Peter Ralston

Peter Ralston (born October 29, 1949) is the founder of Cheng Hsin internal martial arts and ontology. In 1978, he became the first non-Asian to win a world martial arts tournament held in the Republic of China. He is the author of 6 books and currently teaches Cheng Hsin martial arts and facilitates ontology and contemplation worldwide.

Early years
Peter Ralston was born in San Francisco. In 1956 when he was aged 7, his family moved to Singapore as his father worked for American President lines. They lived in Singapore for 3 years and young Ralston studied at the Singapore American School. It was during his time in Singapore that he first began his martial arts training by studying Judo at the age of 9.
In 1959, the Ralston family moved back to California for 3 years before relocating to Tokyo in 1962 as his father (now owner of his own shipping container business) worked on expanding the business in Japan.
Ralston went to the ASIJ (American School in Japan) school in Chofu, and started to show his natural ability in martial arts by becoming the school Sumo champion. During his stay in Tokyo, he learned horse riding at the Imperial Palace Riding Academy in Tokyo. In 1964, the Olympics were held in Tokyo and Peter witnessed some of the first instances of judo as an Olympic sport. He also went to the Olympic stadium to watch the equestrian events as his riding coach (“the Colonel”) was an Olympic judge.
The family moved back to California in 1965 when Peter was 15, he trained some wrestling at high school and also started training the Japanese martial arts of Jujutsu and Judo with Bruce Mackin - Godan, with whom Ralston developed a close connection.
Transformation in learning style
Not satisfied with only being able to train Judo a few times a week, Ralston started training the techniques in his mind, and over time he began to match his mental training with the physical. He learned to go through motions in his mind that would match his physical actions exactly. Once he got a technique to work perfectly in his mind, he could go to the dojo and do the technique perfectly.
Continuing with his mind and body training, Ralston was essentially contemplating Judo, and one day he suddenly had an insight that changed his method of study forever.
“I was contemplating, trying to understand how some techniques were done, when, in an instant, I had an experience of the essence of the art of Judo. With it, I grasped the principle that made throws easy and graceful.”
Before this insight, it took him 9 months to get the first Judo rank (4th Kyu). After this insight, Ralston transformed from a student with average learning ability to an extremely fast learner and he reached black belt in 15 months. Since he had to wait for more senior students to grade before him, he started to coach these seniors so that they could get their black belt. That way Ralston wouldn’t have to wait too long to obtain his black belt.
Martial Arts obsession
Ralston was rather obsessive about martial arts and wanted to be the best fighter in the world. He started Karate at 16 to learn about how to strike and deal with strikes. Within a year he could beat everyone (including senior black belts) except the teacher in the karate school.
Questioning the effectiveness of Karate in real situations led him to train Kung Fu which at that time was almost unknown in the states. A chance present of the Taoist book, Tao Te Ching opened Ralston up to new possibilities and started him down an even more contemplative road. He studied Ch’uan Fa Kung Fu for about a year before meeting his main martial arts teacher. In 1969 at the age of 19, Ralston “stumbled” across grandmaster Wong Jack Man, in a San Francisco Chinatown basement.
With Wong, Ralston studied Northern Chinese Martial arts, including Northern Sil Lum Kung fu, Praying Mantis, Lohan, T’ai Chi, Hsing I, Pa Kua and many weapons. In later years, he was also to experiment with Wing Chun, Kempo, Hung Gar, and Muay Thai.
In 1968, Ralston went to the University of California at Berkley as a pre-medical student with an anatomy-physiology major. Eventually disillusioned with medical practice, he devoted his time to alternative fields of study in health and spirituality. He also increased his martial arts studies. He trained physically for over 8 hours a day, and spent additional hours contemplating and jotting down notes in a training manual. Some of these early notes made their way into his first book.
Ralston continued with his martial studies with Wong and at the age of 20 was living in a commune in Berkley. He was becoming more interested in the internal arts of Pa Kua, Hsing I, and Tai Chi and believed that it was possible to discover a truly effortless power.
After receiving a Zen book with the ten ox-herding pictures, he spent 10 days in the attic meditating each stage. Although he didn’t have any enlightenment experiences, Ralston became interested in Zen and at age 21, he started doing Enlightenment intensives.
