Abstract
What happens when bodies are expanded beyond their visible or measurable limits, when they are doubled, split, or fragmented, or when constituents are added? In the history of religion, one encounters claims about changes in the body that go beyond what the natural sciences define as possible. There are claims about astral projection, imaginary organs, and dual or plural bodily states, as well as subtle bodies, energetic anatomies, and hypostatic union, to name just a few examples. This article examines some examples from Chinese martial arts spiritualities and their Euro-American reception, offering a possible conceptual approach. Inspired by Joseph P. Laycock’s idea of paracosms, a possible comparative term is suggested, namely, paracorporeality. As a broad term, paracorporeality can encompass the variety and messiness of different claims and practices oriented towards expanding the human body beyond its physical limits or constructing parallel or superimposed bodies or body parts.
1 Introduction
Tàijíquán
This article explores such claims with a particular focus on the modern reception and renegotiation of the aspects of a particular subset of “martial arts bodies” which differ from modern scientific physiological and anatomical views of the human body. Inspired by Joseph P. Laycock’s idea of paracosms, I offer a new comparative term, namely, paracorporeality, which can encompass the varied and heterogeneous nature of bodily claims, and practices that aim to expand the human body past its physical limits or construct parallel or superimposed bodies or body parts.
In this article I explain this transgressive somatic phenomenon through an analysis of imaginary organs, theories about qì, and practices that claim to expand the human body to possess features of other (real and mythological) animals as they are employed in the practices of Chinese “internal” martial arts in Anglophone and translated martial arts literature. I analyse the process of paracorporeality through two cases that each demonstrates a distinct type of paracorporeality: the construction of imaginary organs (the dāntián
2 Methods and Data
As I am concerned with the Euro-American reception of Chinese martial arts spiritualities, I rely on sources in English. The data set consists of more than seventy-five handbooks on tàijíquán, xíngyìquán, and bāguàzhǎng, as well as related practices such as qìgōng
2.1 Quantitative Context
Tàijíquán – and Chinese martial arts in general – must be recognised as a significant source of cultural influence globally, functioning as components and, in some cases, perhaps even as the primary component of identity formation for a considerable number of people on the planet in the twenty-first century. The modern growth of tàijíquán was first strengthened by receiving symbolic political support in the People’s Republic of China (PRC) in 1978, when Dèng Xiǎopíng
To the best of my knowledge, there are no global statistics on tàijíquán participation. However, recent results from individual countries indicate that a significant – as well as rising – number of people engage in this activity. A survey of participants in the United States carried out by Statista from 2008 to 2018 showed a rise from 3.42 million in 2008 to 3.76 million participants in 2018 (Statista Research Department 2022). Another Statista survey from England covering the period from 2016 to 2023 indicated a rise from 124,200 in 2016 to 184.900 participants in 2023 (Statista Research Department 2024).
On the supply side, an IBISWorld market research report on qìgōng and tàijíquán studios in the United States (updated in January 2024) estimated the sector to represent a market size of $391.8m in 2024, with 4,033 businesses and a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 4.1 per cent between 2019 and 2024. The market size of the qìgōng and tàijíquán studio sector was estimated to have seen a CAGR of 2.4 per cent between 2019 and 2024. More than half of the activities of the studios were in-person (group) and more than a quarter were online or virtual (pre-recorded), whereas individual in-person and live online or virtual classes represented less than a quarter (Rose 2024).
I have not been able to retrieve statistics from the PRC or the Republic of China (ROC), but a 2019 article about the launch of a national tàijíquán learning platform quoted Zhāng Shān
2.2 Key Concepts
As martial arts historians Brian Kennedy and Elizabeth Guo have pointed out, there are “a number of classification schemes used when discussing Chinese martial arts” (Kennedy and Guo 2005: 78). The authors outline three distinct schemes: internal-external, northern-southern, and Shàolín
Although I agree with critics of the schemes that they are arbitrary at best and express nationalist pseudo-history at worst, I still believe that they cannot be abandoned by the researcher, for the simple reason that they persist among practitioners. They are certainly emic terms, but since a consequence of the collaborations of boxing masters such as Lǐ Cúnyì, Sūn Lùtáng, and their peers was that the arts were since then often taught together, the fact of the matter is that many practitioners now learn more than one of these arts and, consequently, potentially develop a perception of their own body, which combines elements of several methodologies – and their theoretical basis – in the context of an interest in Daoism or other historical Chinese philosophical material.
For practical purposes, I will be using the collective term “Chinese internal martial arts” (henceforth, CIMA) when referring generally to practices or theories that, to some extent at least, are shared by several of the individual arts. Although not unproblematic, the term is widely used by practitioners. It is useful to bear in mind that this is an emic term, and that individual meanings of its component words are open for discussion. For instance, the word “Chinese” is controversial as it does not reveal if we mean the PRC, ROC/Taiwan, diaspora, nor does it indicate which historical period we are referring to when utilising it. Similarly, the word “internal” is equally challenging, for reasons outlined by Kennedy and Guo, among others. Nevertheless, I believe that with these caveats in mind, the collective term will serve its purpose, viz. to remind the reader that there is a perceived familiar relationship between the arts from the perspective of many practitioners.
