Teachers

I am going to address the topic of tradition and teachers with an analogy, see if you can figure out what I am saying.

Anyone who has played a guitar knows that the basic design of a guitar is the same, despite variation as well.
Imagine then that you have a version of the instrument, your own version of course. And you learn to play it, and play it well.

In learning to play this instrument you draw from many sources. You do not learn from just one person, or learn just one style, but instead become skilled through trial and error and experimentation.

Now imagine that you want to play the instrument for some people and they stop you before you do so and ask you: "who taught you?" You reply that you are self taught but that you picked up a little here and a little there. Then suddenly they dismiss you entirely and won't even give you a chance, they won't even listen to what you can play because you did not learn from someone that they consider authentic.

After some time you come up with a solution. The next time you get asked who your teacher was you reply that he was an unknown man who was a student of a well known master. Suddenly people are willing to listen to you play and when they do they like what they hear. Now your ability to play has not changed, your skill has always been a reflection of your hard work and insight as well as dedication. But what has changed is that now people give you a chance, whereas before they did not.

Now lets say that there is no record of your teacher, so nobody can prove they did not exist, you see you cannot prove what does not exist, to not exist. The universe is funny like that. But some individuals take notice of this and start to question your ability to play, because they cannot find proof your teacher existed.
They assert that what you play is not really music, because you cannot prove you were taught by someone they can find a record for. And worse, since what you play is unique to a degree, they assert that it cannot be music because it is a bit different here and there. Lets say you favor a different scale than many others do, and so people say that you are not playing music because your scale is a little bit different.

In my last article I wrote about the test of a martial art and the test of a martial artist. While I condemned some tests and testers as being ignorant, I need to assert something. The test of a martial art has nothing to do with teachers or lineages. It has nothing to do with names or terms or forms. None of that matters. Like with music the test of skill is found in listening, not questioning. Questions are good, but cannot replace attention and an open mind.

Now consider that in my analogy the main character lied about his teacher, just to be considered fairly. Think about that, what is less ethical, lying about a teacher or failing to give someone a chance because they do not fit your idea of what something should be for it to be effective and authentic. To me if anything a person who has developed their own skill through questioning convention and by trial and error is far more authentic than someone who inherits a system or is the great grandson of some famous person. To me, to dismiss a person or their skill and artistic abilities because they do not have the connections that we associate with skill is far worse than lying about a teacher to be considered in a fair light.

Skill and effectiveness in martial arts has nothing to do with lineage. Often people in lineages reply upon the name of their teacher far more than their own skill. Often they take things for granted, failing to question what they are told and then have no personal understanding, instead they just repeat what they have been told. Think about this, who is more dishonest? A man who lied about his teacher so as to be given fair consideration for his hard work and effort, or a man who repeats what he was told, passing along as if it was personal knowledge, having never questioned it. To me the latter man, who merely regurgitates teachings, is far less honest than the man who, in order to be able to demonstrate his personal understanding must misrepresent himself. One of these men has walked the martial path and must test himself and his art constantly to prove himself, the other is far from the martial path and must repeat the names of his teacher and their claims constantly to prove themselves. One man believes that the test is in the art and skill, the other believes that the test is in the names.

These two types are those who will listen to the musician who drawing from many sources is self taught, and those who will not because the person is not a student or family member of a famous person.

Of these two types, which are you?
Think about it.

I am surprised how many people are convinced by false tests of a martial art.

I was told recently that a martial art "sucked" because when someone asked another person to kick very hard on a pad, the person holding the pad moved the pad and let the kick hit their head, and found the kick wanting in power. I note first that the power delivery of a kick to the head is something few arts lack, but does require training in delivering strong kicks to the head. It certainly is not a test of an art. More interesting perhaps is how the test of power was implied. The person holding the pad seemed to think that a powerful kick continues through the target, which is not always true and is a gross oversimplification. A precise kick would be powerful, but to catch it 2 inches past the target it would not have the same power. But more interesting is the concept of following through or as I like to call it: driving. This style of having power is purely external, it is how people tend to hit a heavy bag. It has a 2 main phases, contact/impact and pushing. However some styles of hitting have different phases, these are contact, and transmission. Notice that impact is absent from contact and there is no push phase, rather a wave transmission phase. The two types of energy have a sort of exclusivity and one cannot be seen easily and does not work on a pad, nor does it work at any point after the targeted area because of the very nature of the blow. If anything hearing about this pad "test" makes me think the person holding the pad was and perhaps is still; ignorant when it comes to how to test a martial art. It is no wonder they are the Carlos Castaneda of martial arts.

