The Needle At The Sea Bottom

The game of tai chi chuan is a very human one: evade, divert, escape and survive. What makes the game worth the candle, as the saying goes, I suppose, is the possibility that we may fail. As we are seeing in Japan at the moment, sometimes we face something that can't be played, something which no kind of human cleverness can address in any meaningful way. It's a hollow and horrifying way of learning it, but the best we can generally do is to really appreciate our lives and our world. We all know that we will  be swept away in the end, but to be reminded of this doesn't make it any less painful. For many of us, though, the game goes on. Keep training, keep moving...

The Big Martial Arts Con

The martial arts are a con. The carrot of "fighting ability" is held out on the end of a long, long stick: it's not uncommon to hear or read the following: "tai chi is alright but it takes at least ten years to be able to use it." On one level, there is truth in this. To learn the art takes a long time: the different forms, fighting concepts and so on. But to be able to use it shouldn't take the averagely fit and intelligent person more than a few months. I suppose it depends on your definition of "use".  If by "use", you mean to defeat a slew of assailants who are seriously intent on maiming you, using  the full range of aesthetically pleasing, identifiable techniques of your school whilst barely taking a scratch, you can damn well forget it. If by "use" you mean have the sense to avoid trouble, evade incoming undesirables whilst looking for a handy exit strategy, well you can achieve this relatively quickly.

The point is not to beat or defeat triumphantly and obviously. Life is too messy for this to occur with much frequency. No, the aim is to survive and carry on. Not very glamourous, I know. But tactically, legally and morally, it's the pinnacle of our art. Evade and escape.

It's not always possible to just evade and escape. Maybe you will have to do nastier things. But the odds will be tipped very little even by years and years of training. If after ten months of training you can't handle an attack by four or five assailants on a dark city street, the likelihood is that your way of training won't bear any more fruit in this particular situation ten years down the line. In fact, your own decent instinct to flee might be marred by the added confidence that many martial arts erroneously instil.

It may seem like I am suggesting that no-one need train beyond the initial stages. I am not suggesting this, but rather a change of viewpoint. We don't really accumulate martial skill, but rather we refresh it every single day, as my teacher says "You are only as good as your last training session." We cannot rest on our laurels. Everyday just the basics: evade, divert, disrupt and escape. This is the difference between learning the techniques of  a martial art, and living a martial art.

Why Kung Fu Panda was bad...

Okay,okay, so this film came out ages ago. But I hear there's a sequel on the way...

Kung fu panda was great because it looked beautiful, and it was pretty funny. Anything that features such a devout fan of the martial arts as the lead character can never be a bad thing.

But this panda was a great big fat dude. The Dustin Hoffman creature (was it a Red Panda?) used the panda's love of food to motivate him to train, which was just fine. But why oh why did he teach the black and white oaf to fight like someone slim,lean and with long legs? He'd have been much better at a cool grappling, Bruce Frantzis-style BaGua thing instead of some pseudo-Shaolin nonsense. Of course the message is, no matter what your bodyshape/ability, you should be aiming to do all kinds of gymnastic stuff, spinning kicks and the rest...which is dull. A big guy should train like a big guy.

What do you mean I've got too much time on my hands?

Anger management 101

I have been writing of late (not here...) about the possibilities of tai chi chuan as a way of being evasive and artful when it comes to conflicts of all sorts, verbal, personal and physical.
But the other day, when one of the Union reps at work slung his tuppence worth at me, I slung it right back with added venom. I yelled, I ranted, then I fumed for about a week. Not altogether the coolest way to handle things. Where was my evasion, my control? Nowhere to be seen. Our little contretemps then became an extended meeting with managers present, and I ended up dining out on humble pie filled with patronising jam and sprinkled with bullshit flakes. Boo. So I guess what I'm saying is: it doesn't necessarily translate. When being philosophical about the martial arts, it's great to entertain the broad possibilities of training.But just because you can duck a punch, doesn't mean you can duck an insult. And it's not wise to hit Union guys, however much you might want to.

The Big Qi Debate part II

So the trouble with chi seems to be that both chi-lovers and haters present or expect chi as being something special, something extra to the normal range of mundane experience. I would suggest that chi is little more than a category, different in intent and purpose to any other category in our "|Western" experience maybe, but still referring to sensations available to all people.  In my opinion, chi is simply a different way of labelling sensations, in such a way that one can use these sensations to concentrate, feel the tides of the body, and gain energy and calmness from this process. The human body is broken down by Western medicine into the respiratory system, the cardiovascular system and so on. But none of these is a discrete "thing". These systems are all interwoven and interlinked, labelled for convenience, and the expediency of medicine. What "qi" introduces which Western medicine tries to avoid, is some idea of faith. The dictates of qi say "do me, cultivate me, try me and then see if I exist or not." Western medicine doesn't care if you believe or not. Of course, we also know that if someone feels that they are going to get better, this seems to help the process. If you follow the dictates of qi, you will create qi, or you will create the results of the qi system of work.
Really, if we had to boil it down, I'd say qi is flow. I've never come across a use or definition of qi where it wasn't recommended that it should flow. So whether one is talking about hormones, blood, breath, artistic spirit, or martial intent, flow is key. Flow implies interconnectedness; it also implies that any work to be done is about clearing the path to let the stream flow, rather than carrying the water to the destination in a bucket. Whatever qi is, it is "already there", which speaks of potential in all places, situations and beings. We don't need to do Taoist alchemy to benefit from flow. It's not mandatory because it doesn't add anything that's not there, merely changes the way one looks at it. That's all for now on this topic. 