3 Esotericism and the Euro-American Reception of East Asia
As Lukas K. Pokorny and Franz Winter (2024: 3) have pointed out, “esotericism” is a highly ambiguous term. In the present article, I follow their recent use of esotericism as
an umbrella notion comprising largely nonhegemonic teachings and currents with shared structural features, foremostly centering on the idea that higher or special (practical) knowledge distilled from a discourse deemed secretive can be (incrementally) utilized by its practitioners to salvific or otherwise self-cultivational ends, thereby uncovering ulterior dynamics of life, nature, and/or the cosmos at large. (Pokorny and Winter 2024: 3)
There are numerous examples of how esoteric East Asian martial arts have been and are being incorporated into existing Euro-American (esoteric) contexts, either as auxiliary practices or in ways in which they are combined with, changed by, and modify the contexts into which they are introduced.4 In my recent study of tàijíquán (Makeeff 2024), I described how prominent martial arts influencers, such as Adam Mizner, Mark Rasmus, and Damo Mitchell, combine tàijíquán with Hermeticism and in some cases Buddhism as well. Similarly, martial arts teachers who have been on the scene for longer, such as Alex Kozma and Allen Pittman, constructed and taught eclectic martial arts spiritualities that combined Asian fighting arts (which themselves had esoteric aspects) with a wide selection of esoteric practices.
Faxneld has recently shown how East Asian martial arts milieus in Europe function as contact points with Buddhism and are “central to the broader sacralisation of bodily exercises in the West” (2024: 398). He further notes several areas in which martial arts organisations share similarities with initiatory esoteric groups, including striving for the “attainment of extraordinary (supra-normal) abilities,” being “structured around a type of initiatory advancement through a degree system,” having “reverence for an enlightened master (and a chain of previous masters),” and “formalised ritualistic behaviour in a locale distinct from the mundane world, creating a setting conducive to experiences of ‘the sacred’” (ibid.).
In many cases, the Euro-American reception of East Asian martial arts spiritualities is paired with some degree of exotification, including, as Faxneld mentions, wearing (anachronistic) uniforms, or adopting certain ritualised forms of acting and interacting, some of which are not necessarily imported from any living practice in East Asia, but rather constructed for the context of positing a particular martial arts spirituality as something out of the ordinary and special.
In Euro-American martial arts spiritualities we often encounter the notion of an Eastern-Western dichotomy being proliferated by teachers, students, and influencers. In my opinion, this dichotomy is largely artificially created to serve strategical purposes. By juxtaposing East and West, the practices of martial arts spiritualities are offered as cures for particular cultural ailments, and the teachers of East Asian martials arts are presented as translators and mediators of otherwise inaccessible, esoteric knowledge and practices.
The term “Western” (and implicitly that of “Eastern”) is presented as what Pokorny and Winter have referred to as a (cultural) essentialist category (2024: 3). As I have argued elsewhere (Makeeff 2024), I think that binary categorisations such as Eastern and Western – insofar as they are used to discuss something other than directions on a compass – often obfuscate and confuse more than they help us understand. For this reason, I agree with Pokorny and Winter that such terms are only useful as very vague geographical qualifiers (ibid.).
For example, China has interacted with Europe since the Roman Empire and with the USA since the late 1840s, when the first Chinese immigrants arrived. European cultures have been influenced by China and vice-versa for close to 2,000 years, and the USA was – at least partially – influenced by the Chinese (and other) cultural effects on European cultures even before the arrival of Chinese immigrants in the country. The monodirectional way of thinking of reception as moving from A to B is simply not adequate for the complex and entangled historical and cultural realities. The entanglement of history is evident in many examples of martial arts spiritualities and related somatic systems. As Faxneld (2024: 409) has put it: “For example, aikidō is heavily influenced by its founder’s involvement with the Japanese religious movement Ōmoto
4 The Reception Process
Semantically, the word “reception” implies that someone receives something, which could potentially imply that what is being received and even who is the receiver remain static. However, the dynamic and processual nature of both receiver and received is a key point in contemporary reception theory. As classicist Anastasia Bakogianni has recently argued, “[r]eception is about our dialogue with the classical past, whatever form that takes, and as a two- way conversation rather than as a monologue prioritizing one or the other” (2016: 98).
Bakogianni writes within the context of Classical Studies, but her general points about the reception process and how to theorise reception are valuable outside her field of specialisation. I believe her criticism of ideas about linearity or monodirectionality in the reception process should also inform the Euro-American reception of East Asian culture – such as martial arts spirituality. In fact, if one is interested in a diachronic, transhistorical understanding of cultural developments and entanglements, it would make more sense to talk about the mutual and unidirectional Euro-American and East Asian reception entanglements as a dynamic process. My own approach is not limited to a focus on martial arts spiritualities as merely or only coming from China into a Euro-American context. Rather, I think we must avoid linear and monodirectional myopia (and my source material also points to this) and understand that cultures are not static, have not developed in isolation from each other, and have historically interacted and mutually influenced each other’s development.
Bakogianni’s understanding of the processes of reception is informed by textual studies and reader-response criticism. As she points out, this approach rejects the notion of fixed meaning and prioritises the role of interpretation, placing the reader as co-creator of a text. Reader-response criticism focuses on the pivotal role played by the reader in the formulation of meaning. Each reader receives a text in their own unique way, depending on their education, life experience, and agenda. Reception theory rejects the existence of the one, original, objective, and fixed text that must be examined as a pure art form as new criticism and many postmodern theorists would argue. Rather, in reception we speak in terms of texts, i.e., in plural, given that, each time a text is read, it is being received and interpreted in a new way (Bakogianni 2016: 97). Bakogianni’s understanding of the processual nature of texts reflects a wider understanding of processual reception and the absence of a static, correct meaning embedded in texts (I use “texts” here as a more widely encompassing concept that reaches beyond the written word) in the field of reader- response criticism in Classical Studies, the broader field of Literary Studies, as well as related disciplines such as Cultural Studies and Media Studies. This mutual, processual, and multidirectional relationship between reader and text – or more generally, between cultural products, culture producers, and consumers – was described by the influential literary theorist Hans Robert Jauss (1921–1997) as the “horizon of expectations” (Erwartungshorizont), whose role he described thus: “The new text evokes for the reader (listener) the horizon of expectations and rules familiar from earlier texts, which are then varied, corrected, altered, or even just reproduced” (Jauss 1982: 23). I believe we must approach the study of the Euro-American reception of East Asian culture, and the study of both bodily culture and the embodiment of culture in a similar way.
