day 313: fighting, principles, techniques, forms

concepts:

• ting jing, hwa jing
• gate control, gate entry
• proactive v. reactive
• set-up
• vertical v. horizontal
• lian fa, gong fa, da fa
• fighting v. applications v. forms
• principles v. techniques
• maintenance
  

lessons:

• hsing-yi
• kyudo
  

this post refers to Saturday, July 30. i missed class on August 6, and so this brings things up to date. we're heading into the dog days of summer, so it's been getting warmer lately.

hsing-yi

we've completed going through the 12 animals for Shanxi hsing-yi. Sifu says he now wants to spend some time showing how to translate everything we've learned into actual fighting. he says there's a big difference, and that we have to learn the connection between the 2.

Sifu's been spurred by conversations he's had recently in his college instruction and participation in local panel seminars. he's gotten questions about the difficulties TCMA practitioners seem to have in applying what they've been learning in actual fighting. this is a common issue in TCMA, and a regular observation about current TCMA made in the larger martial arts community: a lot of TCMA practitioners don't seem to be able to use what they've learned in fights. it's given TCMA a dubious reputation in Western societies, particularly in comparison to the more popularly known fights in boxing, MMA, etc.

Sifu had us pair up, with each pair being sparring partners. Sifu told us not to engage in full-contact sparring, but to work on sparring drills. for today, each pair had 1 partner work on defense and the other partner work on offense. the offensive partner was to try to utilize only the 1st 2 animals: dragon and tiger. the defensive partner was to counter or escape.

Sifu had us do several drills out of this. drill 1 was no contact, with the focus on sticking to each other while both partners were largely stationary. drill 2 was the same, but incorporated more footwork, so each partner was free to move across the ground/floor. drill 3 was no sticking but sensing & receiving while moving freely. drill 4 was greater contact with sticking, incorporating light strikes, but again stationary. drill 5 was light contact with sticking and footwork. drill 6 was light contact with no sticking while moving freely. we rotated partners once we had gone through these drills.

Sifu said there were a number of things to focus on with these drills:

• ting jing (sensing): we need to become accustomed to reading the opponent and getting a feel of what they're trying to do at any given moment. this doesn't mean point fixation (i.e., locking onto a single point and following it), but rather general awareness of their overall behavior and general demeanor.
• hwa jing (receiving): we need to become familiar with reading and receiving an opponent's movements, so that we can neutralize them or avoid them.
• gate control: each person has to learn how to protect their gates to deny the opponent an entry for attack
• gate entry: each person has to learn how to locate, open, and enter an opponent's gates
• pro-active v. reactive: each person has to learn how to be pro-active on offense and defense. it is okay to be reactive, but it is always harder to respond to something than it is to initiate things (as so many team sports teach: offense is easier than defense). in addition, in a fight, it's important to control the overall engagement (from initial encounter to ending resolution), and this requires being pro-active to set the direction of the fight.
  
• set-up: applications can't be applied directly. they have to be set up, in the sense that the opponent has to be lured into making mistakes regarding their gates and their structure. every application has a counter, and so an opponent can always defend against an attack. for an attack to work, the opponent has to be manipulated so that they are not able to defend against the atack.
• vertical (dragon) and horizontal (tiger): Sifu asked us to recognize the overall orientations of dragon and tiger as being vertical and horizontal, respectively. in the drills, he said we needed to get a feel of offense and defense both vertically and horizontally. he noted that we should try to get an intuitive sense of this in terms of ting, hwa, na, and fa jing, whether sticking or not sticking to the opponent.
  

we spent some time in between partners discussing the pedagogical philosophy (i.e., teaching philosophy) behind this type of training. Sifu said that in the modern era TCMA has a major problem in that many practitioners don't know how to use it in actual fighting. fighting skills are not trained or taught as commonly as it was in the past. in the West, this is largely a function of how TCMA was introduced to Western audiences. in the East, this is because TCMA was suppressed during the Cultural Revolution. as a result, TCMA has lost a lot of respect. it's also led to a lot of misperceptions about TCMA.

Sifu said we needed to dispel these misperceptions. TCMA has substance to it, and it is valid, but not in the ways so many modern practitioners seem to think. Sifu pointed out that fighting--whether tournament, street, or battlefield--is not like forms or meditating or thinking or anything else. unfortunately, in his view, too many people inside and outside the TCMA community think that TCMA is just the latter. the connections are not taught or not understood. as a result, people don't see how TCMA translates into actual fighting.