One of the main points here though is how people believe that a test of a martial art is a test of a single persons ability to hit something. While this is obviously flawed, many people buy into it. Worse still is the mentality found all over the internet. People perpetuate the downright ignorant view that a sporting contest between two people of different martial arts is a test of the two martial arts. This simply put is stupid, a fight is not a test of a martial system, it is a test of a person and a test of skill. Any martial art has people who are better or worse. Just because you beat one person in a given martial art does not mean you can defeat the martial art, to think so is both arrogant and rather stupid.

I am acutally shocked how common martial art dismissals take place based on ignorant anecdotes. People will say that they know someone: who knows someone in system X, and they think the person in system X sucks, so they conclude system X sucks. This is actually common, despite how ignorant it is. A lot of this is that people sell their own art and basically talk down all others, you can tell when it is pure ignorance when they dismiss all martial arts that are not their own. This is as common as it is stupid, one of the most common forms being gross oversimplifications such as "I can beat a grappler because I know anti-grappling moves" or "Anybody who can't beat a grappler does not know how to fight" All systems seem to have someone stupid enough to do this too, no one system is guilty of this while others are not. These people are ignorant of the simple fact that a test of a martial art is not the same as a contest between two people. Beware those ignorant people who insist that nothing can hold a candle to their system, especially those who dismiss other systems because they claim to know people in other systems who they think are not skilled because they don't share the same opinions. There is always someone bigger, faster stronger and better, even outside of martial artists. No person, and no system is invulnerable and those who claim that their system is superior to others are ignorant, there are no superior or inferior martial arts systems and mistakes occur in all systems. The signs of martial arts ignorance are certainty and a lack of humility. A wise martial artist never claims to know they can beat any system, because they know that is not how things work.

I know that martial artists have to sell their art, after all when you pay a man hundreds of dollars to work with him for a day or two you want him to represent the best. However it is common for this type of situation to be like a naked emperor, you are led to believe that you are wise for paying the money, not because that is true, but because your being convinced has far more to do with what is happening than your being skilled. This works best if you can be persuaded that other martial arts are inferior to the one you are paying for. This is unfortunately as common as it is ignorant and foolish.

One thing wise martial artists seem to know is that the test of a martial art is in reality a life long test, not a fight or a contest, but the actual life of the martial artists once they have undertaken that path. It is deeply personal and has nothing to do with how hard someone hits or their application theory. It is an ongoing thing as well, the true test never ends and those who boast of their skill or dismiss other martial arts are already failing it.

The water hammer effect, wherein the kinetic wave of the momentum of an object continues on when the mass of the object is stopped suddenly and the result is an increase in the frequency of the energy is a useful but evasive martial method.

But what about using water hammer methods regarding the momentum of the duifang?
You see with training one can learn to cycle impact energy up into higher frequencies, but it is also possible to cycle your duifangs energy up from their own momentum and prevent it from exiting their body, thus inducing the water hammer effect from their movement but in a manner that works against them.

The trick is perhaps found in the method where you stop their momentum but allow no energy to be transmitted into you. I call this a trick because it is tricky.

I was hitting an object the other day that was giving me instant feedback in the form of audio sound waves. I found that when I surged forward and relaxed on contact, I barely felt the contact at all, however this light touch aspect had the most profound result in terms of the sound it produced. The trick of the method was to relax, to have no tension whatsoever in the striking arm, otherwise the wave of energy I was sending bounced back into me. I found that when I relaxed as I struck that I would make contact and then a split second after contact the wave of momentum would transmit, the most curious aspect of this was the delay between contact and the wave. If I tried to hurry the slap/palm technique then the result was not the same, if I tried to use force then the result was not the same.

The required relaxation is like water, you must splash and relax like water. Your hands must wave forward like water, if they use their own energy the result is not the same. I could actually see the surge of energy after contact, when my arms were relaxed it went quickly through me and into the object a moment after contact.
When I merely struck the object and my hand was not relaxed there were two major possible effects I noted.
The first was that the energy of the strike bounced my hand out and much less energy was transmitted and when it did it was not penetrating energy. The second was when I pressed my hand as I struck, instead of the force resulting in my hand bouncing back, or the energy transmitting, the energy dissipated in my hand itself, bouncing back into it but being trapped by the pressure, and it hurt. The object in question was a large hollow steel pillar after all.