As I have argued in a recent chapter about the Euro-American esoteric reception of tàijíquán (Makeeff 2024), we must understand such reception processes as forms of historical entanglement that cannot be reduced to static or restrictive notions of the directionality or changelessness of who is the receiver or what is received.
4.1 Reception and Martial Arts Spiritualities
In recent scholarship on the reception of East Asian martial arts, there has been a significant focus on the role of spirituality and religion (Faxneld 2024; Nešković 2024; Makeeff 2024).5 As Per Faxneld notes, a rhetoric about cultivating the self, becoming a “spiritual warrior,” and connecting with a meta-empirical realm permeates contemporary and historical discourse on East Asian martial arts in Europe (and the United States). There are notions concerning “supranormal” powers, mystical inner energy, and martial practice as a form of Zen
Although I agree with these points, I suggest that rather than looking only at movement or actions of embodiment, we must also examine the canvas upon which the text of movement is inscribed, viz. the body itself. In the practice of martial arts spiritualities – whether these are martial arts traditionally considered Euro-American, such as boxing, Greco-Roman wrestling or MMA (mixed martial arts), or those considered East Asian, such as the ones I discuss presently – we cannot only think of systems but must remember that all such martial arts “systems” exist only as parts of cultures of interpretation, performance, and embodiment. Movement patterns or esoteric physical methods are passed on from teacher to student through bodily internalisation in the form of direct physical instruction, the reading of a manual, the viewing of a video lesson, or online classes. In each of these cases, every teacher and student are engaged in the process of changing their horizon of expectations and repeatedly altering the cultural material they are receiving and passing on.
The arts and related views of the body, cosmology, and spirituality that I discuss in this article are the product of complex entanglements, with their reception being equally complex. There are esoteric elements to the way these martial arts were and are being practised in Asia, as well as their Euro- American reception, with the latter being also entangled with the manner they are being reproduced and interpreted in Asia. Rather than drawing lines between Eastern and Western esotericisms or martial arts spiritualities, I argue that we must understand these phenomena as continually existing in a process of historical and cultural entanglement. This process, I argue, also employs a particular mode of understanding, constructing, and performing the body which I call paracorporeality.
5 Paracorporeality
The concept of “subtle bodies” has received some attention by scholars in recent years, both in Asian contexts (Samuel and Johnston 2013) and in a wider comparative and genealogical backdrop (Cox 2022). Although related to some degree with subtle bodies, the topic I discuss in the present article, which I propose to call paracorporeality inspired by Laycock’s notion of paracosms as partly fictional partly factual worlds in roleplaying games, goes beyond the notion of subtle bodies or subtle anatomies. Whereas the latter are part of the phenomenon I describe as paracorporeality, it nevertheless also extends beyond them to include imaginary anatomy and physiology, which are both experienced as having physical reality due to practice-based lived experience, even if it is not empirically verifiable by others and would not be observable in an X-ray, MR-scan, CT-scan, or autopsy. As mentioned above, the term paracorporeality is directly inspired by the work of Laycock. He coined the term “paracosms,” to describe a type of ludic frameworks that blend fiction and fact to construct new worlds:
Paracosms are a special frame created through imaginative play in which signs do not have their ordinary meaning. They are also a product of bricolage in which elements from the real world as well as historical and fictional narratives are reassembled into a pleasing new world. (Laycock 2015: 15–16)
Building on Laycock, I am working on a tentative definition of paracorporeality as a type of sensory (and discursive) state created through imaginative play in which signs, bodies, and body parts do not have their ordinary meaning or may have multiple meanings. Paracorporeality is a bodily and/or body-oriented narrative and experiential strategy product of bricolage that blends elements from the real body with historical and fictional narratives as well as notions of the body, all of which are reassembled into a pleasing and desired new body though bodily practices, communicative strategies, or both.
We find several examples of paracosms in Chinese martial arts culture described by researchers, albeit not using that very term. Building on Amos (1986), CIMA practitioner and historian Scott Park Phillips describes how martial arts fantasies function as a “kind of theatre of dream – a place to put aside the hopelessness of the present and actually become an individual; a place to fantasise about becoming great and to develop a sense of self-worth” (Phillips 2016: 86). He also describes how Avron Boretz’s studies (1996; 2011) of truck drivers in southwestern China revealed a widespread identification “as part of an alternate moral universe called the ‘land of rivers and lakes’ (Jianghu), a theatrically inspired land beyond the control of civilization, where men of prowess establish their own morality with grit and guile, righteousness and reciprocity” (Phillips 2016: 86). Phillips ties this to the theatricality of religion in China and argues that “[s]een from the viewpoint of Chinese religion, martial arts are simply one way of expressing the commitments of a religious life” (ibid.: 87). In the case of martial arts theatricality and paracorporeality, there is also a long history of reception of works of martial fiction (wǔxiá
The same applies to paracorporeality. However, on the one hand, paracorporeality has at least one more rigid constraint, namely, the human body; on the other hand, it offers a higher degree of improvisational interpretation precisely due to that constraint. The simple reason being that although we all share relatively similar bodies, we have no way of directly or entirely experiencing another person’s lived experience of their body. I would argue, to some degree, that the dialectic relationship between the shared experience of having – or rather being – bodies, and the lived experience of one’s own body is similar to the dialectical relation between games and play, as described by S. Brent Plate:
Games and play operate in a dialectical relation. Games provide the structure within which play takes place. Yet play is a force that sometimes breaks the bonds, and through this force, rules and boundaries are reformed, reimagined, and reestablished. (Plate 2010: 228)
In the context of CIMA, the forms and choreography of martial arts could be understood as games that combine individual interpretation and expression with the potential for a shared experience, whereas the lived perception of one’s own body might be conceptualised as a type of play. I must stress that I am only presenting a very brief discussion of paracorporeality here, with a particular focus on multisensory, lived experience. In short: how humans construct counter-factual narratives about their own anatomy and physiology, informed by textual, visual, and other types of sources, and experience validation of these narratives through lived experience, which may be influenced by manipulation through training methods. Both paracorporeality and the derived noun paracorpus/paracorpora are concepts with which to analyse bodies, whereas Laycock’s concept of paracosms deals with the worlds inhabited by bodies.
