Book Review: Two Translations of Cheng Zongyou's "Dandao Fa Xuan"

The easiest way to justify a Sengoku Japanese persona in the SCA is not the usual "ambassador" route, or even the "ronin" route; it's the wakou route.  Japanese pirates were a problem in coastal China, and all the way down to the Philippines, all the way back to the Kamakura shogunate; stopping the pirates was part of the reason that the Mongols wanted to invade in the early 1200s.  With Japan locked in a period of war so significant that it's become a cultural touchpoint from about 1450 to about 1600, piracy, maritime trade, and the flip-side of piracy, basically naval protection rackets, became a reliable way of making money in western Japan at all social levels.

Thus we have Japanese ships putting in at Manila, creating a Japanese colony there (in the sense that Intramuros was the Spanish "colony" in otherwise Filipino Manila, not in the sense that the archipelago was a Spanish colony), and even hiring out as enforcers and bodyguards in Spanish Mexico.  All of this is to say that the fastest way of explaining why your persona is not in Japan is taking to the sea for fortune and glory.

What does this have to do with sword manuals?

Well, in the late 1500s, enough Japanese "pirates" washed up in China that the Chinese origins of Okinawan karate as described in Karate Kid are plausible.  There was a rich cross-channel cultural exchange, though neither culture at this point was particularly complimentary to the other (the Chinese character for Japan used at this time, 倭, can be translated as "dwarf," "deformed," or "monkey," and the most famous forms of contact were metal-on-metal in Korea).  The Japanese, at the peak of their metallurgical skill, gained some reputation in China as swordsmiths, and a Chinese martial artist named Cheng Zongyou (程宗猷) (1561-1636) decided to learn how to use the Japanese sword.

He included what he learned, and the story of how he came to do so, in a chapter of a much larger work, collected in 1621 as Skills Beyond Farming (Gengyu Shengji or 耕餘剩技).  This work also included his crossbow manual and his spear manual, which I will leave aside for later research.  However, the sword portion was first written down about 1614 as Select Movements of the Saber (單刀法選).  I have specifically chosen "Saber" as the translation of the first two characters despite it disagreeing with both of my sources, because the sources both agree that the first two characters mean "simple sword," meaning a sword with one cutting edge, and "saber" describes both that weapon and the intent of how that weapon will be used.

Now, I have said that there are two sources.

There are two easily available English translations.  The first, and arguably more faithful to the original material because it does not contain any interpretive additions and is more firmly Chinese, is Jack Chen's Ancient Art of Chinese Long Saber.  Chen is in many ways a parallel of the early-2010s western historical martial artist, with at this point a decade or two of manual translation under his belt, but he is rooted firmly in Chinese tradition, providing half the context of a manual about Japanese swords in Chinese hands.  The other translation is Eric Shahan's The Japanese Pirate Sword - clearly a more picaresque name, but also telling where Shahan's interests lie, for he is a Japanese translator and martial artist, providing the other side of the context coin.  Neither one of them is a classicist in Chinese or Japanese, but this manual does not require that level of education; it was deliberately kept simple.

As always, when discussing a translation of a manual, there are three things to discuss.  The first is the translation; the second is the system itself; the third is how well the text conveys the system, or text-as-text.  To be honest, there is precious little to choose in translation quality between the two books; Shahan prefers to give things Japanese names, or Chinese-as-pronounced-in-Japan names, and Chen prefers to give things Chinese names.  I think a split on this would have been wiser in both cases; I don't think that Cheng's teacher was named Ryu Unhou, because while three-kanji names aren't unheard of, it has a terrible "mouthfeel," and Liu Yunfeng, Chen's translation of the same name, feels better and more importantly feels like an actual Chinese name.  At the same time, the sword under discussion is very clearly a katana or a tachi - both words that have shades of meaning, but only cleanly translate to "sword," and the character used is 刀 - "sword."  Discussing a specifically Japanese sword used in the Japanese style, then, I would have chosen to use the Japanese word, even in an English-language text.

I say that there is little to choose between them.  This is because both translations provide the classical Chinese characters on facing pages.  For Chinese-language students, there's a line-by-line collation in Chen that also includes the pinyin transliteration, so you could read aloud to a Chinese audience, but the Shahan translation shows the full page from the source text with facing translation.  Each approach has advantages; because I have no interest in the pinyin version, for my specific purposes it is not a particular gain even where I see its use.  However, what this means is that you can cross-check a passage between Chen and Shahan and see if they even remotely agree with each other, and I was pleasantly surprised throughout that they agree, with minor differences in cadence and phrasing but not in intent or technical detail.

