From Chi to Cyber: The Journey of the Lin Kuei in Mortal Kombat

Sometimes you play video games for the great writing.  Knights of the Old Republic, Dragon Age, Mass Effect, Planescape: Torment are a few that come to mind, and certainly there are others (Bioshock, Dishonored) that I haven’t played yet but reputedly have great writing.  Then there’s Mortal Kombat.  I’m not sure how many people play Mortal Kombat for the writing, but I admit that I’m hooked on one of the subplots in 2011’s Mortal Kombat.


There are a variety of factions kompeting in the kombat (forgive me the many k’s), like the Blood Dragon crime syndicate, Shaolin monks, and ninja clans.  Among the factions is the Lin Kuei, a cult of assassins that turns orphans into devout killers.  What makes the Lin Kuei particularly interesting is their decision to move past the spiritual practices of chi and prana and begin the adoption of technology in their art.


By adoption of technology, we aren’t talking guns and knives.  No, the Lin Kuei go all out, hacking off the lower body of their assassins and building armored cyborg bodies with lasers and rocket launchers around what remains of their killers.

Some characters enter the process willingly, others are dragged kicking and screaming to the blades.  All along the doubters worry that having their bodies cut apart will cut apart their spirit, and disconnect them from perfection.

As a yogi and as a bionic man, this notion disturbs me.  Prana, the yogic counterpart of Chi, rides the breath, and flows through all the limbs of the body.  When connected to your prana, the yogi can move with complete integration of the body, and ultimately with world.  As that connection takes our awareness out, it also draws our awareness inward.  Ultimately we see that the core within ourselves is the same in everyone we see, and at the center of us all is unity with a piece of perfection.

(This is why yoga people seem so fucking relaxed all the time)

So while I practice an art of peace, and the Lin Kuei practice an art of war, it is the same kind of energy that we tap into as we move.  Once you’ve touched it, cutting someone off from that energy is, frankly, horrible.  But how much machine does it take to cut you off from perfection?

How many times have I heard the first harrowing description of Darth Vader?  “He’s more machine now than man, twisted and evil.”
 

This guy lost his moral center even when he still had 95% of his original parts.

With that one sentence pop culture, even in the form of a movie deeply entrenched in eastern philosophy, teaches the world that the bionic and the spiritual are diametrically opposed, an idea that has spread through film and television at pace as fast as the spread of artificial organs and limbs through our bodies.  I am happy to report that this notion is, of course, wrong.

A few significant parts of my heart are artificial, made of Dacron and titanium.  Despite the very center of my being partially artificial and ticking like a clock, I am fully human, fully functional, and full of perfection.  My artificial heart valve may be loud, but it also keeps me focused and balanced.  Take that, Obi-Wan!

Ultimately that is the story of the Lin Kuei in Mortal Kombat as well.  The process of making them cyborgs does cut them off from themselves and their emotions, but it is a deliberate action.  In time one of the assassin-heroes, Sub-Zero, defeats the programming that cut him off from himself and turned him into a cold(er) killer, and returned to being the hero he strives to be.

Down in the Bardo, Part II: Champion of the Dead

Fresh off of the unexpected delight of a trip to the Bardo in Marvel’s Iron Fist: The Living Weapon, I decided to try Steve Perry’s take on the Buddhist Hell.  Some days Steve Perry is one of my favorite authors, but his writing is hit or miss for me.  He’s a best selling author for his time writing under some of Tom Clancy’s house brands, and I’m guessing he makes most of this money these days writing military sci-fi novels like the Cutter series.  And while these stories are okay, where Perry really excels is when he writes about martial arts and eastern mysticism.

Champion of the Dead has a modern setting, following the life of dmag-lag-rtsal practitioner Sam Kane.  Dmag-lag-rtsal is an obscure (but apparently real) Tibetan martial art that also happens to prepare you to enter the Bardo, a Buddhist version of Hell, and help guide souls to their next incarnation on the Great Wheel.  The novel opens with Kane taking on an assignment from a mysterious billionaire to help his daughter pass peacefully to her next life.  From there conspiracies and combat touching both the living and the dead ensue.

Perry is a long time martial artist, which shows in his writing- the action is detailed and brilliant.  Like all good martial arts tales there is also a crotchety martial arts master, or in this case a pair of them, helping Kane along the way between wisecracks.  I don’t know if Perry did this intentionally, but I could feel the influence of Remo and Chuin from the Destroyer series in some of the dialogs. 

