Fajin

 

 

Few people think tai chi looks like this; it seldom does, except when it needs to.

Last week in class I got asked about “fajin.”  I was glad to receive the question – it’s about time we discussed it.

An earlier blog post ("Why So Slow?") discusses why we go slow in the solo form and in push-hands practice.  If you haven’t read it, please do so before continuing.

Once you’ve read the linked post, it’s time to sort out when and why we’d ever want to practice “fast;” and not only this, but how to go about practicing “fast” and what it really is. 

In doing so, one of the questions we must answer along the way is “How fast is fast?”

This is an easy question– the Tai Chi Classics have the answer ready-made for us: 
“If my opponent doesn’t move, I do not move.  The instant he moves, I am already there.” 
“If he moves fast, I quickly respond, and if his movement is slow, I leisurely follow.”

In other words, “How Fast?” is determined by our partner/opponent, understanding that we must be actively engaged in sensing (ting jin) and interpreting our partner’s movements and determining his intentions, and letting his actions guide our own.  In this way we will seem, from our partner’s perspective, to be bewildering and impenetrable – both cloud-like and immovable at the same time: 
“If he tries to find me above, he has to keep reaching higher, or if he tries to find me below, he has to keep reaching lower.
When he advances, he cannot get to me, but once he retreats, he cannot get away from me….
The opponent does not understand me, only I understand him.”

So much for “How fast.”  Let’s talk about fajin.

The Chinese way to write fajin is 發勁.  We already know what “jin” means.  It means “Focused/Trained energy.”  It’s distinct from “Li” which means “brute strength.”  Fa – 發 – has a cluster of meanings such as “issuing,” “emitting,” “shooting,” “sending out,” etc.  They give the impression of suddenness, explosiveness and violence – tai chi is, after all, a martial art.  Punches and kicks obviously come to mind.  There’s no such thing as “passively” kicking someone. 

We spend a lot more time on “soft” than “hard” in tai chi for several reasons.  The first is that “hard” is instinctual – toddlers know how to strike.  Learning to be "soft" without collapsing is much more challenging.  The other reason is that “soft” and “slow” allow us to learn how our bodies move and work.  This allows us to be “hard” via coordination and focus, rather than brute force (“Use yi, not li” from the Ten Essential Principles). 

The drawback of this approach is that “hard,” “yang,” fajin and related concepts get de-emphasized, sometimes to the point where some long-time students may be convinced such things don’t exist in the art at all!  Anyone who understands yin/yang theory, on the other hand, knows that “yang” and “hard” must be somewhere in there.

Tai chi is not a "soft" martial art, nor a "hard" one.
It's "soft" when and where it needs to be, and "hard" when & where it needs to be.
In other words, it's either/neither/both, all at the same time.

Fajin is strength, but it isn’t Li or brute strength.  A useful translation might be “Trained energy issued outward” or “Focused explosive energy” or indeed any set of words you please, so long as they convey the idea of something powerful yet mindful that you’re doing to someone or something.

We start learning about fajin when we start developing the sense of qi moving through our bodies as we do the solo form and our qigong/zhan zhuang exercises.  The Tai Chi Classics say that the energy comes from the root, which is in the feet (in other words, bracing against the ground); it's developed by the legs, controlled by the “waist,” delivered by the spine, then expressed by the hands - by which we also imply the wrist, arms, elbows and shoulders. The opposite is true too - when we do Rollback or the first half of Push, we accept or borrow energy from our opponent through the hands, send it down the waist and into the legs and feet. This is all part of the yin/yang relationship we enter into with our partner when we do Push-hands.  Practicing mindfully and paying attention to how we’re moving externally and how we feel internally deepens our understanding of the passage in the Classics.

Over time, and with focused effort, we begin to actively coordinate our movements so they carry this qi efficiently from its origin through its energy point to our intended target.  The “energy point” is the place on our bodies where our qi is “issued” to an opponent or an inanimate object.  It can be our hands (or a discrete part of our hands), our wrists, elbows, shoulders, knees or feet.  Fajin can also be expressed in terms of joint locks and throws.