The Big Qi Debate: what is Qi? does it exist?

In considering Chi ( it's a more elegant spelling than Qi in my opinion...) we have to consider a number of factors. We have to consider the roles of Chinese medicine, of Taoism, modern "alternative therapies", martial arts mythos and the religious attitudes of both Chinese and Western people. So I don't expect to cover it all in one brief and flippant post.
Chi is rarely written about in any kind of specific context. Usually, it is taken as read that the reader "believes in" (and this is far from a satisfactory phrase to use but let's let it stand for the time being...) chi, and the writer usually plunges straight into directions and imperatives: what one should do with ones's chi, whether to sink it or circulate it or what have you. This of course angers a certain section of the readers, who don't "believe in" the notion of chi: for them, it is rather like being given a manual on how to ride the Pegasus. These people are further alienated when members of the tai chi community imply that good tai chi can't be achieved without knowledge of meridians and chi flow, which are the bread-and-butter of the chi-using community. So we end up with a deeply divisive argument which seems never to proceed because one side is blessed with  faith in chi, and the other isn't, and never the twain shall meet. Parallels with the atheist/Believer face-off are appropriate, albeit with a smaller audience.
Both sides suffer from the same affliction in my opinion. They both believe that chi is something special and extra to what I can only call our "normal" world of perception and sensation. Furthermore, both sides are usually ill-informed about  various mechanisms and oddities of religion or spirituality that could shed some light on their dilemma.
First, lets look at the chi-lovers. I shall be generalising, and therefore inevitably offending. For this, I apologise.
The chi-lovers generally are of the opinion that they have discovered something wonderful, something indeed that Western man, in his ignorance, is sorely lacking in. Often, people "find" chi as a result of illness and then overcoming that illness whether by means of chi gung, acupuncture or tai chi itself. This tends to lend a slightly emotional, evangelical air to their relationship with chi, which we will not dwell on for the time being.For them for a variety of reasons, chi is seen as a life-transforming agent, something alien to Western knowledge, and often, something to be believed in. This, strangely, is an attitude they share with their opposite numbers on the other side of the divide. The reason for this belief seems to me because of the West's general post-Christian hangover. The Christian faith, in its drive for accessibility and intellectual respectability, has long since confined it's adherents contribution to that of belief, that's to say  intellectual assent to the existence of things which cannot be proved, namely the existence of God. We have very little experience with forms of spirituality that demand anything other than belief apart from the scientific method, and that's sure not going to help here, for reasons which we will explore later. An introduction to chi is often presented as a revelatory experience by unscrupulous teachers, so it isn't surprising that people get religious about it. As a result of their fervour, the chi lovers present chi as something extra, something that can onlty be found in "special" or "Oriental" exercises, something which can't be manipulated by those who aren't "masters" but which results in fantastic martial and therapeutic abilities. It is at this point that the chi-haters come in to the picture...tune in at the same time for the next thrilling episode.

The Middle Way: Buddha definitely did tai chi...honest.

For a wee paragraph or two, I shall be putting my Buddhist hat on. Apologies to those who couldn't give a monkey's about Buddhism...


It occurred to me that tai chi is the art of following, and of balance. By following, I suppose I mean giving up our superficial intent to harmonise with that of another.
In Buddhism, it seems to me that quite often one must balance, and keep the right tension: for example, between self-regard and regard for others, or between letting our desires have their space, but not letting them run amok. Tai chi I would say is not a method of spiritual cultivation in itself. But it can help at key points in life, at the point where philosophies or systems of cultivation require you to trust yourself, and proceed by feel, by instinct. The Buddha himself said that practice was like keeping the strings of a lute: not too tight, not too slack. Tai chi, through the embodiment of this principle, allows it to be recreated amd imagined in a wide variety of situations, not just martial or physical encounters.
The art of following is perhaps more subtle yet. I posited to the Monkey Army the other night that our movement and its development could be said to describe a circle. We start like ragdolls: whatever the opponent does, we have no choice but to follow, and we lurch and fall from one extreme to the other, from one side to the next.  Then we learn a bit of structure, and perhaps gain a little strength, and we resist, and maybe we start to win a bit here and there. This is the middle stage. Then, however, we relax our ideas about winning. We see that there really is no such thing. So we just follow. If they want to take us there, then there we go. But when we arrive, we still have our balance, and not only that, we are in a better position than them. So they move us again and again we follow, and they end up tying themselves in knots. Following is perhaps an underestimated skill: we are more often taught to be leaders. But as we know from the world's religions, perhaps we could do with better followers, people who have the confidence to give up their own ground but maintain enough poise to turn bad moves into good ones.
The Monkey Army seemed to like this idea.