Paracorporeality could be used to describe and analyse any strategy that verbally, visually, sensorily, or otherwise superimposes fictional and imaginary bodies, body parts, or bodily abilities onto the physical, measurable body. In my view, there is potential in the term paracorporeality for explaining other ways in which narratives about and experiences of bodies are expanded beyond the verifiable – something I hope to elaborate upon in future publications, and which I invite colleagues to develop further if they find it useful. For the time being, my focus is on the former and in the context of CIMA. In this article, I will present two cases of distinct types of paracorporeality: the construction of imaginary organs and bodies. In a scientific research study on voice imaging, Mickey Valee argued that the voice “as a cultural image, is an imaginary organ” (Vallee 2017). Herein, I discuss an organ that does not exist and is not even the product of another organ, as in the case of Valee’s interpretation of the voice.6 I analyse claims about the so-called dāntián and investigate how CIMA practitioners conjure it into existence through argumentative strategies, manipulation of their lived bodily experience, or both. Subsequently, I discuss the notion of the dragon-body as an ideal physicality in CIMA.
5.1 Paracorporeality in Chinese Internal Martial Arts Spiritualities
Tàijíquán is sometimes popularly referred to as a holistic art. Curiously, however, there are many examples of practitioners engaging in reductionism, with a key example being the widespread tendency to emphasise moving “without using muscles.” This seeming paradox is based on the maxim “use yì instead of lì” (yòngyì bùyòng lì
In rejecting the use of “muscular” or brute force (lì
6 Dantians
The dāntián is described in CIMA literature as being located in the abdomen, and it is sometimes mentioned as one of three dāntiáns, with the other two allegedly residing in the thoraic region and in the head. The lower dāntián is sometimes referred to as a point, at times as an area, occasionally as a mental abstraction, and other times as a physical organ or complex of muscles or tissue. It is as elusive as it is ubiquitous in much Sinophone and Euro-American literature on CIMA theories of the human body. Curiously, I have not yet come across any mention of the dāntián as something possessed by bodies other than those belonging to humans (or anthropomorphic entities). As far as I am aware, there are no explicit mentions of animals having dāntiáns.
Historically, the term is described as early as the third century CE in the Lǎozǐ zhōngjīng
We find many parallels to this practice in contemporary receptions of Chinese martial arts spiritualities. In his book T’ai Chi & Pa-Kua: Advanced Techniques for All Martial Artists (1984), Australian author Erle Montaigue describes a method of martial arts qìgōng (he spells it “qui gong”):
In order for anything to work, there must be energy to start with, a catalyst. In qui gong we have the knees bent which creates heat in the tan-tien or psychic centre, an electrical point about 3″ below the navel. This heat then causes chemical changes to happen in the body which also causes energy changes to take place. It’s like lighting a fire under a cauldron of water, so that we cause the steam to rise. In the same way we cause the ch’i to move which in turn makes the chen [shén
神 ] or spirit to rise to the top of the head. (Montaigue 1984: 7)
The notion of the dāntián as “psychic centre” is found in many Euro-American texts on CIMA. The earliest example I have found is by the influential CIMA practitioner and author Robert W. Smith, who was stationed in Taiwan from 1959 to 1962 as an employee of the CIA. Smith authored several books on CIMA which included hagiographies of masters, training methods, and theoretical information, including theories about qì and the dāntián:
Keep your vital energy concentrated below your navel. This refers to the psychic energy center, roughly three inches below your navel, where your center of gravity is also to be found. Physiologically, this means to “sink” your strength from the upper to the lower torso to gain stability. (Smith 1974: 124)
Many CIMA texts refer to the dāntián as both an energetic or psychic centre and as that of gravity. This seems to be a discursive strategy to tie something para-anatomical to the physical body. However, the idea that the area slightly below the navel should be the centre of gravity is inherently flawed. It might be the case when the body is not in motion, but as soon as movement is involved – if, for example, the legs bend or the weight shifts forwards or backwards – the centre of mass is affected and thereby moves. In extreme cases of human locomotion, such as the high jump method known as the Fosbury flop, it has even been suggested that the centre of mass should be considered to reside, albeit very briefly, under the bar, as the backwards curved body passes over it.
The notion of a static centre of mass in the human body seems to represent either a lack of knowledge of the physics of human locomotion or an implicit ideal notion of the human anatomy as static and unalterable, irrespective of whether it is in a static or standing state or moving.
This is a curious example of dual and partially inverted paracorporeality. The centre of mass is perceived as a static locus in the human body and identified as indistinguishable from the dāntián, an imaginary organ. As a result, a very real physical phenomenon, the centre of mass, which is dynamic and moves according to the locomotion of the body in space, is essentially crystallised and fixed in place using an imaginary organ as its anchoring point.
In CIMA there are numerous definitions of the dāntián as well as theories about its role in the greater methodological frameworks. Some of these are explicit, whereas others are less congruently formulated. Similarly, some rest on literal and physiological understandings of the dāntián, whereas others prefer to explain it by placing emphasis on the symbolic, metaphorical or “energetic.” In the following, I present some of these definitions, as formulated by teachers of tàijíquán and xíngyìquán.