There are a few techniques in the tai chi expression of fajin that we don’t spend much time on in the early stages of our tai chi journey.  They’re unnecessary at the beginning; the student isn’t ready for them, and bringing them up would only lead to confusion.  But many of you have already done them in class.  If you’ve done “13 Luohan qigong,” you’ve at least been exposed to the additional techniques – they have mostly to do with centering and rooting, and with the two vocalizations “hen” and “ha,” which we'll discuss in class.  The rest is the repeated practice of coordinating our movements to efficiently move qi from one place to the other as we’ve discussed before.  

The best way to understand tai chi fajin is to see what it looks like.  Unfortunately, good videos of Yang style players expressing fajin are hard to find, and a great many of the rest are silly showmanship.  The video below is the least showy example I can find, and the presenter is showing Chen style.  But the essentials are the same and what he’s doing translates well into how a Yang player would express fajin – there isn’t much difference.

I used the image of a cannon going off because it’s a good metaphor for fajin.  In this metaphor, the crew is the mind or the intent, the powder is the qi, the barrel is the path the qi takes through our bodies as it is accelerated toward the muzzle, and the projectile is the jin expressed in a strike, a push, a throw or whatever we’re up to.  Like all metaphors, it’s imperfect and liable to picking apart (“But what about the deflection and elevation?  Is the Fire Direction Center part of the Shen? Is an open-hand strike more like an impact fuze or a proximity fuze? Is fajin armor-piercing or High Explosive?  What about shrapnel? Where’s the Battery Commander in all this?” and other such inanities), but we should know better.  You could use the metaphor of archery or slings or any other projectile weapon.  Doesn't matter.

My experience has been that the best way to learn fajin as we express it in Yang style is to explore the concept in the “laboratory” of qigong (the 13 Luohan is especially good for this); once grasped, I can begin to inculcate it in my tai chi, still keeping the Ten Essential Principles uppermost in mind.  I’ve always said that qigong is the laboratory or “playground” where we can explore with fewer boundaries, whereas tai chi is more about getting things as right as possible.  In this way, the two practices – qigong and tai chi – complement and inform each other.

We shouldn’t spend too much time on fajin or “fast work,” relative to slow solo form and push-hands work.  Slow work allows us to focus on details, discover subtleties, enhance our ting jin, "lock in" how things feel and gain new understanding.  In doing too much fajin or "fast work, it’s far too easy to let bad habits creep in.   

Originally, tai chi didn’t have a form we’d recognize as such; or if it did, we don’t know what it looked like.  But we do know fajin was practiced with repetitions of single postures/transitions or combinations of no more than two or three.  I see no good reason to deviate from this traditional approach.  Ultimately, doing too much fajin or “fast work” ends up turning what should be a powerful internal martial art into a mediocre external one.  So even once we get good at fajin, we shouldn’t do all that much of it.

A more advanced technique in fajin – one common to almost all martial arts everywhere the world over – might best be called “compressing.”  This technique is similar to one I’ve talked about which Josh Waitzkin refers to as “Making Smaller Circles.”  It refers to generating fajin (or indeed doing anything in tai chi) in ever-smaller increments of space and/or time.  This, however, is going to take its own post – stay tuned.

Chinese Internal Alchemy and the Sanbao

 

One of my goals in teaching tai chi and qigong is to de-mystify the arts.  If you’ve followed this blog, you’ve by now noted the emphasis on making tai chi and qigong understandable and accessible.  The Masters of the arts are quite matter-of-fact about them; and where their language appears to veer off into the mystical, it often makes more sense when we understand that they’re speaking within the context of Chinese culture.  None of tai chi’s earliest Grandmasters ever left China, and they knew about as much of the world outside their own culture as the average American knows about the world around them today – in other words, a hodge-podge mix of fact, fairy-tale and outright codswallop.

