This piece has been written by Dr Atreyee Majumder (Associate Professor, Social Sciences at NLSIU). The image is a still from the movie Kung Fu Panda 1 depicting the Jade Palace.
Recently, I watched the films of the Kung Fu Panda franchise — the first two at least — notwithstanding longstanding snobbery about supposedly lowbrow culture. Today, I wish to curate some thoughts on the art of learning, the self-other divide, the vexed question of freedom and pain and the wonderful Kung Fu Panda I. For those who have not watched these films, I must recommend them not least for the lovely animation of East Asian art forms. This essay may contain a bit of a spoiler.
The premise of Kung Fu Panda I is the serendipitous catapulting of Po, a panda who knows nothing about martial arts, but is admiring of the great warriors, into Grand Master Oogway’s consideration. Oogway then appoints Po, to everyone’s surprise and disbelief, as the next Dragon Warrior. Master Shifu, the main practical teacher of Kung Fu and also a student of Oogway, thinks Po can’t measure up to learning Kung Fu to fulfil the prophecy. The senior master, Master Oogway, believes that there was some kind of cosmic sign that Po is to be the next Dragon Warrior. Master Shifu surrenders to the judgment of his senior Master Oogway completely and accepts the prophecy and starts to teach Po, who is ignorant of the art of Kung Fu, while remaining a sceptic.
Master Shifu, like me, sees talent in skill, tenacity, and the ability to master something at a very high level. Unfortunately for me, there is no Master Oogway to show me the real Truth, one that seemed inscrutable to the workings of reason. This is caused by the damnation of practical reason. Like Master Shifu, I would treat Po and his admiring ignorance as amusing. But unlike Master Shifu, I am too caught up in an all-knowing reason that traps me, such that I would treat Master Oogway’s higher judgment with suspicion. Master Oogway’s logic is inscrutable, obscure and yet Master Shifu yields to it in faith. I would sniff in him superstition, blindspots, maybe even madness of some sort. The Dragon Warrior epithet should go to the best Kung Fu practitioner and not to Po, who landed in the ceremony entirely accidentally.
What I don’t know to reflect upon, and neither did Master Shifu to begin with, is that the Dragon Warrior is not only a master of the practical art of Kung Fu, they must necessarily be a philosopher of Kung Fu. Why was Po the correct choice according to Master Oogway? We can never quite tell. Master Shifu yields to master Oogway’s strange choice, although he remains a bit resentful of Po in the beginning. But his yielding in the first place, knowing that he trusts Oogway although he can’t see reason in Oogway’s judgment, is what I wondered about. Master Shifu shows me the way and teaches me to be comfortable in mystery, even surrender to it - not knowing the point of something. In another sense, this is the story of authority. Oogway is the senior teacher, and his preference prevails.
But Master Oogway also emits a deeper wisdom that penetrates the arrogance of Shifu’s metis or techne (as the Greeks would call it) – practical intelligence of knowing the inner mechanics of something very well. We live in a world where we are full of certainty about our abilities, ever mastery over ways of doing things – art or science or sport or music or philosophy. We rarely give ourselves the opportunity to reflect on what it means to be able to do something very well, why and how we should use our excellence in the world, how we should be vis-à-vis our excellence. All we take from the world of learning is the opportunity to prove ourselves as better than our friends, peers, competitors, and a brief pleasure-fix that these small triumphs bring us momentarily. I wish for a Master Oogway in every school or university, every home, every corporate law firm, every government. Maybe they are there already, and we have forgotten to listen to them.
Who is your Opponent?
The film took me back to the memory of a few major hits I took when I found myself in a jiu-jitsu class a couple of times last year. I don’t mean to draw false equivalences between East Asian martial arts traditions, but these are my paltry entries into philosophical worlds that are mysterious, attractive and yet, very difficult for me to understand. Needless to say, I came out looking like a fool. The black-belt teacher, a young man from Delhi, said to us, “what is the difference between practising with an opponent and doing the real thing in combat?” There were many answers, mostly that you go easy in practice and you apply greater force in the real combat event. But then we won’t win the fight? Nervous voices murmured. He said, “…but you will apply exactly the amount of pressure required in practice, and in real combat. Enough to emerge as the dominant fighter (it is a situation of combat after all), but not so much as to hurt the other person unnecessarily.”