Enlightenment
During these intensives, Ralston had some profound breakthroughs, which in Zen is called “enlightenment.” These experiences changed his abilities in martial arts but also his relationship to martial arts. With a real sense of possibility, he began to devote himself to seeking out a completely effortless power. For about a year he spent his time flopping around like a rag doll and experimenting with finding power while relaxing to extreme degrees, often to the mockery and scorn of his fellow students. Mostly, his experiments to find effortless power were unsuccessful but now and then he would effortlessly move someone. Over time, he learned to produce those effortless results intentionally, mostly through the generation of particular mind-states and feeling-states.
His teacher Wong recognized the changes in Ralston and started to teach him Ch’uan Li (intelligent fist). Ch’uan Li is essentially the understanding behind fighting. This was the first time in Wong’s 21 years of teaching that Wong taught anyone Ch’uan Li. It is not known if Wong passed this on to anyone since.
Teaching
In the early 70s Ralston was teaching Kung Fu, Hsing I, Pa Kua and T’ai Chi. During these years he began to branch off into his own investigations and began to discover new depths in his martial practice, discovering the foundations of what he would later call Cheng Hsin (pronounced “cheng shin). Around this time, he met Emmett Linderman, a student of grandmaster William Chen Chi Chen and they regularly trained together and explored martial arts. Ralston traveled to New York in the summers of 1975 and 1977 to study with William Chen. Such was his ability and speed of learning that in 1977 he was assisting Grandmaster Chen at workshops and was offered a teaching certificate. It was while studying with Chen in 1977 that Peter saw a poster on the wall for the full-contact martial arts world tournament in Taipei in 1978.
Birth of Cheng Hsin
In 1975 Ralston traveled to Japan, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Thailand and Singapore. Unable to find an art or a teacher that he considered had the skill, breadth and depth of his insights, he returned to the California and continued with his own investigations and training. He switched from teaching the technical forms that he learned to instead teach the principles and skills that made him masterful. He named his teaching Cheng Hsin. Ralston also joined a professional boxing gym called the 12th street gym in Oakland. He worked out there for a couple of years, experimenting with effortless power and applying the Cheng Hsin principles in a boxing context. He took up Aikido with Robert Nadeau to expand his exposure to different arts, and to find new ways to recreate.
In 1977, Ralston met and began to study under Stewart Emery, who was like a mentor to him in the field of personal growth. Ralston became one of the staff members of Stewart’s organization and stayed for two years.
In trying to teach Cheng Hsin to his students, Ralston discovered that a whole new communication was necessary. Cheng Hsin Ontology was created to facilitate others to discover for themselves mastery, effective interaction, mind, empowerment and transformation of relationship.
In 1977, Ralston opened "The Cheng Hsin School of Internal Martial Arts and Center for Ontological Research" on Telegraph Avenue, Oakland, California.
The combination of ontological inquiry and martial arts practice is unique to Cheng Hsin. Ralston discovered through his own quest for mastery that martial arts can be an excellent medium to find out about self and to increase consciousness. He created Cheng Hsin so that martial arts could really be used to facilitate transformation and personal growth.
In the martial arts world, teaching normally takes the form of students learning techniques repeatedly. Ralston realized through his travels that there was a real absence of any teacher or any art that really taught people how to be skilful. In creating Cheng Hsin, he set out to teach others how they could become as skillful as himself. Cheng Hsin is founded on the principles of effortless power, effective interaction and more. Rather than believing dogma, he encouraged students set out to experience for themselves these principles so that they can be applied both in and out of martial situations.
The four cornerstones of Cheng Hsin reveal the spirit and the essence of the work: grounded-openness, honesty, questioning, and direct experience.
Cheng Hsin emphasizes personal growth through self-discovery. Students are encouraged to radically experiment and be responsible for their own learning. Anything can be questioned and students are often directed towards questioning the overlooked obvious.
1978 World Tournament
Ralston traveled to China in February 1978 to take part in the world full-contact martial arts tournament. Due to weight gained on the flight over, Peter weighed in at 154 pounds and he was bumped up a division from middleweight to light heavyweight.
Two of his students met him at the tournament and were his corner men. The contest was full contact; meaning full power was used without any protective gear. Striking with any part of the body were allowed, as were throws, but when the opponents went to the mat to grapple they were stopped and stood back up.