So the funny part about this is how counter intuitive it is that the softest of contact, even on a violent forward surge, allowed the greatest transmission of force. And there was a transmission delay of the order of fractions of a second after impact. I am a fan of circular movement and conservation of momentum for sure, but now I recognize the place of the pause in a form during specific strikes, such as single whip. This pause is actually part of the strike itself.

This is key to understanding how to use the method on the momentum of an attack, by relaxing as you check the momentum of the duifang the energy of their attack dissipates into them. The greater the momentum of their attack, the greater the amount of force is that the duifang ends up absorbing. This force or wave of momentum is qi, a form of energy. In essence you use the duifangs qi against them. Not by bouncing, or deflecting but by sealing thier momentum before it arrives, and oddly the amount of force required for this is low. Sort of like using a few ounces to stop thousands of lbs, and certainly not in a manner of force acting on force, but at the same time the effect is not the same as deflecting the path of a strong strike with sideways pressure.

The secret, because it is counter-intuitive, is in the softness. The softer you become in striking, the harder the force becomes that is transmitted. It might sound strange, or perhaps easy, but either way it requires practice, and not on a heavy bag or another person. The reason a steel object is nice is that it resonates with the force of the blow and if you cycle the energy up you will hear the result almost instantly. If you hit a heavy bag this way you will not realize what is happening, and if you play around carelessly with this and another person someone could get hurt. This phenomena does not require an explosive jing to be powerful, the faster you move for it the more challenging it is to relax properly. However the result can be peculiar, I even did knuckle based punch strikes on the pillar and found that although the technique was much harder this way than it was for a palm strike, hitting my knuckles on the steel with proper relaxation did not hurt them, which is odd, because normally I do not hit anything hard with any hard part of my body. This is of course because of the nature of the wave, there was no momentum pressing on the knuckles in the strike, instead there was a wave going right through them. Needless to say this is not how most people strike and this type of energy play is all but unknown in taiji today, let alone martial arts.

The neat part about this is perhaps the relationship of the forward momentum to the wave issued. The momentum need not be of an explosive nature for the wave to be of an explosive nature. However the movement must be whole body, thus uniting the qi of the body into one jing. Otherwise in order to get power one is going to have to use muscular force and doing so prohibits this effect.

True softness results in hardness.

The 8 energies.

If you observe a wave moving forward you will note different properties of different areas of the wave.
The leading bulge of the wave is full of energy at the peak, this is as Peng, while adjacent to this is the void area where the pit of the wave is found, this is as Lu. These two basic energies are present, as void and full energies, in all motion possible. The other 6 energies all combine them, however they can all be complexed and are not exclusive to each other.

Press, which is like the simple machine press and not like pressing on something with just pressure, is much like being squished by the leading edge of a wave. If you put your elbow against a wall with your forearm horizontal so that you can place it against the wall, then place your other hand on the wall between your forearm and the wall. You can now use your forearm as a lever that will press upon the hand touching the wall. This is as press, however in application the leading lever aspect is often yin while it is driven by yang energies. In depiction press is as far as the trigrams, yang cloaked in yin. While the next move, often called push, is yin cloaked in yang.

Push is like the wave itself, not squishing with leverage, but surging forward with both yin and yang energy. Indeed while Peng energy wards off, and Lu energy rolls back, and Press energy squeezes, push energy pushes, but can be done at different energy levels and push merely describes the dynamic, not the application. Indeed for all of the energies the names are not applications but descriptions of energies manifestation.

Pluck is another wave property where instead of the previous effects the wave is used to achieve a pulling type energy, which is not a pull per say, at high rates of speed the result is a violent jarring.

Split or rend/tear is where the wave is used to push things apart with forces that divide. To understand this imagine a wooden box being filled with water so fast it breaks apart. A single surge can be used to move an object in two directions at once, resulting in a rending or splitting effect. While all of these moves can be illustrated with a single hand, in application the split energies are best demonstrated with two hands for the impressive results are easier to comprehend.

Elbow, is not the use of the elbow per say, it is more like transmitting with the bend of the wave where peng meets lu or Yin meets yang. In the body this happens to be the elbow, however if one employs this energy with a weapon then the elbow is not employed while the nature of the energy is conserved and is the same.

Shoulder is one of the bluntest forces, though it is very yin it has a yang foundation. It is like a transmission of the wave itself, in an example a stick placed on a rope, that gets launched off of the rope when a sharp wave pops it us, this is like shoulder.

