The greatest mistake that tai
chi students can make is believing that coming to the tai chi school and
learning tai chi movements is the essence of tai chi.
To identify tai chi with the movements is to lose the meaning of tai chi
and reduce it to a sport.
The tai chi movements are merely aids in helping practitioners to root
themselves in their wu chi nature so that tai chi can become possible.
(John Lash)
Tai
chi
Martial arts are typically just a series of methods
and principles designed to assist you in combat.
Tai chi chuan is a little different.
The entire system is concerned with aligning your body and mind with
tao; of moving in accord with the way of things.
It is a spiritual discipline.
The self
defence component is a side effect of following tao.
Tai chi has more in common with
zen, Japanese archery, calligraphy, poetry, oriental flower arranging or Japanese tea ceremony than it does boxing.
Tao
The
tao cannot be defined verbally or conceived intellectually.
When you begin to understand tai chi, you have a vague sense of the system but
could never express yourself coherently.
This is your first inkling of tao.
Physics
Western physics tries to understand the world through mathematics and
measurement.
The ancient taoist scholars did not.
Rather than simply use the logical, rational, problem-solving aspect of
consciousness, they sought to get a feel of reality.
They wanted to explore reality, not document it.
Taoism is essentially hands-on ancient Chinese physics.
Accord
Lao Tzu, Chuang Tzu and others wrote about tao.
They observed the natural world and realised that there were distinct
patterns and
rules in operation.
These natural laws were too subtle to be rendered verbally, you had to intuit
the way/how of them.
They realised that if you could sense the way of nature, you could move with
it, rather than against it.
This offered the key principle of tai chi:
yielding.
Water
Water demonstrates the yielding principle perfectly.
Its very nature is yielding.
From this observation comes the principle 'wu wei' - commonly seen as 'going
with the flow'.
Wu wei also means not forcing.
Water is the very softest of things, yet with mass and momentum, it becomes
devastating without losing the softness.
Working with tao
When you first learn
form
and begin exploring self defence, your attention is upon the science.
You need to align the body just-so and respond very
sensitively to contact.
This process is quite difficult and you are inclined to think a lot.
The drawback is that this prevents you from truly letting-go.
It is a necessary set-back designed to help you to move in the correct manner
even though you cannot feel what the right way is just yet.
Form flows
Form is designed to be abstract and flowing.
It shapes and moves your body in a rounded fashion that mimics water.
There are no sharp corners or angles.
As your skill grows, you begin to feel as if the form is moving by itself.
The divide between your mind, body and tai chi blurs.
Sometimes you complete a sequence or perform an application with no sense of
what just happened or what you did.
This is good.
It reflects a condition of meditation.
We call this 'sung'.
Sung
Sung is commonly translated to mean 'relax'.
Relax does not mean flaccid.
It refers to wu wei; a condition of non-opposition, an ongoing
meditative state.
When you move with what is happening - such that nothing adverse
impinges upon you - you are relaxed.
Sung is the physical manifestation of
yielding within your tai chi and can occur at any time within the syllabus.
Without sung, you cannot reasonably fa jing fully or perform the training in a
way that accords with tao.
When sung is manifest, you feel alert yet dreamy, your joints are springy and
your body alive.
Your body responds to stimuli faster than your mind can register the event.
When sung is present, you feel the movements themselves but not your body
performing the action.
Tao & tai chi
As you progress, odd things will happen during your tai chi practice.
Often, the effect of your actions will be disproportionate to the cause.
You may feel euphoric.
You find something to be impossibly easy.
It is tempting to attribute these to qi or body mechanics, but these
explanations are partial, incomplete.
In tao and zen traditions, the practitioner seeks to remove themselves
from the equation.
The archer finds that the arrow fires itself, the swordsman considers the blade
to be his soul and the fighter scores a strike without aiming.
Your action is somehow exactly what the situation required.
This is when you understand the purpose of tai chi chuan.
Your journey has become a religious one in which there is no deity to appease
and no goal to be sought.
The barriers that prevented you from sensing the way have disappeared and
you have become like water: soft, calm, adaptive, changeable, flowing, resilient
and free.
Page created 10 December 1998