Maybe he was channelling an Oogway. I mulled over this wisdom for a long time. Modulating the correct amount of force is our only route to a higher pedagogic wisdom. It’s the only way to teach or learn with any meaningfulness. It’s what we need to learn to do with ourselves and others, as well as with those in our care as students or subordinates. The classroom is a jiu-jitsu mat, I concluded: it is a control experiment for the correct application of force in pursuit of something beautiful – learning. As a teacher, I take on the responsibility to those in our care to reveal to them versions of themselves hidden in plain sight that may not immediately be visible to the person themselves. I shoulder this responsibility of playing with the correct balance between release and constraint, and more often than not, I fail at this endeavour. I think mastery over course material is the only thing that matters in this controlled environment. I lack Oogway’s wisdom. Don’t get me wrong — freedom doesn’t mean I become okay with students who sleep or play video games in class, but try to cultivate a perfect balance of care and authority together to bring out something hidden and beautiful in my students.
The meagre wisdom doled out casually at a jiu-jitsu session changed my life in significant ways. I started to think of freedom differently. To be free, and responsible for one’s freedom, one needn’t feed every impulse and every desire that passes through one’s consciousness and revel in such impulse-actualisation. One needed to exercise remarkable balance in the components of release and constraint in order to apply just the right amount of force on one’s own and others’ energies. One had to be an orchestra musician or a company dancer of sorts. This may be mundane in many traditions of learning – especially music and sport, but it was new for me. I wanted to share this thought with my twenty-year-old, defiant self. I would have pooh-poohed at all these gestures as conservative attempts to curtail my inner freedom.
Free as a Jiu-Jitsu Fighter
If there is inner freedom, where is it? What relationship does learning have with our inner selves? What is this inner space? Apart from experiencing it as desire and hurt - the two primary poles of emotions, are there other ways to access it? These questions led me to study the lectures and writings of some teachers of Buddhism, especially the Zen tradition. Some answers on the inner domain are beginning to emerge, but that’s not so relevant to discuss here. The Zen school, as an East Asian version of Mahayana Buddhism, denies the self in its entirety – something I am still trying to wrap my head around. Does that mean I have no dignity, no purpose, no self-regard, no direction? Am I to become a doormat for other people with malign intention to trample upon? Am I to become abject? This was scary, as the substratum of the self as I know it, is deeply laden with a certain self-regard; in some vocabularies, ego.
How should we access Freedom? The big F. I don’t mean that as a poor joke. It’s really a kind of self-fucking. The freedom agenda that finally translates as endless feeding of a hungry ego. Without drawing an easy binary between East and West, the moving away to the actually East-of-myself (meaning East Asia) registers a definition of freedom that is written with eloquence, but not so easy to practice. Imagine, being as careful and delicate and loving with your opponent in a real-life fight, as though they were your friend or lover and you would never ever hurt them. Applying just the right kind and amount of force, with love, mutual respect, and a certain dissolution of the self-other divide. That jiu-jitsu lesson taught me the need to hold someone’s wrist with the care with which I would hold my own. We don’t do that in our homes, our friendships, our classrooms, our professions, and definitely not on the jiu-jitsu mat of learning. It is easy when both parties share a common vision of the world, like it’s easy to be liberal in a world where everyone else is a liberal. The test really begins when we start to apply force on the wrists of someone who doesn’t think like us. Perhaps, in a classroom or in theatres of ideological warfare. This complete divorcing of another person or community or religion or nation occurs through a complete split from one’s self. True freedom probably lies in exercising the deftness and control of a jiu-jitsu fighter.
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