Original published in the San Jose Mercury News’ West Magazine on January 29, 1989.

THE REWARDS OF HONORABLE WORK

Forget the chop-socks exploits of Chuck Norris and Bruce Lee. The spiritual side of the martial arts will never show up in the movies.

By Michael Dorgan

Photography by Tom Van Dyke

MAYBE IT STARTED WITH THE CHICKENS. One of my earliest memories is of a life-and-death struggle against a half-dozen roosters. Or so it seemed at age 4. A chicken-farmer neighbor in my small Wisconsin town had hoisted me over the top of their wire pen--his idea of a joke. As he laughed, I flailed wildly to fight off the beaks, wings and heel spurs.

Never will I forget the terror of staring into their wild eyes, which were level to my own when the roosters arched their necks to attack. Nor will I forget my state of mind once the fright-induced paralysis passed and I began the desperate business of defending myself. Empty of thought or conventional feeling, my mind was free of fear, hope or any of the distractions that muddle so many of our moments. If life were an electrical current, then this would be superconductivity at maximum voltage.

So vivid is my memory of those roosters that I've wondered if they were the reason I later began what has become a 20-year training in Asian martial arts. Was I so scared by those unlikely assailants that I would invest thousands of hours of time learning to defend myself? Or was it not fear but the sensation that followed that attracted me? Did the intense clarity and focus I experienced during that bout with the chickens seduce my young mind like a drug?

I don't know the answers. Maybe the roosters had nothing to do with it. Motivations are often murky and complex, and sometimes they change. More important than why I started training is why I never stopped. Month after month, year after year, I have averaged at least two sweaty hours per day refining an esoteric skill that developed halfway around the world and became obsolete with the repeating rifle.

WHAT THAT PART OF ME IS, ONLY gradually has come into focus. Certainly I had only the fuzziest notion of it when, as an 18- year-old college freshman, I slipped into a stiff new karate uniform and tried to figure out how to tie the long white belt after lapping it twice around my waist. My first teacher was an American who had learned an Okinawan style of karate while stationed there as a Marine. It was a rigid, kamikaze style of fighting that nicely fit his personality. His right hand was a gnarled hunk of fused bone and scar tissue from being slammed against hard objects, including human heads. Even the tops of his toes were calloused. His favorite pastime was hanging out in beer bars looking for fights. If subjected to the slightest provocation, he would grab a longneck bottle, smash the top off it and then offer the jagged weapon to his prey. "Here, take this, " he'd say. "Then I can kill you legally." If the offender accepted the broken bottle, he usually was dropped like a rock by a kick to the side of his head.

To train his students for similar heroics, this teacher began most classes by ordering everybody to lie on their backs and hold their legs off the ground. He then circled the room leaping from stomach to stomach. Another training technique involved dividing the class into two facing lines, one of which would march across the room while its members delivered full- force punches into the stomach of the opposing person with each step. Once the far wall was reached, roles switched and the punchers got punched all the way back across the room. It was a big room.

The class provided the kind of combat preparation that might have been appropriate in ancient Okinawa, which for a lengthy period was stripped of weapons by the ruling Japanese. But in modern America such training injures more people than it protects. Several students quit the class with broken bones, including an attractive woman who got her nose flattened on her first day--by another woman.

My own most spectacular injury was inflicted by the right foot of the teacher, who lifted me off the ground with a kick to the groin during a sparring session. I collapsed to the floor, my entire body locked in a spasm of shock and pain. After two days on my back in bed, I carefully transported my severely bruised and swollen parts to the student clinic, where the doctor's eyes grew wide when I dropped my pants.

Nevertheless, I continued to attend the class until the end of my sophomore year, when I transferred to the Madison campus of the University of Wisconsin. There I quickly got caught up in the political and social ferment of the times and stopped training. But I constantly found myself thinking about martial arts, and after graduating from college and joining the ranks of the underemployed as a furniture mover, I searched for another school.

THIS TIME I CHOSE TAE KWON DO, a Korean style that is similar to Okinawan and Japanese karate but emphasizes kicking over punching. My teacher was a former South Korean Army champion.

I spoke no Korean. His English lacked crucial words and was pronounced in a way that sometimes turned our conversations comic. One day soon after I joined the class, for example, he told me I needed a school patch on my uniform. I followed him into his office, where he pulled one from a desk drawer and handed it to me. It featured the image of a fist encircled by the name of the school. "How much is it?" I asked.

"Fwee, " he answered.

"Thanks, " I said. Then I turned to leave.