The fighting went on for five days. During the warm up for his first fight, his Korean opponent saw him doing boxing warm ups. In one warm up, Ralston was hitting a badge on his student’s lapel with one hand twice before his student could block his arm. His Korean opponent for round one decided not to fight Ralston, much to the disappointment of Ralston (since he came all the way to China to fight), and he passed into the second stage of the tournament. Over the days, he won each of his fights easily and took first place.
Ralston was surprised when after receiving his world Champion trophy and certificate, he was called back up to receive another trophy. This time the trophy was for placing fifth in the team category. All of the Asian countries had competitions to decide their national champions and then sent a team of 20 champions to fight in the world tournament. The accumulative points of all the fighters on a team decided who would receive team trophies. Even though Ralston was a team of one, since he won all his matches with such a massive point advantage, he accumulated more individual points than most teams of 20.
Reaching out
After winning the world tournament in China, Ralston returned to Oakland and set out to use his world championship title to encourage people to come and learn from him.
In a magazine interview, Ralston said:
“One of the fundamental reasons I fought in a world tournament is that I ask people to do “unconventional things”, to actually question and understand themselves… now people listen to me who wouldn’t before, yet I’m saying the same things.”
Along with martial arts and Body-Being training, Ralston put equal emphasis on increasing consciousness through contemplation intensives and ontological workshops. He created ontological material for various workshops such as “Mind Course”, “The Principles of Effective Interaction”, “Transforming our Experience of Relationship”, and “Mastery”.
The ontology workshops opened participants up to the possibility to change their experience of themselves and how they viewed the world. This work crossed over into the Cheng Hsin martial arts since a main principle within the martial art is that students can change their level and skill and ability if they can change their experience of the interaction.
Ralston created the Apprentice Program to facilitate students towards an experience of mastery. He worked closely and intensely with apprentices specifically on personal growth and becoming genuine and mature individuals with personal power and integrity. Some of his talks with apprentices were transcribed into an ontology book.
The apprentices also helped to staff at the school and at workshops or help to run the logistics as the school started to grow. Ralston began to write books and also started up a school magazine called the “Internal Dialogue” in which both himself and his students contributed articles.
Recent years
In March 2002, Ralston opened the newly built Cheng Hsin center in Pipe Creek, Texas. The Center is open for residential workshops in the Art of Effortless Power, boxing, ontology, personal growth, contemplation, and 7 month-long Apprentice Programs.
Ralston also teaches workshops throughout the United States, Asia and New Zealand and summer camps in Europe. He continues to facilitate his ontology to a wider audience through email courses that people subscribe to for a year. He still write books and also sends out a quarterly newsletter to his students worldwide.
Published works
Ralston began writing a martial arts manual for his students and privately published his first book called Integrity of Being. Later on he rewrote and expanded this book and in 1989, North Atlantic books published this work titled The Principles of Effortless Power which is now a classic in the internal martial arts world. Other books on Cheng Hsin, Which include The Art of Effortless Power, Ontology and Consciousness, and Body-Being followed and are listed below. His latest book titled The Book of Not-Knowing is to be published in 2009 and released January 2010.
Books
*Cheng Hsin: The Principles of Effortless Power, Peter Ralston, North Atlantic Books (1999), ISBN 1-55643-302-6
*Cheng Hsin: The Art of Effortless Power, Peter Ralston, North Atlantic Books (1991), ISBN 1-55643-094-9
*Reflections of Being, Peter Ralston, North Atlantic Books (1991), ISBN 1-55643-119-8
*Ancient Wisdom, New Spirit, Peter Ralston, Frog, Ltd. (1994), ISBN 1-883319-21-8
*Zen Body Being, Peter Ralston and Laura Ralston, Frog Ltd. (2006), ISBN 1-58394-159-2
*The Book of Not Knowing: Exploring the True Nature of Self, Mind, and Consciousness, Peter Ralston and Laura Ralston (2010)
Videos
*Introduction to the Art of Effortless Power. Cheng Hsin Videos
*Fight, Play, Demo. Cheng Hsin Videos
*Discovery Channel Interview. Cheng Hsin Videos
*Cheng Hsin Skills. Cheng Hsin Videos
*Cheng Hsin Body-Being. Cheng Hsin Videos
*Cheng Hsin Talks. Cheng Hsin Videos

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