Simon’s Martial Arts Bio

柯懋资乾的武术传记

Like most 80’s kids I have been into martial arts since before I can even remember.  I’m pretty sure I identified as a Ninja Turtle before I ever identified as a human.  I started training at the age of seven, taking classes in some generic karate-taekwondo mashup style at our local community center taught by a guy who wore an American flag onesie.  Stars and stripes head to toe.  I loved it.  The classes, that is.  I’m still on the fence about the onesie.  

I pretty quickly drifted into other practices and martial arts styles.  When I was in fourth grade I began taking after-school yoga with a Sikh yogini.  Around that same time I began taking after-school Tai Chi where we learned the Yang style 42 step form and basic push hands.  In middle school I spent three years training Taekwondo under Barbara Dickens from Houston’s White Horse Academy.  At the age of thirteen I started my Kung Fu training at the Houston Shaolin Temple under the monks Shi De Shan 释德山 and Shi Xing Hao 释行浩.  Their classes were way out in Chinatown though, so my mom was pretty keen to find something closer to home.  After about six months with them I switched to a nearby Aikido school.  

All this stuff was cool, but at the age of thirteen I just really wanted to become a ninja.  One day I found a school that taught Bujinkan Ninjutsu not too far from home.  I started training there under Brian Tritico in 2001 and stuck with that style until about 2009.  I travelled to Japan twice, once in 2004 and again in 2006 to train with the grandmaster Masaaki Hatsumi 初見良昭 and his student Someya Kenichi 染谷賢一.  On my latter trip Someya Sensei granted me the rank of third degree blackbelt.  He doesn’t typically give out ranks to people who aren’t close personal students, so I was and still am particularly proud of that one.

While in highschool I also trained for two years under Paul Chu 朱經武, studying Wing Chun 咏春 and a unique style of Tai Chi called Wong style 王式, named after Chu Sifu’s grandmaster Wong Duk Hing 王德慶 who had supposedly learned it at Wudang mountain in the 1920’s.  It was through this style and master Chu’s many stories of Wudang mountain that I came to be interested in the place and the martial arts practiced there.  Chu Sifu always said Wudang was dead and the only martial arts practiced there now were fluffy modern performance styles, which was a pretty reasonable assumption given everything that happened in China in the 20th century.  But I was still curious.       

In 2008 I graduated from the University of Houston with a degree in classics specializing in ancient Greek.  I tried to find a job in Japan so I could go study with Someya Sensei full-time, but graduating into the financial crisis meant there were no jobs to be found.  I worked a truly uninspiring job in Houston for three months before saving up roughly enough money to live at a temple in China for a year.  I had heard about this kung fu master at Wudang mountain through the martial arts grapevine and figured now was as good a time as any to check the place out.  

I was 21 when I moved to China, and I really had no idea what I was getting into.  The temple was super cool, but also immensely strange.  We trained every day in Yuxu Gong 玉虚宫, the largest temple on Wudang, and the mountain’s former administrative center.  It was built at the same time as the forbidden city in Beijing and was known for most of its history as the forbidden city of the south.  Run for centuries by powerful court eunuchs, it was historically a place of immense wealth and political influence.  Some time during the republican era (1911-1949) the temple was divided into two parts and re-purposed.  Its eastern half was made into a hospital while its western half was partially bricked up and made into a prison.  So our dormitories were actually in the old hospital (our meditation room was a former surgery room, with a drain in the middle of the floor and blood grooves around the edges) and our training grounds were in the former prison.  The temple was informally granted to our master Yuan Xiugang 袁修刚 in 2006.  But in 2012, after rebuilding major sections of the temple complex, the National Tourism Administration took over and sort of kicked us out.

I was among the twelve foreigners who participated in master Yuan’s five-year intensive training program (2009-2014).  Most of our training was really quite mundane. Traditional practice in our lineage involves some serious daily grind.  Qigong in the morning, kung fu all day, then meditation or chanting in the evening.  Six days a week.  But we also did some really extraordinary things too, performing with Jackie Chan and Jet Li, and travelling all over China for different martial arts and Daoism-related functions.  We all really lived a lifetime in those five years, and my classmates and I continue to unpack what we learned there, each in his or her own way.  This website is my public way of working through everything.  Shifu wanted to teach us so we could share this stuff and ideally help people with it.  So here we are.  

After the program I moved back to the states and entered a PhD program in religion at Rice University, from one intense five-year program to another.  I ended up writing a thesis entitled “A Genealogy of the Subtle Body” under Jeff Kripal and Anne Klein, a history of the concept of the subtle body in the western intellectual tradition.  Grad school was a joy for me.  I studied classical Tibetan under Dr. Klein with the goal of breaching its vast tantric literature in order to compare the meditation and qigong practices I learned in our Daoist lineage with Tibetan yogas.  I’m currently writing another book on that. My dissertation was picked up by Oxford University Press and was published through their series Oxford Studies in Western Esotericism under the title: The Subtle Body: A Genealogy (2022) (Check out Charlie Stang’s review here).

After finishing graduate school my wife Brandi and I moved up to Penticton, British Columbia, with the hope of supporting ourselves by teaching Kung Fu. In December of 2022 we opened our school right in the middle of town, in the Cannery Trade Centre, and have been blessed with a wonderful community of chill and open minded students. I continue my research through the Esalen Center for Theory and Research, where we just initiated a long-term subtle body initiative. I have a number of books I will be releasing over the next few years, so stay tuned.