco Bay Area and taught workshops at several Shaolin schools. This was predominantly organized by my Shaolin brother, Master ‘Andy’ Ye Xinglie through his school Shaolin Kungfu Zen. Decheng had been visiting the United States regularly, mostly at the behest of my disciple brother, Master Scott Jeffrey, at his school Jade Forest Kung Fu & Tai Chi in Rockland, Massachusetts. However, he had not visited my area since our 20^th Anniversary in 2012, and I was too busy working to make that happen to take any lessons. Prior to that visit, I had not seen my master since 2007, when we hosted him to teach at the O-Mei Kung Fu Academy. So, it had been a decade since I took a formal lesson from him.

That first year that Master Andy hosted Decheng, the workshops focused on Qixing Mantis. In late 2018, the following year, Decheng returned to Shaolin Kungfu Zen to teach Da Luohan and, to get back on topic here, the Brocade. So, I relearned the Shaolin Eight-Section Brocade once more, and this time, because it was part of my daily practice, I paid much better attention. Or I thought I did at least. I decided that my hybrid amalgamate Shiwuduanjin was getting too cumbersome so I let go of it and scaled back to this Shaolin version that Shi Decheng originally taught me. When recited properly, it has everything that I need, and eight movements was far more efficient than fifteen.

The transition was rough at first. I was more efficient but dropping a lot of those moves had consequences that irked my body and mind until adapted back to the original protocol. What’s more, the following year, my practice space at work changed. For the past seven years, I’ve been living by the sea, some forty miles away from the Tiger Claw facility in Fremont. It was a brutal commute over a mountain range, across the Silicon Valley. I worked 7-to-3s instead of 9-to-5s to avoid the traffic crunch. I’d arrive at the office before daybreak and start in on the day’s chores. At around 8 or so, before the rest of the staff arrived, I’d take a break to do my qigong and a few forms in our office, green room, or studio.

And then, early in 2019 just as I was settling back into the Shaolin Brocade, we lost that space. Our entire luxurious TC Media International office space had to be sublet because we just could not afford to sustain it. As anyone who visited our publishing headquarters can tell you, it was a tremendous loss. It was a glorious space, adorned with art and history. We made a video before we had to dismantle the KungFuMagzine.com offices to document it for posterity. 

Losing that space was tragic. Our crew had worked there for over twenty years. For me personally, doing a light practice there every weekday morning was a rare privilege. Our office was surrounded by all our back issues. It inspired me to be under the watchful gaze of all our cover masters. The walls in the green room were adorned with magnificent calligraphy by renowned grandmasters and those paintings just radiated qi. And so many masters and grandmasters had demonstrated in our studio. I imagined I could absorb some of their residual qi by osmosis. It was a wonderous space to practice – such powerful Feng Shui – and practicing there was my private perk.    

For a few months after the move, my practice was off. There wasn’t a good practice space at the new office, nowhere I could be alone. Our new workspace was much smaller and didn’t have the room. The warehouse crew came early too so I couldn’t grab privacy. My practice came askew until several months later when a new studio was built. I suffered for it. My allergies and arthritis flared. What’s more, I started getting more random injuries. Now that I’m past the half-century mark, I don’t heal as quickly. I was struck how profound the effects were for skipping my Brocade.

After the new studio was built, I resumed my early morning practice. Later in 2019, Shi Decheng came to California again at the behest of Master Andy Ye. Decheng went over the Brocade once more. Realizing I had the opportunity to go deep and get some questions that had been nagging me all year answered, I arranged for him to come to our new studio to shoot an article and video. An advantage of my position is that I can research topics to a depth that most cannot, and I had a full crew to back me up. But mostly, I wanted to nail my Shifu down on the finer points for my own personal use without having a class of workshop participants to distract him.

That article ‘Unravelling the 8 Section Brocade’ by me and my Shaolin brother, Jeff Hung, appeared in our SPRING 2020. We went all out with it, producing a special poster of the Brocade exclusively for subscribers. The issue hit newsstands in early February. We didn’t know then that it would be our last.

That’s when the pandemic emerged and much to our chagrin, or perhaps a sign of magnitude of the coming catastrophe, our subscription fulfillment was delayed. We usually sent issues to our subscribers a few weeks prior to the newsstand date so they could get them in advance. However, our envelopes were printed in China and the container that contained those envelopes got held up at customs. Everything coming from China to the United States was held up in the early days of the pandemic. 

As I mentioned at the start of the previous chapter, Shaolin Ways Episode 5: The Eight-Section Brocade, this web article was to coincide with the latter weeks of the newsstand run of our SPRING 2020. That should’ve been April. However, the Shelter-in-Place order shut down production prior to that. It shut down the newsstands too, which was the final cut of a thousand cuts that ended our print magazine. My final act as a regular employee of TC Media was to post the Eight-Section Brocade video we made with Shi Decheng, also to accompany this issue.

I was planning to return to Shaolin this year. I’ve not been back since 2004 and 2020 marked the 20^th Anniversary of my Shifu’s school, the Shi De Cheng Wushu Center of Song-Shan Shaolin. At one point, he had two brick-and-mortar schools. I only visited one of them. The other came and went during the last decade or so. Now he teaches through Grandmaster Chen Tongshan’s school but it’s still under his banner. He summoned all his students and disciples around the world to come back for a big celebration and the American contingent was making plans to travel together. It was going to be a grand reunion, but instead, it was just one more event that the pandemic stole from us.

Finishing this article feels like closing the final chapter of our final issue. There’s still a chance that we might publish what would have been our SUMMER 2020 issue. We were so close to completing it when the Shelter-in-Place shut us down. When the pandemic subsides, hopefully we’ll be able to see that through.

Until then, please keep supporting MartialArtSmart and Tiger Claw. These companies are the benefactors of KungFuMagazine.com. Without them, KungFuMagazine will cease operation and like our print magazine vanished off the newsstands, this website will be shut down. Through these difficult times, the martial arts world must rely on itself for support. With your support, I hope to keep bringing new articles to you throughout the pandemic and beyond.

Amitoufo.

For more, read “Shaolin Ways Episode 7: Yinshougun”.