day 244: playing with concepts

concepts:

• entries
• jing (ting, hwa, na, fa)
  
• yin-yang and yang-yin
• closing circles
  
• structure
  
• holes
• centers
• dantian
• orbits
  

lessons:

• bagua elbow form

this past Saturday started a little slow. i got caught with morning errands and arrived to class a little late, but found that everyone else was running on the same time. i ended up catching up on news and events with Siwanndi and Art, who had made it to the park before me. there was also a new student, who had come to learn baji--i didn't get his name, although i figure i will eventually.

the lessons today were related to the applications in the elbow form, but actually delved much deeper to hit a more general level related to martial arts as a whole. as a result, while we did get to the form itself, most of the morning was spent discussing concepts and trying to learn techniques that demonstrated the concepts.

we started on a tangent, with Sifu announcing that he was teaching 2 seminars at the january kung fu tournament in San Diego, and that he wanted our feedback on what topics to cover--particularly those that could be covered within the space of 2 hours. he'd decided one would be devoted to chin na, but the other was open for discussion. after some conversation, we settled on something involving applications of jing (ting, hwa, na, fa).

Sifu mentioned that he'd been thinking about this, since he believes that jing principles exist across all martial arts, not just the internal styles, and that you can see this in every martial arts application. as a way of demonstrating this, Sifu showed a shuai jiao application broken down into ting, hwa, na, and fa jing, and pointed out how the principles can actually show you how to improve the application.

he'd apparently thought about this while showing them to Tommy Friday night, since he'd been teaching Tommy some shuai jiao principles. he said he'd been a little disturbed that Tommy had adopted the current trend in shuai jiao of using a 2-handed engagement to begin rounds. Sifu noted that this has become almost universal in shuai jiao, and observed that he believes this is indicative of the prevailing transformation of shuai jiao into a sport along the lines of Olympic judo and Olympic greco-roman wrestling, which have the same starting posture.

Sifu argued that originally shuai jiao--at least in its incarnation as a combat art--discouraged 2-handed entries. in a combat setting, 2-handed entries are dangerous because they commit you to engagement and reduce the options for movement, and tend to lead fighters to 1) direct force-on-force encounters, and 2) expend focus and energy on yang actions. for self-defense situations, Sifu said that the training had traditionally been on 1-handed entries. unfortunately, these are being taught less and less as shuai jiao has evolved into a sport.

at this point i asked Sifu if the 1-handed entries for shuai jiao could be borrowed from other martial arts. i noticed that in bagua all (or almost all) the entries are 1-handed.

Sifu laughed and he told us a story that when he was young Chang Dong Sheng had taught 1-handed entries in his shuai jiao techniques, and that people had categorized them as "secret technique" taught only to special students. but after learning bagua, Sifu realized that the "secret techniques" were actually all bagua entries, and that Chang Dong Sheng had really just used his bagua training (he knew bagua) and adopted bagua entries for his shuai jiao. Sifu argued that the mixing of the two arts had been seamless, largely because they'd been tied using jing principles, with Chang Dong Sheng apparently seeing the consistency of the principles between what most people consider to be widely divergent styles.

at this point, we started on a more in-depth discussion of the jing principles used in these kinds of entries, and then went to talk about how they could be seen as continuous movements with no distinction between entry and application of technique. in action, everything becomes a smooth progression from one stage to another, both in terms of jing and in terms of entry to application.

Sifu pointed out that this is the same with other principles. staying with the bagua/shuai jiao movements we were using, he explained that you can also see the interplay of yin and yang, with the progression of jing being expressed through yin and yang actions within the techniques.

he emphasized that yin-yang meant not only that a particular application not only had a yin component and a yang component, but that these characteristics could change, with the yin component becoming yang and the yang becoming yin. this depends on what the opponent is doing and on the intent of the practitioner. he demonstrated this with one application, and showed that depending on what the opponent did, the distribution and direction of forces in the application will adjust so that it still works.

Sifu went on to note that in deciding the distribution and direction of yin and yang components, it is useful to think about circles that incorporate the force vectors of you and your opponent. by recognizing the yin-and-yang movements of your opponent, you are able to identify the distribution and direction of your yin and yang forces. the idea is to apply yang to the opponent's yin and yin to the opponent's yang. in essence, it can be seen as closing the circle.

from a physics perspective, you can visualize you and your opponent as a closed system. if you attempt to neutralize force with force, you are in a situation where you must add energy to the system--something which is problematic if you have less energy or less power than your opponent, because in that brute-force scenario you will lose. if, however, you deal with the opponent's force with yin-yang principles, you are able to neutralize the opponent's actions without having to add energy to the system, meaning that you are able to use the opponent's energy against the opponent, saving your effort and making up for any deficiencies in energy or power by using skill. thus, if the opponent's force vectors are tracing a path, you are using yin-yang principles to direct the path in a circle back to the opponent--hence, you are closing the circle.

incidentally, in relation to jing, this means that you are blending your jing with the opponent, in a way that takes maximizes depletion of the opponent and minimizes yours. the ideal state is for you to close the circle so that you don't expend any jing at all, but use the opponent's for everything in your actions, whether they were for ting, hwa, na, or fa.

Sifu went on to have us practice the application he'd shown us, using jing and yin-yang principles in response to changes in what our partner was doing. he showed us that the end goal was to destabilize the opponent, so that we were using their effort to break down their own structure.

in the process of practice, i suddenly realized that it was magically easier to see holes and centers. by visualizing the force vectors for both practitioner and opponent, and then seeing the encounter between the two as an effort to direct the opponent's forces to close the circle, i noticed that you can place the centers for both people and the closed system encompassing them--the centers of the circles (the circle of the opponent's force attacking vectors, the circle of the practitioner's redirecting force vectors, and the circle that results as the 2 people work against each other) are the centers of struggle in the battle, because invariably they tie to the centers of the bodies at play.

i suspect this why Sifu said that the dantians and the centers of gravity are not the same thing (even though they should be). as long as a fighter is structurally sound, the dantian and the center of gravity are together. the fighter, however, becomes structurally unsound the moment the dantian and the center of gravity separate. it is at this point that the holes form, and the more the structure destabilizes, the bigger the distance grows between dantian and center of gravity, and the bigger the holes become.

i also suspect that this is what closing the circle is trying to do: as the circle is closed in a system of 2 bodies in struggle, the body with the center closer to the system center will maintain the unity of dantian and center of gravity, while the body with the center farther from the system center will disconnect its dantian and center of gravity. i think this is consistent with physics, in that the bodies in closer orbit to a central mass will maintain more stable orbital paths, while bodies in farther orbit will be much more susceptible to disruption from their orbital paths.

bagua elbow form

we practiced the ideas that Sifu had discussed with us, and then finished class by going a little further into the elbow form. Phunsak said we were almost done, and that it would probably take 1 more class to finish the form.

we made a video of where we were to date, since it was starting to become hard to remember, and then left for lunch.