The system itself - I will be honest.  Cheng spent a great deal more time on how a Japanese sword is made, mostly accurately I should add, and how this differs from other sword construction, than he did on fundamentals such as "how to hold a sword."  Even his "how to draw a sword" feels weird and unnatural to me, though that could be because I've been conditioned to keep skin oils off of a sword blade at all costs rather than because it doesn't work.  Certainly it makes sense of drawing a four-foot-plus blade, but the other solution to that problem has been to draw and throw the scabbard back, so the weird "cradle the spine" might be unnecessary.

Cheng's approach to teaching technique is to teach stances, a total of 27 of them, and then to leave the method of getting from stance to stance to the student or instructor.  In a vacuum, this would be an exercise in frustration, as a lot of the stances look very similar to each other but for small details (like "arm floating" versus "arm bracing the spine of the blade" but both in same broad, open pose).  However, just the same way that Guy Windsor came up with the Farfalle di Ferro, or Iron Butterfly, to teach every transition, position, and blow of Fiore, the school Cheng describes has a form, drill, or kata to teach the moves.  The description of the form includes the transitional cuts needed to move from one to another.  Here is a sample of the English translation of the directions:

Begin Face-North, Use-From-South

Place both feet together, into left Carry-Sword Stance

Do a right-turn.

Draw-Out Stance.

Press-Down Stance.

Throw and receive the sword (Colin - toss it in the air in a flourish, not "end him rightly") into Pressing-Tiger Stance.  Step in with left foot.

Enter-Cave Stance.

Single-Lift Stance.

Turn the sharp edge

Waist-Cut Stance.

Lift up left leg into

Left Solo-Stand Stance.

Twist sword.

Deliver a diagonal cut.

Lift up right foot into

Right Solo-Stand Stance.

There is an extended footwork diagram of sorts, with lines indicating direction of movement for each of these and the main stances in a cartouche for decision points, but without adequate supervision and direction in fundamentals, it would be very easy even with this book in hand to learn this form perfectly and still be a mall ninja - although the amount of springing (not jumping, just very broad, aggressive steps where both feet may be in hover mode for a moment), one-legging, and twirling requires either pretty good balance, or faking it.  But the spinal alignment, balance, timing of blow and foot, measure and timing considerations - all of these are clearly not meant to be taught out of the book; the book is as much a teacher as a travelogue is a vacation.

In the form, Shahan's translation has one very strong, very clear edge - the "dance steps" include a small copy of the stance from the stance page.  With Shahan's version, any sword background whatsoever, and a sharp-eyed partner, you could do a pretty good approximation of this form; Chen is adamant both in the book and on the website that this is better seen than read, so it is a pedagogical decision, albeit one that as a man who reads much faster than video can convey, one where I prefer Shahan's approach.

In other words, placed in the context of Chinese martial manuals, this one is above-average in its clarity; it wasn't written as a formal essay but as an instruction booklet and it is well illustrated.  It does not have opposed figures, but rather assumes (according to both translators) that the instructor has a spear or staff to apply pressure to the student.  Having seen the reach advantage that a montante gives an instructor, I believe this, but I find it frustrating that all training is assumed to be asymmetrical and it is only assumed and never shown.  I tend to judge manuals on a scale of Carranza to Fiore in terms of being able to tell what's intended and going on, and I wouldn't give Cheng a full Fiore but I'd be willing to give him at least a Fior out of five.  It could rise to five with contextualizing each movement with opposition, and with a discussion of fundamentals like "how to hold a sword" and "how not to stand like a baby deer."  Cheng Zongyou, if you're reading this, I'd appreciate if you will include my notes for the 400th anniversary commemorative edition.

To his credit, Cheng does attempt to put his manual into a broader context with a brief sketch of what's different about the Japanese sword from the Chinese standard and to narrate what he views as the fundamentals of the system - mobility, deception, and aggression.  Between Cheng's attempts to contextualize, and his writing in a straightforward, metaphor-free fashion, this comes across not as a manual for the aristocracy but as a serious how-to by a subject matter expert, albeit one who has absorbed some lessons in his field (Cheng spent a decade at Shaolin before finding a sword master) that they are instinctive and trivial to him and he has forgotten that sometimes the student needs additional help getting to that point.

If I were to recommend only one edition of this, it would have to be Shahan's, because it's half as expensive and the form steps are illustrated; however, if a student were to pick either edition of this book up, they are likely to find useful material in it.  I picked up both, because I wanted to compare them.