The concepts artists for Mortal Kombat are reading the same manual on designing Hell.

This makes for a complicated Saturday night

As much of the novel takes place in the Bardo as it does in our world, and Perry’s depictions of Hell are intense.  The steaming piles of excrement that meat eaters are forced to climb will surely help keep me on the vegetarian track; well, at least close to it.  The Bardo is an insane place, which oddly resembled the Netherrealm and Outworld backgrounds in Mortal Kombat that I also happen to be playing lately.  A lot of Champion of the Dead feels like a novelization of the Tibetan Book of the Dead, so you wonder in the Mortal Kombat artists read from the same manual.  There are also gods both Hindu and Buddhist wandering about, leading to discussions such as “…consider the logistics of a god who has eight arms and three penises coupling with a goddess who has four arms and nine vaginas.”

Kane’s fights with demons are as much a matter of will as of skill.  “Kane stood ready, his sword forged of love, hope and prayer, in hand,” may be one of my all time favorite lines from an adventure story, which is probably influenced by my time in yoga.  Speaking of which…

Kane has several dmag-lag-rtsal students, and he hopes to find one to pass along his skills to and who can take his place in the future.  They all bring different backgrounds in mind-body techniques or combat, each adapting in different ways.  While the student with an aikido background looks promising, the one with a yoga background is less so.  She moves as well as, if not better than, the other students, but her background in yoga provides her with challenges.  Her yoga training “had taken her down a different path.  She was reluctant to hit people, even when she could.  This was not necessarily a bad thing in a warrior, to know when to hit and when to wait, but it could be a problem, taken too far.”  In time Kane and his student agree that the two paths are, ultimately, the same.  Both yoga and dmag mean “union”, but the time where the inherent violence of dmag-lag-rtsal and the pacifism of yoga reveal the same unity may be decades of practice away.

There’s not a lot of action/adventure novels out there with authors who understand yoga or concepts like ahimsa or pranayama, and most of them have Steve Perry’s name on the cover (Matt Stover, Steve Barnes, and at least one of the house authors of the Destroyer series round out the mix that I’ve seen so far).  Champion of the Dead is a great story if you are looking to merge your inner peace with some smack-fu.

(And a special thanks to Steve Perry for introducing me to Kurukulla, the Tibetan goddess of passion, with her bow made of flowers and bees, stark naked and trampling the ego.  That is perfection.)

Mortal Kombat and Surviving the 30 Day Plank Challenge

Recently I stumbled across a Facebook post recommending a “30 Day Plank Challenge”, taking you from 20 seconds in plank to a full five minutes in one month’s time.  Seemed like a great idea to me, although I realized that there is probably no scientific validity behind this method or rate of improvement, and my fellow yoga teachers pointed out the terrible form of the woman on the post.  Regardless, I was up for a challenge and raring to go.

Timing your plank is tough, and at first this was the hardest part.  If you have a timer in front of you, you end up staring at the seconds go by, and then boy do they go by slowly.  As a yogi I wanted to spend the time exploring my breath, alignment, and searching for my bandhas, not staring at the clock.  I got into a habit at first of playing podcasts on tantra philosophy on my ipod, because it fit the mood and gave me an accurate time.  Eventually I hit on an ideal way to proceed- setting my Kindle up under my face and watching Mortal Kombat videos on YouTube, turning off the sound, and setting them up so the video ended at exactly my goal time.

Mortal Kombat and yoga?  I started to focus on my yoga practice at the same time that I started reading the Matt Fraction / Ed Brubaker / David Aja martial arts comic Immortal Iron Fist. I loved the idea of a superhero who solved problems with esoteric notions like meditation, chi, and alignment.  When the comic took a turn into a pan-dimensional martial arts tournament, it visually took on a look from the Mortal Kombat video game franchise.  Thus there are times when I picture a room full of yogis and it looks like a bunch of my friends in tadasana, and sometimes it looks a lot more like Kitana, Raiden, and Mileena.

There are some fascinating Mortal Kombat videos on YouTube, conveniently at or around the durations for the various stages in the 30 Day Plank Challenge.  When I was at 45 seconds it seemed unlikely that I was ever going to make a minute.  Today was my last day at 2:30.  Time to start picking longer videos.