Among those who might be called literalists, we find the massively influential Zhèng Mànqīng
In my 60 plus years of Tai Chi Chuan practice, I have noticed that the “Dantian
丹田 ” is regarded as a “field of magic”. However, it is not magic. When approached with a modern realistic perspective, the body can be regarded as a natural machine and the Dantian as a reservoir in a hydraulic system which pressurizes the Qi energy to produce mechanical leverage for physical movements. […] When we think of the Dantian as a hydraulic reservoir within the lower abdomen, we can then consider the Qi in the reservoir to be like fluid energy which generates the pressure to run the mechanical system, enabling the remote devices of the fingers and the toes to do the work. (Chen n.d.)
Another interpretation of the dāntián, not merely tying it to scientific anatomy but to rather recent neurological findings, is expounded in a blogpost by the martial arts teacher Marco Lueck: “The real Dan Tian is behind the abdominal muscles, in the guts, with a constitution that is perfect for storing energy. The Dan Tian is a neural network sometimes referred to as the 2nd brain” (Lueck n.d.). This claim seems to be inspired by the recently popularised idea of the Brain-Gut Connection – “second brain” is the term commonly used for the enteric nervous system, sometimes including the gut microbiota (Ochoa-Repáraz and Kasper 2016).
While some, as we have seen, attempt to connect their interpretations of dāntián’s “real” nature to anatomy – in a strategy which could be seen as a kind of reverse engineering by using science to legitimise outdated anatomical models – others in the CIMA community stick to the religious origins of the dāntián, interpreting it as a sort of “spiritual organ” that can grant privileged insights or powers. In Christopher J. Markert’s Dan-Tien: Your Secret Energy Center (1998), the dāntián is described as the seat of intuition, which one much learn to understand: “Thus we have to use our own ingenuity and imagination to find out what the DanTien is trying to tell us at any given time. This requires a degree of mental flexibility and it takes a while until we get the hang of it” (Markert 1998: 36).
Many CIMA teachers and authors who subscribe to supernatural or counter- scientific interpretations of the dāntián stress that this imaginary organ is in fact neither imaginary nor are its powers metaphorical. On the website Flowingzen.com, Anthony Korahais describes how he feels a ball of qì in his dāntián, and goes into detail about the physical reality of this energy ball:
Right now, as I’m typing this, I can feel a golden, golf-ball-sized sphere of energy in my lower abdomen. This is almost exactly as the Chinese classics describe. I don’t understand the physics behind it, but there really is a ball of energy in my belly. It’s not mystical mumbo jumbo, and it’s not a metaphor. […] Unfortunately, going searching for dantian with your thumbs isn’t terribly helpful. If you haven’t cultivated qi at dantian correctly for a few years, there isn’t much to feel. For years, I knew where dantian was; the problem was I couldn’t feel anything there. (Korahais 2012)
Despite adamantly believing that the energy ball is real, Korahais touches upon a key point in understanding the process of paracorporeality: the role of imagination in the gradual accustomisation to a new lived experience of the body in order to feel what one already believes to know as true. It is the perceived sensory validation of theory.
6.1 The Qì Ball
The notion of the dāntián is intricately tied to theories about qì, and qì serves as a sort of vessel for the attention and the imagination in the process of building the sensation of having a dāntián. In some instances, practitioners claim to be able not only to accumulate qì in the lower dāntián or circulate it at will, but to shape it into a ball that can be moved at will and felt by others. The most famous practitioner to make this claim was probably Féng Zhìqiáng
In an interview with the CIMA researcher and practitioner Jarek Szymanski, it is mentioned that Féng developed a “qi ball” inside his body (Szymanski 2000–2003). The claim is stated in the biographical text preceding the interview, which is noted as being “based on the article ‘Opening the river of Hunyuan, establishing the manners in martial arts’ written by Pan Houcheng and published in ‘Hunyuan Taiji’ magazine, 1/1999”:
After two years of diligent studies under Hu Yaozhen’s guidance, Feng Zhiqiang’s internal skills reached high level – not only his Large Heavenly Circle and Three Dantians were opened, but also there was a small ball of Qi that could circulate freely along his body at his will, Five Bows were developed so that his body was full of elastic power. (Szymanski 2000–2003)
The same claim is stated in the biography of Féng in the book Hunyuan Qigong (2001) translated into English by Feng’s student Chén Zhōnghuá
Not only that his heavens (Small and large heavenly circles) and dans (the three dantians) were open, he had reached the level of converting the qi into spirit. He also opened the “Heavenly Gate” and closed the “Earthly Door.” One pellet of Hunyuan Qi moved around his body at will. (Feng and Chen 2001: 41)
In a conversation with Marvin Smallheiser for T’ai Chi – The International Magazine of T’ai Chi Ch’uan, Féng Zhìqiáng expanded on the practice of building the pellet or ball, therein referred to as a crystal. He also mentions how a well-formed crystal qì ball in the dāntián can grant “extraordinary powers”:
They also have to practice neigong, which involves internal energy throughout the body. In the development process, he said, a practitioner should develop the crystal of qi. This crystal is located just behind the belly button, about 1.5 inches. It is behind the acupuncture point Shenque. When the crystal has a minimum amount of energy it keeps people healthy. At a high level it helps you to live longer and healthier. At a high level someone may have some extraordinary powers. (Smallheiser 2020)
The type of training that is used to “feel” the crystal ball of qì in the dāntián is described as dāntián breathing. Although Féng clearly believes that both the crystal ball of qì and the dāntián are real organs or bodily features, he also stresses that they require attention to actually be felt. The fact that he believes that the qì crystal is real is underlined by his detailed description of it in the same interview:
The crystal itself, he said, is like a hollow ball, accumulating a mixture of dense energy. The core is empty, but inside it has congealed energy. While the lower dāntián is centred in the area behind the naval, he said basically the whole stomach is called the dāntián. It includes points such as qi hai, guan yuan and others. But the centre is at shenque, at the belly button. This is the area where the energy comes from. “This helps the baby in the womb to function and be alive before it is born”. (Smallheiser 2020)
Féng’s description of the qì ball employs references of an even broader and all- encompassing bodily paradigm, which includes points on and in the body, theories about qì, conception, and essentially the place of humans in the cosmos. Rather than being an exception, this is in fact a widely occurring phenomenon. In CIMA (and beyond), paracorporeality is frequently part of thoroughly imagined and constructed systems that include cosmologies, anthropologies, theologies, mythologies, anatomies, bestiaries, and more. A closely related example in the Chinese context is nèidān, in which we find the human body inhabited by a complex gallery of gods and entities. In the context of CIMA, we find similar systems that include real and mythological animals, such as dragons.
