I recently placed a video on my Facebook page that showed some of the nonsense that gives martial arts a bad reputation. It triggered the idea to write a series on Martial Arts Myths.

Why? Because no matter how hard you squash those myths, like cockroaches, they crawl from under your foot and multiply once again. I don’t think we’ll ever be able to eradicate them, which leaves giving better information, hence this article and the following ones on other myths.

Let’s start by defining our terms.

Martial Arts Myths: Chi projection

A “myth” is “any invented story, idea, or concept.” In other words: a lie, an untruth.

The concept of “chi” is more difficult to explain. A common translation is “vital energy” though that is not entirely accurate either, as in the ancient Chinese worldview, ghosts existed and had “chi” too. “Energy” might be a better translation, but that doesn’t work for Western minds, as science has a classification for the different types of energy we can measure. So we’re a bit stuck here.

“Projection” in this case means transferring the “chi” without physical contact.

Bringing all this together, here’s the claim some people make:

There exists a skill that gives you the ability to transfer “chi” from one person to another in a combat or self-defense situation, without making physical contact.

Supposedly, you can learn to control your chi and then throw it across a distance at an attacker to incapacitate him. They call this chi projection, kong jin (empty force), ki power, and a host of other names.

It’s all the same thing, though: a myth.

Here’s a typical demonstration:

The “master” yells and “projects” his chi at his students with the usual, ridiculous results. Funny thing : when you look at the slow-motion footage, you clearly see they throw themselves to the ground. There is no unseen force doing so. The only reason it “works” is because he uses his own students to demo, people who are mentally conditioned to play their part. You rarely see uncooperative non-students in such a demo. When that does happen, this tends to be the result:

This “Kiai master” did all sorts of funky stuff with his students in his own school. He even offered fortune-telling services (for big bucks, of course) to naive believers. But he made the mistake of issuing a challenge to anybody who doubted his chi powers were real. An MMA fighter took him up on his offer and the “master” got his ass kicked.

It takes a special kind of idiocy to put out such a challenge and expect people to never take you up on it. It takes an entirely different level of self-delusion to actually show up when a fighter picks up the gauntlet. Apparently, he convinced himself he could handle it when somebody came at him for real

More on that in a bit, first this.

 

The chi projection master…

About 15 years ago, a guy showed up to a seminar I hosted, and from then on kept on saying we needed to train together. I ignored it until a friend of mine said he actually did have some fighting skills. I wasn’t convinced but was willing to take my friend’s word for it and set up a time with the guy for a “mutual exchange” as he called it.

Turned out he was a friendly guy, polite and respectful at first. We talked a bit, discussed martial arts myths and chi projection in particular, and I expressed my disbelief. Then he wanted to see how I did pushing hands. So I explained how we train in my school and we did some free-style pushing hands.

I broke his balance repeatedly which made him upset and he complained I was using my muscular strength instead of good technique. I replied that if I had done that, he would have been thrown a whole lot harder. And that if brute strength is all I had, it should make breaking my balance with his superior technique a whole lot easier as the claim is precisely that it overcomes brute strength. His response was that he never trained like I do and always included striking, so we did his way from then on.

I guess he tried to recover his lost dignity because right away, he came at me with enthusiasm and a lot of force. The first couple of exchanges ended quickly with me breaking through his defenses and landing a controlled palm strike on his face, fingers pushing gently (but firmly) into his eyes.

The next exchange ended when I kicked him in the head.

The last exchange finished with me sweeping him to the floor and him landing with a resounding thud.

At that point, he refused to continue and started talking about his chi projection skills. How he had once put a student in the hospital for a week with a no-touch strike and later on healed him with his hands when the doctors couldn’t find what was wrong…

I politely asked to demonstrate that on me.

He said he couldn’t control it. Sometimes his chi projection worked, sometimes it didn’t.

I asked to try it anyway.

He refused.

I left and never saw him again.

He stopped calling me to train with him.

What are they thinking?

My story here is just one example of martial arts myths in action; there are many more. But it illustrates the key question: how on earth is it possible that people:

• Believe this stuff actually works.
• Spend lots of money to learn it.
• Convince themselves it’s a good idea to teach it.