"Fwee, " he repeated.

I turned back, thanked him again and once more turned to leave.

"Fwee!" he shouted impatiently. "Fwee dollars."

Misunderstandings aside, I felt a deep affinity for the man and sensed that he understood something I needed to know. I had no name for it but it had something to do with poise and clarity.

I began to learn a little about poise by fighting in tournaments throughout the Midwest. Some of the roughest were in the Chicago area, where whites were a minority, and not a beloved one. Howls of anticipated pleasure arose from a crowd when I one day found myself faced off against a menacing, ghetto-toughened black who loomed over me like the worst suburban white boy's nightmare.

He stood about 6 foot 3 and weighed about 210. His chest barely fit into his uniform and his fists looked like hams except for the rows of big knuckles. His eyes flared with what I assumed to be a lifetime's worth of stored racial hatred.

I stood 5 foot 10 and thin. If my eyes flared, it was from the fear I was trying to conceal.

An hour earlier, when the bout schedule was posted and I realized I had been put into the heavyweight category, I had gone to a Korean official, informed him of the mistake and asked that he correct it.

"Too late, " he said.

"But it's not fair, " I protested. "I only weigh 155."

He responded with a contemptuous glare. Perhaps he was offended that I had questioned the way things had been done; Tai Kwon Do had a lot of military trappings, and teachers and officials generally enjoyed unchallenged authority. Maybe he thought I was a coward for not wanting to fight a man whose thighs were the thickness of my torso. More likely, he simply didn't want to bother rearranging the complicated schedule.

"Too late, " he repeated.

So there I stood, the soles of my bare feet as sweaty as my palms. Heart pounding, mind racing, I waited for the bell that was about to toll for me. This is going to hurt, I thought.

At the sound of the bell, he lunged like a racehorse. I ducked to the left but was stopped cold when a foot crashed down on the side of my head. Stunned, I barely felt the punch that followed, though I could hear the heavy thud when the fist slammed into my ribs.

I knew he would be strong but was surprised by his speed and skill. Dodging and blocking a steady shower of kicks and punches, I tried to get close enough to counterattack but was kept at bay by his longer reach.

By the end of the first round I knew I was whipped. He was bigger and more powerful than I, and had better technique. I had nothing to rely on but luck, and that already had deserted me or I wouldn't have been in this fight in the first place. As I knelt in my corner drawing deep breaths, I could feel in my guts the cold, clammy hairball of defeat.

But defeat has many levels. While accepting that I would not win the fight, I felt a surge of determination to not be humiliated. I will not let him batter me at will, I vowed, and I will not let him knock me out. With that diminished goal, I fought hard through the final two rounds, then accepted a loss by unanimous decision.

As I headed for the showers, the winner approached and stuck out his hand. There was a gang-style scar-tissue tattoo on his forearm. The anger was gone from his eyes.

"Good fight, " he said. "You OK?"

"Fine, " I said, shaking his hand. "Nice job."

Had he turned friendly only because he won? Did his earlier rage have nothing to do with race? I wasn't sure, but I accepted his gesture as a show of camaraderie from a traveler of the same path, a path that initially may be obscured by such thickets as racial tension but that ultimately leads deep into the colorless terrain of inner self.

FIGHTING, AT BEST, IS SIMPLY A WAY to check one's progress. A great thing about martial arts, a later teacher told me, is that they provide immediate feedback: If you do something wrong, you get hit.

Often what's wrong is that you are not paying attention. And often the reason you are not paying attention is that you are afraid.

If you see a fist speeding toward your face and think, "Ohmygod, that fist is going to hit me in the face, " it probably will. You are thinking when you should be moving. If your attention is focused on what actually is happening, you will not be thinking, you will not be afraid and you will have a much better chance of not getting hit.

Which brings us to an important paradox: Fear for your safety can jeopardize your safety. That extends far beyond the realm of martial arts. Fear is one of the great inhibitors of human performance, no matter what the activity.

Just as fear can distract, so can other emotions or thoughts. Most people sense that but don't realize that such distractions can be controlled. They don't realize that something beyond their deliberative, rational mind can take charge and do a better job. Sometimes it's as if the body itself takes charge. Chinese martial artists refer to the "educated palm, " as if the hand itself can develop the intelligence to act on its own. The point, however, is to educate one's entire being, to utilize the intelligence that extends beyond the conscious mind.