7 Dragons
“Who is worthy to be trusted with the secret to limitless power? To become the Dragon Warrior?” Spoken by Shifu in the 2008 animated movie Kung Fu Panda, these words illustrate a curious tendency to refer to warriors as dragons in Chinese martial arts and their Euro-American reception. In the movie, the warrior in question is an animated panda. More often, however, the warriors referred to as dragons are human beings.
It could be argued that this is more of a rhetorical strategy than a bodily one. But when the former use references to the body, they are also inherently bodily ones. My definition of paracorporeality includes rhetorical, visual, and other multisensory strategies, as well as bodily practices – essentially, that is, any strategy that verbally, visually, sensorily, or otherwise superimposes fictional and imaginary bodies, body parts, or bodily abilities onto the physical, measurable body.
The most famous example of superimposing dragons on humans in recent martial arts popular culture is probably Bruce Lee (1940–1973). Lee was also known as Little Dragon (Lǐ Xiǎolóng
The reference to people as dragons is also widespread beyond martial arts culture. For example, the term “descendants of the dragon” (lóngde chuánrén
It is likely that both examples have influenced martial arts culture, as well as martial perceptions and constructions of the human body. Another practice that has influenced martial arts is the performance of Dragon Dances. Originating in the Hàn Dynasty (206 BCE–220 CE), this ceremonial performance still exists and is highly popular in the Chinese diaspora. There is a long tradition of being performed by local martial arts schools, and this deep interconnection between martial arts and dragon dancing must have mutually influenced and informed the way these two practices conceptualise – and embody – dragons.
7.1 Dragon Body
One finds many references to movements, methods, and theories named after dragons in CIMA and in the wider martial arts landscape. One of the most thoroughly dragon-oriented manuals is Mark Small’s Taiji, Xingyi, and Bagua Throwing By Way of Our Modern Masters (2011). Small consistently refers to the ideal CIMA body as the “dragon body,” and being dragon-like is tied to mastery: “There are important lessons to be learned at the hands of masters and from masterful opponents who are more masterful than you (Small 2011:10).”
Curiously, in the most widespread type of tàijíquán, the Yáng-style (Yángshì tàijíquán
In xíngyìquán there are also several moves that imply that the practitioner, to some extent at least, must embody dragons: Black Dragon Overturns the River, Green Dragon Leaves the Water, Lazy Dragon Lies on the Way, and Green Dragon Overturns its Body, to name a few. Most systems of xíngyìquán have animal styles that aim to embody the yì
The dragon is supreme at being able to extend and shrink freely, changing unpredictably. […] The Manual says: “In the dragon technique is the method of gathering in the bones [i.e., shrinking the posture].” If we want to get the upper hand in a confrontation by mimicking the dragon, we will not be able to if the muscles and bones of the whole body are not acting with ease. Therefore in practicing the dragon technique, feel it in your body. (Liu and Brennan 2012)
The wording “feel it in your body” is telling, as it implies that the notion of martial artists as dragons is not only a matter of metaphor, analogy, or dramatic performance, but that of a fundamental transformation in the experienced, lived body of the practitioner. Paul Brennan, a martial artist and translator of Liu Dianchen’s book quoted above, raises an important issue in his translator’s note:
The dragon is the only one of the twelve which is clearly a mythical animal, but every Chinese person would have had a strong sense of one through seeing dragon dances. This is a similar situation to lion postures in Shaolin, which are apparently based on movements in a lion dance rather than imitating actions of actual lions.9
This illustrates the curious fact of many martial arts practitioners striving to embody animals that have never existed (such as dragons) or adopt dramatic representations of animals that do exist but that they have never seen themselves (such as lions). Here we are reminded again that paracorporeality, like Laycock’s paracosms, blends fact and fiction with immersive sensory practices. The martial artists who historically trained, and those who now train themselves to become human versions of dragons (or lions), obviously did have an empirical foundation for their endeavours: oral renditions, visual representations, literature, myth, sculptures, etc. – in other words, fiction. This, in turn, warrants the question: are these humans who train themselves to become dragon-like in fact the closest version of a dragon we find in the real world? I will not attempt to answer the question here, but it does open a theoretical dimension: What is more real? A picture of a dragon, or a person pretending – and experiencing themself to be, at least partially – a dragon?
In CIMA training in general, and in xíngyìquán in particular, the borders between analogy, metaphor, imagery, and practical embodiment are not always clear. For example, in Jin Yunting’s The Xingyi Boxing Manual (1931), we are offered a tour de force of animals and natural phenomena as analogies or ideal images of martial movement:
Raise the hands like lightning, strike downward like a thunderclap, the rain driving the wind, an eagle seizing a swallow, a sparrow hawk darting through the forest, a lion pouncing on a hare. When raising the hands, the three centers align. When not moving, be like a scholar. When moving, be like a dragon or a tiger. (Yunting and Groschwitz 2015: 79)
Here, the use of imagery serves to illustrate ideal qualities through comparison – and interestingly, tiger and dragon seem to be used interchangeably, representing simply large and fearsome predators. The language is poetic, albeit prescriptive, and gives the impression that the ideal xíngyìquán body must do a lot of things at the same time. This is certainly the case. Like other CIMA, xíngyìquán has long lists of requirements for the placement, abilities, and qualities of individual body parts as well as their combined efforts in movement, solo, or interaction with a training partner – and ideally, with an attacker. In the foundational practices and requirements of xíngyìquán, which are shared by many practitioners, irrespective of lineage or style, we find more specific directions for postural manipulation in order to embody animals (or parts of animals) as a way of producing the ideal body.
