Taomeow

Some... nothing particularly brilliant I'm afraid. I can do what they call the "long jin." I was (accidentally) the recipient of the "short jin" on one occasion (o u c h). Between the two lie many years of practice and they're not in the same qi category. A long jin is indeed thrown like a stone (or, as my teacher put it, your release your arm as a chain with the metal ball attached to the end -- with power but a loose, explosive kind that you won't pull off if your arm or anything else tenses up! One would find plenty of that even at the beginner level in Chen Laojia Er Lu (well, not "absolute beginner," but if you do it after Yi Lu), aka Cannon Fist -- the name speaks for itself, you can't shoot a cannonball by tensing up anything in its way, the explosion comes from inside and the trajectory the cannonball travels is open all the way until it hits its mark. This is accomplished only by sung, or it won't have the explosive speed. Hard MA punches and kicks are like something you do with a mallet, and regardless of the strength, hardness, heaviness of the mallet, the speed of such a blow is very limited. A sung taij player can dance three pirouettes of polka around it instead of waiting for it to land. A long jin blow is exponentially faster, and that's where simple physics shine -- a bullet does as much damage as it does due to its speed, not its weight, hardness, or any of the other li goodies. But then the short jin (what I referred to as "a bolt of lightning")... that's a different category. It transcends simple physics. In my case, it hit me in the "core of my being," for lack of a better term. It didn't hurt much, but it rendered me, instantly, drained of the will to live down to the last drop. I felt demolished, canceled out. There was no physical damage whatsoever. This state lasted for about an hour. Then I cried for another hour, and the effect gradually disappeared. I can very well imagine that a similar blow but executed with intent and the will to kill would absolutely succeed, no question. The master who accidentally hit me used one finger.

Never hurts to reiterate the basics. Yup, it's about as hard as a bolt of lightning.

This is not normally used by "all" taiji practitioners, to my knowledge. ??? I did it once though (not all day, but all night), so I can tell you what my personal purpose was. My circumstances were such that I was terrified out of my mind and yet I needed to act, clear-headed and efficient as never before, so this standing softly and waiting for something to change inside came to me spontaneously. The purpose was to find inner strength to deal with the most devastating crisis. It worked. I found (or maybe formed while doing it) my "diamond axis." The strength to match my circumstances, something that would never crumble, under any kind of pressure, no matter what. Wuji does not equal something else (e.g. softness) and isn't anything but itself. Softness is softness, wuji is wuji. Wuji in stillness is wuji, wuji in motion is taiji. Softness helps, leads, develops, facilitates wuji perceptions and states. So, taiji is wuji in motion. What I described as "microadjustments." When things get subtle, they don't respond well to verbal labels though, it's all experiential. Words merely hint at the general direction of your pursuit. You can fairly easily tell the difference between "hard" and "soft" on a gross level. On the level of "microadjustments," however, you can only follow and/or direct the flow of "open-close-up-down-rotate-contract-expand-peng" and so on. "Hardness" is in there but if you stop to dwell on it, even for a microsecond, it's like you've thrown a hard boulder into the flow and perched there. That's when the whole stream gets out from under your awareness and control and leaves you far behind. It happens faster than you can say the word "hard." The "hardness" within taiji "softness" requires astonishing inner speed. It's not unlike what a chess master does in a blitz match when he or she assesses the situation fifteen, twenty, fifty moves ahead in a second, and makes the only "winning" move instantaneously. Anyone who doesn't have this speed of processing would have to spend months on finding and analyzing those fifty moves, mind you. In taiji (of the high skill kind), this is something that happens throughout the body -- at all times. So, I repeat... taiji is wuji in motion, and this motion is stupendously fast. Faster than the speed of light, if it needs to be.

Not 100% sure from the picture, but it is likely to be chalcedony or even carnelian, in which case its energy can act on jing, facilitating its smoother distribution throughout the body. It can relieve sexual agitation and redirect it to other tasks. Herr Freud would give all his patients one of these if he knew it. Very beautiful!

On occasion. What do you want to reveal to her?