One thing I like about martial arts is that they deal with core aspects of life--fear, violence, mind, spirit--in ways that can be tested. The truths learned are experiential and potentially transformative, not intellectual and abstract. It's like the difference between reading a textbook definition of music and listening to Mozart.

But if there are things to be learned from martial arts, they are not learned easily. By the time I had earned a black belt I had trained for six years. (Normally it takes only three or four years, but I studied at three schools and had to start at the bottom of the ranking system each time.) Yet I still knew little of what the arts have to teach.

I had long realized that self-defense alone didn't justify the time and hard work required for mastery. Only a true paranoid would invest thousands of hours in training to protect against the remote possibility of being delivered from danger by a burst of kicks and punches. Any punk with a cheap gun and a 20-cent bullet can triumph over years of self-defense training.

On a few occasions I've felt seriously threatened: I was mistaken for a Brit by a band of Provisional IRA guerrillas in Belfast; I was robbed by renegade soldiers on a train near Algiers; I found myself surrounded by young gang members on a desolate block of Chicago's South Side. Each time, a calm mind was more useful than a trained body. But then one of the first things learned in martial arts is that mind and body are not separate, so maybe the composure I managed at those times was a result of my training.

However, a little martial arts training can be worse than none. Millions of years of evolution have prepared even 90- pound weaklings to bite, kick and claw their way out of threatening situations. But martial arts training at first represses such natural instincts in the hope of enhancing them. There is a period, often lasting several years, in which a student has neither unencumbered instinct nor effective skills. Some students during this period discover a new self- confidence, but often it is the unfounded confidence Michael Spinks expressed before he climbed into the ring with Mike Tyson.

Martial arts have gotten me into as many jams as it has gotten me out of. Probably half of the dozen-or-so incidents in which I've felt forced to fight have resulted from training itself, which is provocative to certain people.

FOR THE PAST 10 YEARS I'VE LIVED near and worked out in Oakland's Dimond Park. It's not a bad park by Oakland standards, which is to say that a few drug addicts and alcoholics live in the bushes but rarely bother anyone.

I prefer to practice early, when the air is fresh and the tops of the redwoods disappear into the morning mist. But my schedule sometimes leaves time for practice only in the evening, when drunks, dope fiends and juvenile delinquents sometimes prowl the park. Most merely search for more chemicals to suppress their pain and rage, but some look for ways to express those feelings.

One evening while I was practicing, a punk of about 20 strolled up, sat down on a low brick wall about 15 feet from me and pulled a butcher knife from his boot. As he stared at me with dead eyes, he repeatedly flipped the knife in the air, catching it each time near the tip of the blade.

"You wanna spar?" he asked, still flipping the knife. He was too close to ignore, so close I couldn't safely turn my back on him. Besides, I was irritated by his attempt to intimidate me.

"Sure, " I snapped. "Let's do it."

He said nothing, but I sensed his disappointment that I showed no fear of his knife. I showed no fear of the knife because I felt no fear of him. After years of training, you usually can read the potential of a would-be attacker. This kid had done a lot of mirror training but showed no fighting skill or power. His chin was held too high, and his shoulders were drawn back tightly into a puffed peacock pose that would prohibit quick movement.

On a more subtle level, he showed little of what the Chinese call I (pronounced E), which translates roughly as "intent." I is the part of the mind that marshals the energy that puts the body in motion. If the I is not focused and concentrated, the resulting movement is weak and confused. At some level, he must have understood this. Without another word he turned, tucked his knife back in his boot and sauntered off.

Only twice have I had to fight in the park. I ended both skirmishes with one or two blows but neither case represented a great achievement. And no, I did not wait for them to swing first. The instant they began to move on me, I hit them. My aggressiveness may surprise you when you learn that for the past 11 years, one of the martial arts I've been studying is Tai Chi Chuan, a Chinese style widely known in this country as a "soft" or "non-aggressive" method of self-defense. Tai Chi, which usually is practiced in slow motion, is often portrayed as a gentle art designed solely for defensive use.

That characterization is based on a misunderstanding not only of Tai Chi but also of those martial arts these same people would characterize as "hard" or "aggressive." Every martial art contains both defensive and offensive movements, including Tai Chi.

The "non-aggressiveness" of Tai Chi results from a tactical concern, not a philosophical or spiritual one. Tai Chi masters often let their opponents attack first because many Tai Chi techniques are most effective as counterattacks. Other martial arts styles, such as Hsin I, which I also practice, emphasize offense over defense. When a Hsin I practitioner blocks a punch, for example, the intent is to attack and injure the attacker's arm, not just to defend.

