day 241: elbowed by disruption

concepts:

• bu ji
• slowing things down
• jing (ting, hwa, na, fa)
  
• bi chi
  

lessons:

• bagua elbow form

it was brutally hot this weekend, with air quality made worse by the forest fire in La Canada-Pasadena-Altadena. temperatures were over 100 degrees F, and the smell of smoke and ash was everywhere. as a result, it made for a slightly toned-down class.

we warmed up with the basics, working our way through the moving drills. we also took some time to organize things, with Ching-Chieh insisting we come up with English names for each drill to make them easier to remember. going through this process, we figured out that there were a total of 20 drills, with 8 pairs of single and double moving drills. at some point Ching-Chieh is going to type all this up, so i figure we'll get a finalized list then--although my suspicion is that there are already pre-existing names for each drill in Mandarin, but it's just that nobody knows them.

bagua elbow form

the majority of class time today was actually spent working on principles which, while within some of the techniques of the elbow form, are actually applicable across TCMA--or even martial arts in general. we went a little bit further into the elbow form itself, but Sifu stopped and showed us 3 major principles: jao ji jo ji bu ji (sp?), slowing things down, and bi chi.

regarding jao ji jo ji bu ji...this is actually a phrase, and i think i have an error in the English transliteration of the Mandarin. but the figurative translation is to avoid using force and to use light touch. Sifu said this is a common phrase in martial arts, but one that can be expressed physically in various ways. one is the perspective often related to the idea associated with tai chi (i.e., redirecting an incoming force vector using only enough of your own force to do so).

today, however, Sifu said he wanted us to see a different perspective, and demonstrated by engaging me in a mock sparring, but instead of attacking aggressively with force so that each movement was an attempted strike, he mixed up the attack with a series of light moves and hard moves, where it was not clear if any of the movements were attempted strikes.

Sifu noted the idea with this approach is that you are trying to disrupt the opponent--disrupt their focus, their comfort level and rhythm, their center, their placement of force and mass, and their chi. he said that if you tried to make each movement a strike, it makes every action obvious, making it easy for the opponent to match. if you instead mix things up, you will disrupt them enough that they become confused, and lose track of what you are doing, and so become vulnerable to manipulation that opens their gates and frustrates their abilities to respond when you do decide to attack.

this brings up the concept of slowing things down. Sifu observed this does not mean literally (i.e., it doesn't mean that you slow down). Sifu said this means that you slow the other opponent down. typically, the assumption is made that in a fight you have to try to be faster than the other opponent. Sifu argued that this is a mistake, because it leads you into the eternal struggle to be more (i.e., faster, stronger, etc.) than your opponent, which is not what martial arts is about. if anything, martial arts is about knowing how to defeat an opponent who is more than you (i.e., faster, stronger, etc.).

Sifu explained that you don't need to be faster than the opponent. instead, you can make the opponent be slower than you. there are a number of ways to do this--and one of them is by disrupting the opponent. by disrupting them, you induce hesitation into their actions, causing enough delay in reactions that you can launch attacks.

as a reminder, Sifu said that this goes back to the ideas of jing (ting jing, hwa jing, na jing, fa jing). here, the idea of disrupting the opponent plays into ting jing. Sifu argued that this is one of the reasons why ting jing is the most prevalent form of jing, because without it you can't proceed to the other jings--at least, you can't proceed with any assurance of success. ting jing is crucial to setting up the opponent, and hence to enabling the ease via which you proceed to hwa, na, or fa jing.

the last principle we touched on today was bi chi (sp?). again, i think have an error in spelling. Sifu demonstrated this using one technique in the elbow form which looks suspiciously like "pull-down" in tai chi. Sifu showed that the technique fails against an opponent who is ready for it and recognizes what you are trying to do. however, by initiating the technique with an initial movement that attacks another part of the opponent (today, Sifu preceded the pull-down w a simulated knee to the groin), the technique becomes dramatically effective (even against someone who is expecting it).

Sifu explained this is an example of bi chi. that you attack--or at least lead the opponent to believe that you are attacking--another part of their body, so that it distracts them and forces them to change their focus away from your actual intended target. Sifu noted that the initial diversion has to be convincing, and that to be so you actually have to have the intent in your mind to be attacking the diversionary target (i.e., in order for the opponent to believe you are attacking their groin, you have to believe that you are attacking their groin, even though you know that this is a diversion from your plan to pull down).

this is, in essence, another way of disrupting the opponent, which i guess was the theme for class today. Sifu and Phunsak then had a discussion of other ways of disrupting the opponent, with techniques that involved little effort--one was most impressive: simply placing your hand on top of a person's skull, and somehow causing them to collapse downward. this can be done with little pressure, but to work requires that you place the hand in a motion that serves to disrupt the opponent's stability and center, meaning that it works not because it exerts force that overpowers the opponent, but because it uses little force that structurally destabilizes the opponent.

we spent the rest of class time trying to learn how to apply these principles. it's not easy. there's a certain feel to using them, and just what is required to disrupt an opponent varies according to the opponent--not all people are the same, and some people are less susceptible to certain forms of disruption than others. Sifu noted that this is why fighting is a challenge, especially against skilled fighters, because people can train themselves to be resistant to disruption, and so disruption is an art form requiring an understanding of how to manipulate the human body.

we got some of the principles to work some of the time on some of the people. which is a start, but also shows that we have a long way to go.

we finished on that note and went to lunch to contemplate.