I keep finding little (and not so little) things I'm missing in every class. That's the way of taiji -- as soon as you "get it," your new level of skill reveals to you the inadequacies you weren't aware of before. It never stops. They don't call it "supreme ultimate" for nothing. There's literally no ceiling to hit, no "top of the line" skill. You can improve on anything you have. So, if you start a class with a good teacher, you will start feeling -- um, rightfully frustrated with your own performance. Taiji and self-satisfaction simply don't mix. True. Another way to put it is, the more sung you are, the less of what they call "ego" you have. An "ego" always has a physical counterpart, it is put together of habitual tensions and habitual responses to stimuli that are never limited to the mind and always either originate in the body (shaping the mind accordingly) or extend into the body (from habitual processing grooves in the mind). It is not all in the head -- in fact, most of it isn't. You can only be sung when you're not busy maintaining that. And this removal of awareness from the "ego" frees the former up to notice and understand the other person(s) much, much better. Top level taiji people literally feel to the touch (in push-hands) as though they've disappeared, as though there's nothing there. You're pushing against emptiness! Mighty annoying!!

We have a few new students in our taiji class, karate black belts and instructors. They are working HARD to unlearn hardness and learn softness. Sung has a very peculiar feel to it. Beginners are usually uncomfortable and not in control of their total shape in any taiji position. Middle range players are getting comfortable -- very comfortable -- in any position, and complacent at that. If they don't move on, they don't discover sung. Sung is a state that makes you very comfortable and very uncomfortable simultaneously. If you're totally comfortable, something is tensing up, something is invested into maintaining the shape and therefore is not fluid and not ready. If you're totally uncomfortable, feeling as though indeed you're about to fall over, you have no true control over your balance and consequently your responsiveness is inadequate and your sensitivity is blunted. The middle ground, where you are comfortable with no tensions, and simultaneously uncomfortable because this no-tensions state absolutely requires a continuos flow of micro-adjustments (not visible to the eye) to a looseness that constantly threatens to throw you off balance -- but you don't lose your balance because you don't stop micro-adjusting -- that's sung. I wouldn't call anything in taiji "hardness," more like "if I stopped here, I'd tense up and harden, but I don't stop" -- the non-stopping is internal movement, not necessarily external, externally you can stop in any position and meditate on "movement within stillness."

Accomplished by suspending the wrists from heaven on rubber bands. This opens the joint and gives it mobility and readiness in any direction without limpness in any position. There was a movie, don't remember what it's called, where a Japanese warlord's wife falls in love with the main protagonist, a Westerner, a silk merchant. She does not dare speak or even look at him, but when she drinks tea in his presence, she picks up her little cup and, instead of just bringing it up to her lips in a straight line with the wrist held stiff and the movement coming from the elbow, the way it is ordinarily done, she rotates her wrist ever so slowly and smoothly, not in a straight line but in a curve, round and round and up, the movement coming from the center, the heart... and then puts it down in the same fashion, round and round and down in the opposite direction. I thought it was the most sensually expressive move I've ever seen in a movie, and I also thought, gee, this lady knows a thing or two about internal MA, no question.

Sounds like you're doing a great job. I'm going to check out your books. I always thought Paracelsus was the devil though. Didn't he come up with the "one disease, one remedy" model that became the method and madness of "modern Western medicine?" Didn't he introduce a whole bunch of highly toxic substances as medicines on the merit of their ability to suppress symptoms, notably mercury as the single best remedy for "human vices" in general, the bane of Western civilization ever since? (A hundred years from his time, an author of the anatomy book for doctors asserted that mercury is a natural constituent of the human bones, because he had never seen a skeleton not affected -- doctors started blanket-prescribing it for everything, in particular as a cough and cold remedy for children, among other things.) I'll be curious to check out your sources. (Mine is "The Healing Arts" by Ted Kaptchuk, OMD). Yup, "Ailian" is me (that's the translation of my name into Chinese offered by my Chinese teacher), glad you liked the blog!

