The Technique of No-technique

 There are those kung- fu wisdom snippets about "technique of no-technique" or "fighting without fighting" and I have never regarded them as more than fortune-cookie nonsense. But they come near to some of the work we've been doing in our Friday night sessions of late.

We've been attempting to boil the syllabus down into essentials, based on honest enquiry and our own experiences of a martial kind. What is tai chi, when you take away the cultural trappings, the philosophies and the mythologies? We have by no means arrived at an answer yet, nor do I suppose we ever will; at least nothing that can be formulated neatly, concisely or even verbally.

It isn't about striking. That doesn't mean there isn't percussion, but it's part of the moving, part of the evasion, part of taking or destroying the oponent's balance. It's not fixing in one place and attacking, then moving on. It's not really grappling, though again this may happen.

As Western boxers have known for years, you fight with your feet, and this is nothing necessarily to do with sweeping or kicking, though those might appear. There's nothing formulaic about it. The recent Sherlock Holmes film, in which Sherlock pre-plans how exactly he will strike and defeat his opponent five "moves" in advance, is how many people perhaps envisage the process of the martial arts. This is because we are taught discrete "techniques": he does this, so you do that. Tai chi chuan is as guilty of this as any other art. But the trouble is that, instead of reacting to what's hapening, we attempt to shoehorn various techniques in to the proceeedings to show what we have learnt, and to please the teacher. But the martial arts is only about reacting to exactly what is happening, not defeating someone according to some pre-ordained "style" "school" or "technique". So we are cutting away technique, to see what we are left with. We are ditching the flow-chart and heading out into open water. I'll let you know how it's going.