The nature of the energies is profound, no move can be made lacking them. If one understands them then one can meet them with exactitude and neutralize/avoid them to the point of maintaining the upper hand and combat initative. One can learn the techniques by the same name, and practice them until the cows come home, but that does not equate to comprehension of the 8 energies, which has as much to do with reading these energies in your opponent as it does with employing them yourself.

all of the energies can be done in any direction of the sphere, taiji is whole body so this is not a matter of hand or foot work but is instead bodywork. All of the energies can also be done at different rates of speed. The fastest of which is explosive energy or speed, termed Fa-Jing, but even slow has it's place in taijiquan.

There is a reason that the bagua is employed to teach taijiquan. The symbolism facilitates greater comprehension of the transmissions due to its aptitude. Moreover taijiquan is Taoist in principal. It is the system of the mother of yin and yang, this mother is taiji. Taiji only comes from wuji, which is undifferntiated and so can respond to anything as it lacks intention of its own. As is said in the Tao-De-Jing

Harmony is only in following the Way.

The Way is without form or quality,
But expresses all forms and qualities;
The Way is hidden and implicate,
But expresses all of nature;
The Way is unchanging,
But expresses all motion.

Beneath sensation and memory
The Way is the source of all the world.
How can I understand the source of the world?
By accepting.
..................

The Way has no true shape,
And therefore none can control it.
If a ruler could control the Way
All things would follow
In harmony with his desire,
And sweet rain would fall,
Effortlessly slaking every thirst.

The Way is shaped by use,
But then the shape is lost.
Do not hold fast to shapes
But let sensation flow into the world
As a river courses down to the sea.
....................

Nothing in the world is as soft and yielding as water,
Yet nothing can better overcome the hard and strong,
For they can neither control nor do away with it.

The soft overcomes the hard,
The yielding overcomes the strong;
Every person knows this,
But no one can practice it.

Who attends to the people would control the land and grain;
Who attends to the state would control the whole world;
Truth is easily hidden by rhetoric...

Indeed truth is hidden by rhetoric and a martial arts classic can be hidden in a work that seems to be merely a collection of rhetoric. However it is said by some that LaoTze, the author of this work, was a practioner of the ancestral art of Taijiquan. Hidden in his work are potent keys to understanding this martial art, and presented in a way that if the work falls into the hands of the uninitiated they will not comprehend it, but can still employ it as a work pertaining to ethics and action. However the double meaning of the work is profound and deliberate. The art it pertains to is not an art of violence, nor an art incapable of violence. It is concerned with self mastery and harmony, this way includes a martial path for to sustain health and allow self preservation, however if you practice a martial art in the open you attract challenges, to attract challenges involves risk, only a fool takes unneeded risks of violence. What is the point of learning to protect and defend the self if the result is increased risk? To practice the art in the open violates the very principals upon which it is founded. Thus it is hidden.

LaoTze went west, there he is said to have taught a young prince. The young prince founded teachings which included temple martial arts. His 28th successor in the line of transmission went east, this man was known to practice martial arts. He went to a temple in Shaolin, his name was Tao-mo aka Bodhidharma. The martial arts were still with the teachings then, however over time a man named Hui Neng came to the temple, the head patricarch of the temple found him worthy of the transmissions of the principals, for he alone understood at the time, however the transmission of the martial art did not take place. From that time the teachings spread widely without the martial art, but were found so relative to martial art that transmissions coming from Hui Neng were applied to martial arts thought even centuries later.

However a record of the martial art exists, in the form of statues and temple dance having martial meanings. The martial is hidden in the dances for the same reason that the martial teachings of the Tao-de-jing are concealed with rhetorical content and a form of code that is common to Chinese martial arts. The postures of the statues are 108 in number and form the basis of martial art and dance in the region where LaoTze is said to have ventured after leaving China. However the limitations of nationalism and borders has resulted in a veil obscuring the reality of the transmissions, every region claims them to be the original creation of the region and yet they are found all over. Even in the polynesian islands, where there martial dances with postures like those of the 108 statues and of taijiquan were said to have been taught to the people by a God of war whom visited from another culture.

When Arjuna recived the transmission of the martial arts from Indra, he was also taught dance at the same time. The dance is the gong of the art. Over time much has been lost, however much is still preserved for those meant to recieve the transmissions. It is not for convincing others that I share this information.