Hi Osalina, great to meet another student of the history of medicine. Medicine has always been a field of application of power. (As a healer once wrote, there's no power greater than the power of the healthy over the sick. Which is one reason the power usurpers want everybody sick, no exceptions.) Who, when, and how exactly usurped it is an inquiry that goes far and deep into the darkest places of the universe... as Yoda might have put it, the deepest darkest secrets of them all, they are. So without really going there, I just felt compelled to throw in a crumb for thought... so that "Chinese Communists" don't get the credit for the antics of the archons.

The rabbit hole goes deeper... how about Rockefeller investing $45,000,000 in 1927 (perhaps equivalent to $ billions today) into "Westernizing" Chinese medicine?.. Check out, e.g., http://www.whale.to/b/ruesch.html

The term used in the Taiji Classics is sung. It comes together with the idea of a "steel needle hidden in a cotton ball." Soft and yielding on the outside, hard and firm (but springy and flexible) on the inside. That's a taiji body. That's a taiji mind!!!

Then I guess people who have sex with Germans are germaphiles.

sorry, changed my mind

There's a germ in Germany.

Anyone with push-hands experience would see it's real and pretty good. Not miraculous -- I am exposed to this (or better) level of training every week. But good and legit, solid work against a backdrop of excellent structure. Of course, anyone with no real-life real-taiji push-hands experience could "form an opinion" of any nature whatsoever. My teacher, former champion of Beijing, refers to his competing years as "the show-off things a youngster will do." He tells stories of all those champions that are glorified for a second and promptly discarded -- some of them proceed to sweep the pavement for a living, literally -- because their skill is for show and their glory is an exploitable product for a short while, and as soon as it has been exploited to the max, they get dropped like a pair of worn-out shoes. Whereas folks who never competed give you a run for your money in their 90s... forget "immortal," how about "happy, healthy and strong and more so every year?" How about "the older you get, the greater your skill?" That's what real taiji does... championship taiji does the exact opposite. Like all sports.

Um... you need to ask for your money back from the teacher(s) who told you this.

Hieronimus, thanks for your thoughts and the image. The jiugongtu was identified as Hetu by the famous taoist Chen Tuan as far back as the 10th century. What I posted is not a rotated Luoshu, it's a version of Hetu -- with yin at the top and to the left of yang, unlike in the Luoshu jiugongtu where yin is at the bottom and to the right of yang on top. (since you proposed simplicity for the common person -- if we have any such here -- nothing is simpler to see than the yin-yang configuration of the jiugongtu, since a 6 stands for yin and a 9 stands for yang. Just look! )

This is half the map. Here's the other half: 618 753 294 Hetu arrangement will be used in some alchemical, martial, and healing practices and, exclusively, in yin feng shui.

To add to what I've already written, I've been taught to draw the taiji symbol with my body as a warm-up silk-reeling practice by my taiji teacher, and for meditation by one of my taoist teachers. So every way I do it can have a meaning to it, and the meaning transpires through practice. You can get funky with it, e.g. rotate the taiji in your dantien clockwise while going counterclockwise with your hands (generating the kind of peng that can cause your opponent in a martial setting the very confusion of senses that is the hallmark of taijiquan "tricks"). But beginners are only asked to trace the symbol with their hands while shifting the weight accordingly. Anyone trained in the empty-full distinctions of weight distribution in taiji will know exactly what is going where when yin and yang play with each other. That's the deal with all taoist stuff -- none of it can be resolved in the head to any satisfaction, practice makes it perfectly clear though.

The longest-standing traditional way (I've seen it in museums in China, on all kinds of objects) is to depict yang with its head on top, yin with its head on the bottom, because that's the illustration of their primary inherent attributes -- whatever you're dealing with, if it has an "up" and a "down," a "top" and a "bottom" to it, then its yang moves upward and its yin moves downward. Then far as left or right sides are concerned, if the direction of motion is "unfolding outward," it's clockwise, so you would place yang on the right, and if the direction is "folding inward," you would place yang on the left to signify return. So, basically, you can encode your intent via depicting the symbol this way or that. If you place yin on top and yang on the bottom, you mean "going against the flow" (only a good idea in a very precise alchemical setting). If you place yin on the right, you mean "I've had enough of this world." And so on. The oldest depictions I've seen carved in stone can have both symbols swimming side by side, intertwining and swirling, and even detailed like a pair of fishes chasing each other's tails or a pair of snakes making out.