The first one, I believe, is very simple:

People want to be fooled.

They want to believe magic is real.

They want to believe they can do the impossible.

So they re-frame their thinking to absorb information that confirms their bias and then ignore opposing views. They also willfully rearrange their thinking to find solutions for the conflicts of reasoning they discover along the way. This is called cognitive dissonance, and it’s a well-studied problem. Case in point:

A few years ago, I was in Bali to train a client and went to a local market. I walked around a bit and drifted over to a stall from where the incessant chanting came. There was a small crowd gathered around a “magician”, as my translator called him.

He sat next to a box with a big snake in it and “proof” of his claims of the supernatural in pictures all around him. Apparently, the guy gave out blessings to his followers and they were constantly handing him over their money while he chanted those blessings. I kept track for a little while and saw him making a decent salary for that country in just five minutes: his followers were in ecstasy.

Here’s the thing: the pictures he had there were from tabloids (“I married Elvis’s Alien Clone” type magazines), medical books (showing horrific mutations and diseases), and some modern works of art (Piccinini’s half-woman, half-cow.) I recognized most of them, but the followers clearly had no clue.

Had he tried his con game on the campus of a Western university, any art or medicine student would have laughed him out of there. But not so in a country rife with poverty and a poor education system. Those people believed him because they want to believe in magic.

It’s still a part of their culture.

Show me the money!

Once people start believing these martial arts myths, or merely doubting that they are impossible, they go to enormous lengths to make them their own. They’ve already convinced themselves they want to investigate this further, so they seek out people who offer that knowledge. That’s why you see martial arts myths like chi projection alive and well today, when science can prove it’s nonsense: the con men know how to work a mark.

Unscrupulous teachers figure out there’s money to be made from gullible martial artists, and they reel them in by offering freebies first and then progressively charging more. By that time, you’re spending way too much money on something you would never even consider if you look at it rationally: you’re suffering from commitment bias or escalation of commitment and keep on paying. You tune out information that proves you should stop because you already spent so much time and money on it. So you decide to go all in and dig even deeper. Not unlike those people who play the lottery for decades and never hit the jackpot but keep going anyway…

Good con men can keep this going for a long time and wipe out people’s bank accounts. They always have an excuse why it’s your fault that the chi projection thing didn’t work correctly. Here’s an example of that in action:

When it doesn’t work, you get this weird explanation about putting your tongue in the wrong spot or pushing with your toes. Isn’t it funny how there was no mention of that in the beginning? How it was all “this stuff works great, you can’t resist it,” right up until it fails?

Another example is the Yellow Bamboo scam. It was pretty big a few years ago but seems to have simmered down somewhat. They claimed to teach chi powers and asked for lots of money for their courses. This is the promotional video from back then:

This is what happens when they challenge people who don’t play ball:

Like I said in the beginning, I’ve yet to see somebody make chi projection work consistently against non-compliant partners and this video is more proof of that.

But even if it did work, how many self-defense situations do you know in which you can take a minute or so to do your meditation and breathing exercises before you have to deal with that incoming attack?

Conclusion

It’s only human nature to want to believe the magical and mystical things you see around you. And for thousands of years, people did just that (remember, at one point in time everybody knew the earth was the center of the universe and the sun revolved around it…) but that doesn’t mean we have to remain ignorant.

I loathe the snake-oil salesmen who take advantage of people and sell them this nonsense. They deserve whatever they get when somebody eventually decides to test them. I also loathe how they give martial arts a bad name through their antics.

I feel bad for the believers, though.

They’re being taken for a ride, a costly one, and often don’t realize how far they have drifted from reality. Violence is scary, and it can be painful and traumatizing to be confronted with it. But learning parlor tricks to deal with it is no solution. This article is my small part in spreading the word to those who haven’t been sucked in yet, but are at risk.

In closing, I’d like to leave you with the words of a teacher to one of his students:

Don’t teach bullshit; the truth is hard enough already.

Both as teachers and students, it would be good if we tried to follow this advice.