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With
only a silk ribbon secured around his genitals, diao gung
practitioner Wang Hsin-kun is capable of lifting up to 60kg.
PHOTO: CHEN CHENG-CHANG, TAIPEI
TIMES |
Pushing the limit of pain
Practitioners of the 'chi gung' offshoot 'diao gung' are not
satisfied having pulled a trunk with their genitals. Now they want
to haul a Boeing 747
By David Frazier STAFF
REPORTER
On Oct. 29, 2000, three men used chi gung and their
penises to pull a flatbed delivery truck across part of a Taipei
parking lot. Their success prompted their teacher and mentor, Tu
Chin-sheng (Ò\ª÷²±), to dream up an even grander plan -- using 20
men to tow a 180-tonne Boeing 747.
Tu hoped to accomplish the feat with the blessing and sponsorship
of the Guiness Book of World Records. "We will be the first," he
said. "We will create the record." But why?
"The first reason is to let people know that there is this kind
of Chinese kung fu," he said. "And second, I want to let the
students show what they've learned." The pulling and technique,
which is practiced by hanging heavy weights from the male genitals,
is technically known as yin diao gung (³±¦Q¥\, literally translating
as something like "genitals hanging kung fu"), or diao gung (¦Q¥\)
for short. Tu claims that it is in fact an ancient art, its roots
tracing back to China's legendary Shaolin Temple (¤ÖªL¦x).
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Tu
Chin-sheng leads a class through traditional warm-up chi gung
exercises at his studio in Taipei. PHOTO:
CHEN CHENG-CHANG, TAIPEI
TIMES |
Tu's own practice of diao gung, however, represents a fusion of
Shaolin kung fu and a most singular strain of esoteric Taoism. Tu
said he learned the method in Taipei about 25 years ago from Wu Zhen
(®©¯u), a Taoist monk who'd come to Taiwan from Mt Omei (®oØݤs) in
Sichuan Province. According to Wu's teachings, diao gung is only the
fifth stage in a nine-fold path to enlightenment, with five of the
first six stages involving contortion of the penis or testicles.
From this nine step cycle, Tu has taken the name for his dojo,
Chiu Chiu Shen Gung (¤E¤E¯«¥\, literally "nine nine mysterious kung
fu"). Of the nine rungs on the method's mystical ladder, however,
Tu's chosen diao gung is not necessarily the most curious. The sixth
stage, for example, involves drawing water back through the urinary
tract and into the bladder by use of a drinking straw. Citing the
danger of infection, Tu never learned the technique and refuses to
teach it, saying only, "I know that it is done in India."
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Wang
Hsin-kun stretches before attempting to hoist weights with his
genitals. PHOTO: CHEN CHENG-CHANG, TAIPEI
TIMES |
In comparison to such fantastical athleticism, Chiu Chiu Shen
Gung's steps seven through nine seem almost banal. Stage seven
involves the channeling of chi (®ð), often translated as "energy" or
"breath," throughout the body. Stage eight is meditation, and stage
nine enlightenment. Claiming no grandeur, Tu says his abilities stop
at stage seven, and that he will only teach up through stage five --
diao gung, the technique that has become his hallmark.
As a person, Tu is nearly as enigmatic as the chi gung he
practices. He was born 46 years ago in Chiayi, the sixth of seven
sons of a kung fu master, all of whom now teach traditional Chinese
martial arts. Tu learned tai chi and chi gung from a master who died
at 103 and painting and calligraphy from a master who is now 105.
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Tu
Chin-sheng is a teacher of diao gung and can hang 60kg of
weights from his genitals while suspending himself from a
chin-up bar. PHOTO: CHEN CHENG-CHANG, TAIPEI
TIMES |
His sartorial tastes run somewhere between Bruce Lee and a Venice
Beach body builder -- cross-laced arm bands, weight belts, mesh
camouflage muscle shirts, balloon pants and monastery slippers. He
is soft spoken, unassuming, and will pause in the street to let
other pedestrians pass. He has built muscles like mountains not by
lifting weights, but by dragging 100kg logs through beach sand. He
is a certified acupuncturist.
He also loves to perform. And he has been doing it for a long
time. Under his father's tutelage, his martial arts performances
began in his early teens. In 1975, he was Taiwan's champion in guo
shu (°ê³N), the nationally recognized form of competitive martial
arts. He later went on to serve as a coach for the team as well as a
Taiwan representative to numerous international martial arts
competitions and exhibitions. His reputation steadily grew. On
occasion, in front of local TV cameras or in front of international
audiences, he would break 10 blocks of ice with a single fist or a
wooden board with a single finger. Has he ever broken his hand?
"Yes, a couple times." He's also pretty honest.
In 1976, he founded his chi gung training center, Chiu Chiu Shen
Gung, in Taipei. Since then, the school's branches have spanned
Taiwan, setting up in seven major cities. The Taipei branch alone
has more than 100 students. Most of the students are simply
interested in chi gung.