Yu Hwa Long, perhaps the greatest living Hsin I practitioner, expressed this principle quite eloquently several years ago when I was training with him in Shanghai. "You must come down on your opponent like a hard rain, " he said. "Where you touch, he breaks."

But to say that Hsin I emphasizes offense over defense is not to say that Hsin I players are bullies while Tai Chi players are pacifists. George Xu, who teaches both styles in San Francisco, says it is dangerous for a Tai Chi student to think that an attacker can be warded off with purely defensive movements.

"You may be able to block 50 punches in a row, but you will eventually be hit, " he says. "To defend yourself, you must at some point attack."

BUT IF ALL MARTIAL ARTS, BY DEFINITION, are ways to train for fighting, that is not to say one must fight to benefit from the training. Many players who never have had to defend themselves, and never expect to, still regard martial arts as enriching. The rewards range from health and fitness to spiritual growth.

For most modern players, health is the realm in which martial arts offer the greatest benefits. Americans are much more threatened by heart attacks or crippling arthritis than by muggers. Martial arts can provide an effective defense against a range of ailments, including those induced by stress. They also impose a structure on one's life that tends to moderate bad habits, such as heavy drinking and excessive eating.

The health benefits derive from both movement and breathing techniques. The movements tone muscles and stretch tendons, flex joints and improve blood circulation. Proper breathing is so crucial that many historians date the beginning of sophisticated martial arts to a time many centuries ago when an Indian monk introduced Yogic breathing techniques to Chinese exercise regimens. For the most part, the breathing is simply slow and deep, centered on the abdomen rather than the chest. For a model of proper breathing, look to any toddler. Their bellies are relaxed, swelling and shrinking with each breath. Such breathing is said to tone internal organs, including those essential to digestion and excretion. It also increases lung capacity and delivers more oxygen to the blood.

Proper breathing affects mind as well as body. Shallow, choppy breathing accompanies excitement or fear. People breathe much more slowly and deeply when their minds are calm.

Most players refer to "spiritual" development that results from martial arts, but that may be because they have no better word. For many people, especially Westerners, spiritual refers to an other-worldly realm that is approached through an elaborate set of doctrines and rituals. A matter of faith, not experience.

The spirituality I refer to has more to do with discovery and development than belief. It involves a usually slow and incremental process of coming to know oneself and the world, largely by paying attention to what is going on. And to what is not going on. It is learning to know not only the motion but also the stillness within the motion, the stillness that is the source of motion. The Chinese call it Wu Chi--the great, undifferentiated whole from which all things arise. It is that which lies before and beyond the reality ruled by the five senses and the imagination.

I don't know much about this other and greater reality. Even if I did, I probably couldn't explain it. But sometimes when I practice the entire context of my life seems to shift and the borders between me and everything else begin to blur. It is as if I were viewing life through the lens of a powerful microscope or from a distant planet, except that I am part of what I am viewing and not something separate from it. It is as if I can feel the heartbeat of the universe and that it is part of me, and I part of it.

It's a great place to visit, though my stays are brief. A sudden sound or an intrusive thought always returns me to the perception of myself as a harried human on a cramped and sometimes hostile planet:

A punk's approaching and he may want to fight. . . .

I've got to remember to mail my car payment. . . .

God, I'd like to win the lotto. . . .

I'm tired, maybe I'll go watch something stupid on TV. . . .

Sometimes I resent the pettiness of my life and sometimes I merely resent my awareness of the pettiness. But then I take a deep breath and remind myself that you can't measure progress from a single point of reference. You must consider not only where you are, but also the point from which you started.

When I have slipped into depression or deep sorrow, my training has been a lifeline to what lies beyond such states of mind. When I have felt cheated by a capricious world, martial arts have provided a model of fairness and justice. (In training, the return is always in proportion to the investment.) When I have felt stuck in the superficiality that often passes for daily existence, martial arts have pointed toward life's deeper core.

Martial arts have taught me patience and the importance of sustained effort. They have taught me to value losing as well as winning, and to focus on process rather than specific goals. They have helped me grow to where I am now, while continually humbling me with reminders of how far I have to go. Kung Fu, an umbrella term for Chinese martial arts, translates as "honorable work." In my case, a lot of work remains to be done.

Sometimes I wonder if the same results could have been gained if I had invested the same time and effort into something else--playing the piano, perhaps. Maybe I could have learned the same lessons from a different teacher. But then, what good is a piano if you ever find yourself surrounded by a bunch of nasty roosters?