35th Generation Disciple
Brief info
From what I can remember, I never really liked martial arts as a child. My father was Shifu Shi Yanzi, so I was somewhat expected to follow in his footsteps. When I moved to London in 2003, aged 9, I did the children’s class at Shaolin Temple UK. I was one of the noisiest and most mischievous children, and I liked the class only because it felt like play time.
Something changed in secondary school. It’s not easy to pin down, but it was a mixture of encounters with bigger kids, seeing others train really hard at Shaolin, and coming to know what would become my role models: Bruce Lee, Muhammad Ali, and Michael Jordan. I was obsessed with the one-inch punch and practiced it on my wardrobe, I copied Ali’s flurry of punches against the mirror, and Jordan hooked me onto basketball, practicing it in the same repetitive, perfecting fashion as you would a punch or kick – reviewing, questioning, imagining and solidifying every movement with each repetition. After I was on the train, I went full steam, training 6 times a week in the morning before school, for 2 years. It made me work harder, and gave me confidence. It proved that achievement was based on effort and effort comes from the individual.
I remember my dad spoke to me about the Buddhist philosophy of non-attachment in primary school, when I kept crying because my mum went to China. Somehow, it worked. In a strange way, that memory has always stuck with me. Sometimes it is easy to forget that there is a lot of chaos and suffering in the world, not just in war-torn areas, but also in normal everyday life. So I always try to position martial arts in context, and I think Buddhist philosophy is really important in this perspective. Why is there suffering, how should we treat one another, how do we react in complex situations, and why exactly are we practicing martial arts? I think these are questions that are important, and Buddhism more than anything else has reminded me this.
More information: http://www.tianxu.co.uk/about