One of the foundational practices of xíngyìquán is zhàn zhuāng
Generally speaking, however, the dragon body implies coiling qualities of the torso and abdomen, bear shoulders connote a droop or slight hunch, eagle claws refer to the gripping and ripping potential of the hands, chicken leg allude to the ability to stand on one leg in a stable manner and shift weight from one leg to the other without losing balance, the tiger embrace refers to the cooperation of the two arms, and thunder sound hints to both the speed and sound of impact of the feet as they touch the ground. Interestingly, some of these animalistic qualities contain requirements to embody other animals in a doubly superimposed paracorporeality. For example, to attain dragon claws, one must open the “Tiger Mouth” (hǔkǒu
In an interview with the famous Taiwanese CIMA teacher Luó Déxiū
As for the dragon, it exhibits rising and falling motions; its springing movement demonstrates the use of the spinal wave. It is a very powerful creature. It fears nothing. It has no limitations. It may wander about in either heaven or hell. The infusion of form with spirit creates a considerable range of possibility within the xingyi system. It allows for movements to change inside of movements or for change to occur inside of change. For instance, if xingyi’s pi quan adopts the spirit of dragon, pi quan will appear with a greater amplitude of the spinal wave. (Stubenbaum and Brinkman 2016: 68–69)
Here we see how paracorporeality is not only something that, once attained through practice, becomes the new permanent status or lived experience, but how it can be a state one slips in and out of. If the practitioner who has attained a dragon body desires so, they can “adopt” the “spirit of dragon” which is perceived to affect the physical movement qualities of the spine.
8 Paracorporeality and Play
The kind of paracorporeality described in these two cases is complex and – as I hope it has become clear – also highly heterogeneous. For the same reason, my definition of paracorporeality is an open-ended one, as I expect to discover many more ways in which humans employ paracorporeal strategies of practice and communication in order to experience and perform transcension of both their own bodies and those of others. For each individual person there is a distinct lived experience that changes over time and exists in a dynamic, dialectical relation with other individuals, as well as with textual, verbal, visual and other types of both fictional and factual source material. A common feature, however, is the ludic element: that is, acting “as if” in order to experience the reality one imagines or performs. This is not something exclusive to CIMA or to martial artists. For example, recent experimental studies of the role of parietofrontal mirror neurons suggest that simulated experience based on visual cues is a cognitive mechanism in monkeys, and probably also in larger primates such as humans (Cattaneo and Rizzolatti 2009).
Ludic methods similar to those from CIMA I have described here are also employed in modern sports psychology, where acting is used as a performance enhancing method. James E. Loehr discusses this in depth in his handbook The New Toughness Training for Sports (1995), arguing that acting is relevant to competition in sports because “great competitors are great actors” (Loehr 1995: 23). Elaborating further, he adds: “Acting as if you feel a particular way stimulates emotion-specific changes in your body,” and “[w]hat begins as a faked emotion can quickly lead to genuine emotion – particularly in skilled actors” (ibid.: 144). In favour of adding the ludic method of pretending or acting “as if,” Loehr even refers to pretending as a skill one can get better at: “Acting as if is a trained response” (ibid.). Acting and role-playing are closely related practices, and, as I have already mentioned, Laycock’s term paracosms – which was coined in a study of role-playing games (and their reception) – directly inspired my definition of paracorporeality. The relation between acting and role-playing is central to understanding both paracosms and paracorporeality. Although acting might be perceived as more focused on dramatic performance and provoking emotion(s) solely in the spectator(s) rather than in the actor(s), role-playing is also meant to make the role-player feel and experience the play – that is, both practices accomplish both outcomes by acting “as if.”
Loehr’s points about acting “as if” are very similar to the training methods in CIMA I have described above. Part of the method of attaining a dragon body is imagining it, another is to hone that imaginative state, to manipulate the body physically to produce sensory changes, and to interpret those sensory changes in a manner that validates the theory – and, finally, repeat this sequence in order to feel that one has become more dragon-like as Small described it. The role of imagination as a sensory strategy is evident throughout CIMA. For example, one could recall tàijíquán teacher and author Ron Sieh’s description of the process of imagining qì:
I don’t know what Ch’i is. It is an abstraction. I experience sensation; it is real. We don’t feel Ch’i; we feel, period. If we name what we feel, that is an abstraction, an addition. Abstraction is conceptual, raw sensation is non-conceptual, and the two are often confused. But don’t believe me; check it out! (Sieh 1992: 25)
Sieh’s version of paracorporeality is interesting as it engages with the concept of qì but simultaneously asks the reader/practitioner to not use the term but rather feel the sensation. It seems as if Sieh tries to escape the cultural connotations that accompany the use of the term, but still wants to address a readership of practitioners who are familiar with and perhaps expect this terminology to be operationalised by teachers and authors. Sieh emphasises that what he experiences is “real,” while both criticising and implicitly employing the troubled term he is trying to avoid. This represents a layered understanding of bodies or body parts as being several things at the same time, the superimposition of body image or body imaginary onto the physical body.