Sifu stressed that knowing how to use martial arts in a fight involves several different types of education: lian fa, gong fa, da fa. all these types of education must be taken together as a martial arts pedagogy (teaching method). lian fa is forms, gong fa is conditioning, and da fa is sparring. lian fa has the purpose of teaching fundamentals, including structure, principles, and techniques. gong fa has the purpose of conditioning a person's attributes for fighting in terms of physical fitness, power generation, etc. together, lian fa and gong fa provide the mental and physical building blocks, respectively, to be used in fighting. da fa is training in how to take those building blocks and use them in actual fighting, using various forms of sparring to progressively teach how to fight.

according to Sifu, in the modern era too much of TCMA instruction is lian fa. in fact, in his opinion, almost all of it is. based on what he's witnessed, very few TCMA practitioners are being taught gong fa and da fa, and as a result hold extremely dangerous misperceptions about fighting and their own martial skills. Sifu has commented on this in the past, saying that lian fa and gong fa do little good without an understanding of da fa, and this is the reason why you sometimes see street fighters with no training who are able to defeat trained martial artists--because they've gotten da fa through the hard experience and understand the reality of fighting, whereas the martial artists often have not.

Sifu noted that too often, TCMA practitioners think that fighting needs to look like applications or forms. he said this is a mistake, and that a fight scenario is never as clean as an application or form, especially against an experienced fighter who knows what they're doing. reality is never an ideal environment, while applications and forms always take place in ideal environments. Sifu said that we have to understand the role of applications and forms--they're not to teach actual fighting, but rather to teach fundamentals and building blocks to be used in learning fighting. applications teach a student the basic movements to apply principles contained within the forms, and neither actually teaches how to work them into a fight.

to learn how to fight you actually have to fight so you can learn how use the movements applying the principles against an opponent who is not cooperative. the issue is to do so safely. Sifu said this is why there is sparring, with different forms of sparring designed to lead a student on a progressive understanding of how to deal with the chaotic and hostile reality of fighting.

Sifu emphasized this is why he keeps telling us to not fixate too much on application techniques or obsess too much on forms. he said this will actually mislead us from concentrating on the most important thing, which is principles. the danger with techniques is that you fixate on them, and try to catalog them in your mind, so that you become a database of techniques and forms. unfortunately, it's hard to choose techniques and follow forms in an actual fight, where the situation is random, confusing, and fast. in order to match the randomness, confusion, and speed of a fight, you have to be mentally and physically flexible in your actions. this means that you understand the principles and have an intuitive feel of how to move to express those principles.

Sifu's talked about this in the past, with comments about the distinction between "empty" understanding versus "substantive" understanding. "empty" understanding is seen in someone who is "married to the form", in the sense that they do applications and forms as movements without understanding the principles in them. you see this in practitioners who do them as physical movements without a recognition of the intent and awareness of the physics. the hallmark symptom is a practitioner who just fixates on the form and insists on always sticking to some version of a form without being able to offer a fight-based explanation why. in contrast, "substantive" understanding is seen in someone who can modify and work through a form, with physical movements that display some evidence of intent and understanding of the physics, to the extent that the practitioner can explain what can change and what can't be changed and why in terms of what might happen in the context of a fight.

kyudo

the continuing theme for kyudo this week was maintenance. oh sure, we did shooting. in fact, we did a lot of shooting. more than the usual class. but a lot of my attention was on maintenance issues, which i am realizing i really need to spend some time learning.

superficially, maintenance seems mundane, and not really a contributor to the art of shooting a bow and arrow. but the art involves equipment, and so the condition of the equipment relates to the development of the art. a lot of people tend to gloss over maintenance, but i'm starting to recognized that it's something worth devoting time.

i thought i'd fixed my string last week to fit the nock on my arrows. however, the shrinkage and drying of the glue had apparently resulted in a shape that only fit the nock from a certain angle. this is a problem, since the string has to be free to move on its axial rotational plane of motion to minimize distortion and energy loss in the arrow.

fixing this, unfortunately, meant stripping away all the work i'd done last week and re-gluing the string. and with more care and attention than i had done last week.

while i was at it, i also decided it was time to add more pine tar. i've suspected i needed to apply more pine tar in cleaning my string. Sensei told me i should be able to smell the pine when cleaning the string, and i rarely do. the pine tar is hard, and so has to be softened. as a result, it involves a measure of time to soften the tar before i could apply it.

unfortunately, i apparently misjudged the amount of tar i needed. Wilton happened to notice what i'd done and he appeared shocked, noting that "uh...that's a LOT of tar." i realized when he meant when i tried to rub the tar down, and instead found that i'd just made the string a long sticky piece of twine. i ended up having to spend a good portion of time trying to remove tar from the string.

of course, all this is with equipment that i've been told is low-maintenance. i'm using a fiberglass bow and synthetic string. others have told me that the traditional bamboo bow and hemp string are much more labor-intensive and require much closer monitoring in terms of maintenance.

hmmmmmmm...i think i'm going to need to take some time out and just work on learning maintenance. i may ask Sensei for a class on this.