Though Tu estimates that around 100 of his former students have
gone on to teach diao gung in various parts of Taiwan, he also
readily admits that diao gung is not his primary focus. According to
Tu, chi gung, an art of physical and internal development, is the
source from which Chiu Chiu Shen Gung springs.
Both men and women have come to Tu's chi gung classes on account
of neck and back problems, joint problems, bladder control problems
and other infirmities. Many of them are advanced in years, and if
given the chance, nearly all of them will offer testimonial to their
various cures.
"Most of the people who come here have some kind of health
problem," said Chiang Cheng-true (½±¯u°£), a 57-year-old engineer
who claims that some movements in the chi gung routines will even
cure a stuffed up nose.
Chen Kuo-ying (³¯°ê^), age 69, came to Taiwan from Indonesia
two months ago after hearing about the diao gung truck pull. "Now I
have no problem carrying groceries back from the market, and I no
longer have to wake up three or four times a night to go to the
bathroom," he said thankfully, obviously amazed at the rapid
progress he's made.
Yet neither chi gung nor bending steel pipes with blows of his
fist -- as Tu sometimes still does -- have made him famous. But diao
gung might. To most, it is amazing that men can lift in excess of
150kg with their genitals. Tu himself can dangle up to 60kg while
hanging from a chin-up bar.
"You have to get your chi up first," said Wang Hsin-kun (¤ý«HµO),
an air conditioner installer dressed in a sort of light blue satin
kilt and glancing down towards his privates.
Practicing diao gung, he says, is something you don't do cold,
it's a several step process. Typically, students start a work-out
session by first taking part in a normal chi gung routine. After an
hour or so, on this occasion, the class divided and the diao
gung'ers passed through a curtain into a special kind of weight room
in the back. Iron plates weighing from 1kg to 20kg were scattered
over the padded floor as were the devices used for stacking and
hoisting those weights. Vertical rods stick up out of these weight
hangers at the end of which is a hook for catching a loop in a blue
silk ribbon. The ribbon, which is about 15cm wide before it is
folded and rolled into a fastening rope, is looped in a lark's head
knot around the base of both penis and scrotum, near the point where
they join the abdomen.
But this is getting ahead of the process. After the chi gung
workout, a diao gung specific warm-up is also necessary. It begins
by massaging and stretching the genitals, followed by beating the
muscles of the arms, legs and torso with wooden paddles. "It really
gets the chi flowing," said Wang.
Comparing diao gung to weightlifting, Wang said that he starts
every workout light, using only 1kg. From there he works his way up,
maxing out around 60kg, which he holds for only a few seconds, as he
did at a recent open house.
Another of Tu's students, Tu Chuen-hsin (Ò\¬K¤ß), can heft up to
100kg. A taxi driver of 22 years, he will speak of the tonic powers
of chi gung like most other practitioners. And after five or 10
minutes of talking about it, he'll smile, lower his voice, and
remark as an aside, "my wife stays good and satisfied."
"Sometimes if you don't warm up," he said, "it will go really
fast. But if you use chi gung, you can go for a long time. It comes
in handy, especially when you're tired and your wife is in the
mood."
Master Tu also makes no secret of diao gung's benefits for
virility, saying that a man's testicles begin to shrink when he is
30 and that "exercise" will keep them in shape. Hsieh Ru-tun
(Á¦¼´°), a uroligist at Taiwan University Hospital, says this is
not exactly correct however. "After 30, the testicles don't shrink,
but men begin producing fewer hormones, which affects the libido but
not sexual functioning," he said. "At an advanced age, men can also
face andropause, or a cessation of sexual functioning."
Unlike many doctors quoted in Taiwan's local media, however,
Hsieh is hesitant to criticize diao gung as dangerous. "Chi gung is
not exactly medicine, and I know that acupuncture has been known to
cure impotence," he said.
Chen Ruei-hsin (³¯¾UªY), chief resident of urology and Hsieh's
colleague at Taiwan University Hospital, holds a similar opinion
despite having treated a penile fracture (a rupture of the tunica
albuginea, a key membrane for containing the blood pumped into the
penis during an erection) that resulted from diao gung. "If the
weight isn't too heavy and there is no erection, there shouldn't be
any danger because it is just stretching the skin," he said. "The
biggest problem is that it will hurt."
Tu said none of his students has ever been injured (Chen was not
sure where his injured patient had practiced diao gung), and his
students say that the dangling is not painful. And 20 of them,
ranging in age between 30 and 72, are ready and willing to pull a
Boeing 747 -- if they can get the chance. The only problem now is
finding a plane and a sponsor. After recently contacting Taiwan's
EVA Air, Tu was told that the company's planes were in near constant
use and thus unavailable. Last Tuesday, the Guiness Book of World
Records Museum in Taichung also yanked support, saying first, that
"no such record exists," and second, that "we are not interested in
such a challenge."
Tu, however, is not dissuaded. "If we can't get a 747, we'll try
to pull a military plane at Sungshan Airport," he said. "And if we
can't get that, we'll pull a tractor trailer bed holding 500
people."
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