These are just different systems of romanization -- tai chi is Wade-Giles (which went before) and taiji is Pinyin (developed later). Modern translations use Pinyin, older books use Wade-Giles, still older ones something third (don't remember what it's called). However, some crucial Chinese notions are occasionally spelled in the Wade-Giles tradition even in the otherwise Pinyin settings -- and example is "tao," which is Wade-Giles, and which would be "dao" in Pinyin. I've learned Pinyin spelling but I still prefer "tao." On the other hand, having had more exposure to Pinyin than to Wade-Giles, I prefer taijiquan to tai chi chuan, and qigong to chi kung.

It occurred to me yesterday at a sushi place... What is it that really separates humans from animals and other life forms? Not our capacity for love -- other creatures have that. Not our intellectual prowess -- I do believe many other life forms are way smarter, by different means. Not our penchant for enslaving our own -- ants have that. As they, as well as beavers and birds, have their architecture. Wars maybe? -- unusual for a mammalian species, but viral cultures, yeasts, and even kelps do have their wars. Religions? -- I've seen many a dog worship his master. Playing with nuclear energy? Bacterium radiodurans is better at that than we are. So, what sets humans apart? What, if anything, is special about us? Well, food and clothes, of course. The way we prepare our foods and eat so much of everything changed and modified in so many ways. No animal bakes cakes. No animal knows how to combine grains and sea creatures and poultry all in one pot to create a paella. No animal fills chocolate bonbons with aged brandy to be served with coffee and a platter of aged cheeses from around the world. No animal makes sushi. They all eat what god, the higher powers, the alien or human geneticists, or tao herself have given them to eat. We don't. We invent our own foods. Been at it throughout our civilized history, and maybe from the start (depending on what you believe or know about how we started). Then again, they wear their skins and furs and shells and scales. We wear out jeans and jerkins and togas and kaftans and sarafans. We wear wool and silk and cotton and linen and, lately, mostly polyester (not me, but most of the rest of humanity today.) We have "fashions." How we look is not how god or whatever higher powers or the meddling higher (or lower) civilization of geneticists or tao herself have created us to look. We look hip, we look cool, we look dated, we look sloppy or put-together by virtue of what we wear. We look wealthy or poor or middle class, blue collar or white, careless about it or obsessed with it, with what we put on. We walk on stilts of heels and platforms, noose a tie around our necks, and create places where we can't go unless we do. The variety of ways we cover our bodies with things that aren't part of it is endless, subject to changing and arbitrary rules, and for the most part the effort exerted has nothing whatsoever to do with a mere attempt to adapt to the seasonal weather changes. (For this, internal cultivation would suffice -- animals do that, so do trees, they change their own body in order to adapt to the weather. Not us. We change the way our body looks in a certain weather for the look, without the change affecting the body itself.) So, it occurred to me that all those rumors about "judgment" when we die must be founded in a sort of review that does take place -- a creator (whoever or whatever he or she is) would want to know... what? Most probably what she didn't herself create -- what we, the species that has come up with cuisines and fashions, have created. So it's not, contrary to rumors, about our deeds and misdeeds (what's new and interesting about that? -- we're just like everybody else in this respect). It's about what we've experienced that other species don't experience. Which is our foods and our clothes. I imagine it will go something like this... "And what was the absolute best dessert you remember having?" "Um... I think alfresco de maracuya I had in Peru... also those little eclairs my mother made for my tenth birthday... and aunt Sima's raspberry cake..." "Very well. You'll have unlimited access to these from now on." "And which sweaters of yours do you remember as your absolute favorites?" "The one I got when I turned four, the soft, warm, lime green thing with little snowflakes embroidered at the neck -- it always looked so festive and felt so gentle! Then, of course, the heavy grey mountain goat wool "native" one I got in the vicinity of Elbrus, from a peasant who knitted it. And that outrageous black cashmere thing that hugged the throat but opened the back almost to the tailbone! I loved that thing, whatever happened to it?" "Nothing happened, it's immortalized by your forming a bond with it. Wear it whenever you like, it repels stains, tears and moth for all eternity."