8.1 Body Imaginary
Body image or body imaginary are concepts employed by social scientists and psychologists to refer to individual subjective auto-perceptions of bodies and their comparison to other bodies (Abidoli et al. 2024; Negeau 2015; Barquín, Barquín, and García 2016). Some forms of paracorporality, such as the ones I have discussed here, could be understood as the superimposition of culturally defined body images or bodies imaginary onto (or into) physical bodies. Both bodies and organs – including imaginary organs, such as the dāntián – are cultural products, and often the result of prolonged physical and communicative practices that promote perceived sensory validation of parahistorical theories or claims. Paracorporeality is a complex process of embodied reception that often involves claims about as well as experiences and representations of bodies that differ from the variety of scientific models of the body accepted by medical and biochemical disciplines such as anatomy, physiology, histology, neurology, or genetics. The lived and experienced body of a practitioner of martial arts spiritualities, as the ones described here, differs markedly from the empirical data that could be gathered from an examination such as a CT scan, X-ray, or an autopsy. In the latter case, one could simply cut open a practitioner of esoteric martial arts and no dāntián would be found in their body. To some extent, however, this would simply miss the point. Depending on how that martial artist defined a dāntián, the results would vary. An autopsy of Zhèng Mànqīng would have certainly shown that he partly consisted of a Greater Omentum, which was (partially, at least) his own definition of a dāntián, just like George Kam Wing Ho and Mike Patterson have internal oblique and transverse abdominal muscles – like most other people. They did however differ in their definition and lived experience of what these body parts signify. For them, they are (also) dāntiáns, with all the counter-scientific connotations that might involve. Although one would need to look longer – naturally, to no avail – for Féng Zhìqiáng’s qì ball, just like we will find no scales, wings, or tails in any of the martial arts dragon bodies that we might examine.
Although not real by any scientific standards, the esoteric perceptions of the human body in CIMA spiritualities are still part of rigorous physical practices that involve hundreds or even thousands of hours of physical training. Just like running or lifting weights, such training inevitably changes both the bodily composition and the neurological programming of the practitioners, thereby altering their physical bodies by increased or decreased local muscle composition, bone density, callouses due to skin lacerations, hand-eye coordination, and so on. The same training also changes their lived experience, or the discursive reality of their own bodies, and the perception of their bodies by their martial arts peers – and in some cases (such as with very famous masters like Féng Zhìqiáng) the perception of their body in the wider non-martial arts population.
From a scientific point of view, Féng Zhìqiáng’s body – or that of any other martial artist with a transempirical worldview, body perception, and culture of practice for that matter – is still entirely comparable to any other human body. But at the level of both their own body image and lived bodily experience, as well as in the relatively smaller nuances of how their bodies were influenced by physical training regimens, they manifest culturally specific (and individualised) examples of the physical consequences of paracorporeality.
9 Conclusion
I have defined paracorporeality as a type of sensory (and discursive) state created through imaginative play in which signs do not have their ordinary meaning or may have multiple meanings. Paracorporeality is the product of bricolage that blends elements from the scientifically measurable body with notions about the body from historical and fictional narratives that are reassembled into a pleasing and desired new body through physical practices, communicative strategies, or both. In the paracorporeality of CIMA practitioners, culturally specific models of the human body meet fiction and idealised versions of history in the process of reception of sources and construction of new body images. My theory of paracorporeality is inspired by Laycock’s paracosms, and the bodies that are produced from the process of paracorporeality can be called paracorpora or paracorpuses. Paracorpora are the cognitive, neurological, physical, verbal, sensory, social, and cultural products of acting as if and can be both thoroughly developed to the point of physiological change – or be loosely imagined and flexible. In the case of CIMA paracorporeality and its Euro-American reception, fictional and historical sources from an array of Chinese historical periods and practices are combined in complex ways to produce imaginary organs and bodies, including those of mythological beings, such as dragons.
In his 1852 poem The Buried Life, Matthew Arnold (1822–1883) proclaimed that “The same heart beats in every human breast!” (Arnold 1852). From the perspective of paracorporeality theory, however, this does not capture the whole picture. Not every heart, head, or belly is the same – and even in those bellies in which dāntiáns are felt, not every dāntián is the same. Those bellies are in some instances located in dragon bodies or in bodies that (at least partially) embody dragons. Yet again, those dragons are not the same either; they are individually imagined and embodied depending on the practitioner’s cultural repertoire. Paracorporeality blends reality with the discursively real of lived experiences and the body imaginary in a process of imaginative and experiential superimpositions. In turn, this process plays a central part in the production, reproduction, reimagination, and reception of cultural entanglements.
Abbreviations
| CAGR | Compound Annual Growth Rate |
| CCM | Classical Chinese Medicine |
| CIMA | Chinese Internal Martial Arts |
| PRC | People’s Republic of China |
| ROC | Republic of China |
| TCM | Traditional Chinese Medicine |
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For readers interested in some of my thoughts on this, my recent chapter “Be Water My Friend: Esotericism, Martial Arts and Entangled Histories” (Makeeff 2024) may be useful. My analysis is also informed by my wider knowledge of the field as a practitioner of these arts in the past twenty-five years, as well as by a selection of relevant quantitative data, which form the basis of the following section.
See https://ich.unesco.org/en/RL/taijiquan-00424 (accessed: November 29, 2024).
See the article by Per Faxneld in this volume.
Inspired by Pokorny and Winter (2024: 2–3), I use the term Euro-American as “a qualifier intended to geographically delimit the globally interwoven esoteric discourse,” rather than as an essentialist term.
See also the article by Justin B. Stein in this volume.
Although, as I will show, some CIMA practitioners and authors equate the dāntián with actual organs or tissue found in the human body.
In nèidān, there are also examples of the embryo being referred to as shēn wài shēn
Lóngde chuánrén is also the title of a song by Hóu Déjiàn
Translator’s note (Liu and Brennan 2012).
