The Way of Least Resistance

The sun has set behind the Kaohsiung skyline as our bus rattles along in the congested rush-hour traffic. I lie back against the head-rest, feeling the vibration on my scalp through the velour, and try to doze. Every now and again a jolt throws me back into the real world and I see flashes: flashes of the faux wood-panelled interior of our vehicle, the slumped, silent silhouettes of my fellow Chen Pan Ling practitioners, chaos passing in every direction, the smoky-red stain on the horizon and the neon glow of the pea-soup sky. We’re travelling from the Fo Guang Shan monastery into the city centre for our respective appointments with blind masseurs/masseuses. “Go on!” James had said to me in 2009. “Do it. You’ll feel like a new man.” But for whatever reason I declined – a decision I’d come to regret deeply. In fact, the moment I saw them arriving at the Kingship Hotel (each on the back of a scooter) and being escorted in through the foyer to the elevator (aided by the directions ...

Introduction The other night I dreamt I was back at university, in a mathematics lecture. The lecturer writes up Pierre de Fermat's last theorem 1 on the board as follows: c n = a n + b n , where n = 3 or greater, has no possible solution. Instead of asking us to prove the theorem, he simply says: "How many variables are there?" I woke up and wondered about that piece of cheese I'd eaten the night before. Then I started thinking about the substance of the dream: How many "variables" are there in, say, c 3 = a 3 + b 3 ? And how does this compare with the number of "variables" in Pythagoras' theorem c 2 = a 2 + b 2 ? Pure mathematics relating to number theory arguably has no practical application. Yet I realised that maybe, just maybe, my subconscious was telling me something "useful" in martial terms. Flawed dimensional analysis It seems to me that when marital artists analyse techniques, they often do so in either 2 dimens...