In discussing the topic of “Chinese Internal Alchemy,” I run the very real risk of undermining every single effort I’ve undertaken in pulling back the obscuring veils of Orientalist mysticism.  Just using the word “alchemy” in a sentence in the 21^st century conjures up images of Aleister Crowley, Madame Blavatsky, and Legions of misguided occultists or manipulative charlatans.  You’re liable to think I’ve got a Ouija board and a hooded cloak stuffed in the trunk where I keep the striking pads and “loaner” shoes at class.  I’m acknowledging this hazard not only for my own benefit (to help me keep focused) but also as a way of begging your indulgence.  Trust me - we won’t be dealing in potions or incantations, and any lingering ghosts we can’t just ignore will be unceremoniously banished. 

Much of the work, therefore, of discussing Chinese Internal Alchemy involves something philosophically similar to mucking out a stable.  There’s a lot of manure to pitch before you get to anything useful.  Again, I beg your indulgence.

I’ve written before about the fact that while a great deal of the “muck” in the stable of Chinese martial arts (and Chinese culture generally) is the result of Western Orientalism and cultural ignorance, the Chinese themselves have deposited their fair share as well.  Chinese Internal Alchemy is interwoven with Chinese cosmology, philosophy, history, folk religion, traditions whose true meaning are lost to time – just like us.  Everyone, everywhere, believes a certain amount of unexamined nonsense, each according to their own cultures.

Starting off at a baseline we should all be able to agree on, Wikipedia has this to say about Chinese Internal Alchemy:
“Chinese alchemy is an ancient Chinese scientific and technological approach to alchemy, a part of the larger tradition of Taoist body-spirit cultivation developed from the traditional Chinese understanding of medicine and the body.”
This is an inoffensive definition, if somewhat unsatisfying and incomplete.  To say it another way, it’s the foundation of traditional Chinese medical practices like acupuncture, massage, pharmacy, diet, exercise (qigong is considered an intrinsic element) and so on.

Without going into details which are beyond my grasp, it can perhaps best be understood in the following manner:  Western medicine tends, as a rule, to consider a healthy person as one who is free of disease or injury.  Traditional Chinese medicine tends, as a rule, to consider a healthy person as one who lives well, which includes not only the absence of disease or injury but also includes wholesome and beneficial practices and habits. 

The previous paragraph is a nearly unfair oversimplification.  Western medicine also contemplates “healthy lifestyle” practices as being essentially necessary; while for its part, Chinese medicine has a fair bit of what can only be described as quackery.  For example, while I can accept that acupuncture works, without fully understanding why it works, I also think the use of bear bile, tiger bones and rhinoceros horn as treatment for ailments is ridiculous and beastly.  More sympathetically, Western medicine excels at treating acute conditions, where Chinese medicine tends to return good results on long-term and chronic problems.  There are other fundamental differences between Western “biomedicine” and Traditional Chinese Medicine, but these need not be gone into, except to direct the interested reader to “The Web That Has No Weaver,” which is as good a primer as any ever written.

When people talk about qigong and tai chi being “healing,” I’m not always sure what they mean.  When I think of “healing” in the context of qigong, tai chi and Chinese medicine more generally, I think of it as undoing the decades of self-abuse, neglect, bad habits that started out as expediency, wear-and-tear from work or family life; learning to pay attention to what our bodies tell us, and re-learning how to move and live the way we were designed/evolved to live.  In this sense, Chinese Internal Alchemy has much to teach us.

There is much about Chinese Internal Alchemy that I don’t know and much more that I don’t completely understand.  The one concept I think I have a reasonable grasp on – one which we as tai chi players can actually put to use in our daily lives – is that of the “Sanbao” or “Three Treasures.”  It is this, the Sanbao, which will take up the remainder of this blog post.

The names for the “Sanbao” or “Three Treasures” are jing, qi and shen, translating (roughly) into Essence, Energy and Spirit or Mind.  We’ll look at each of them in turn; and in doing so, we’ll use two allegories to help communicate the concepts: a candle and a car.

Jing
Look up the word jing and very often you will find that the Chinese translate it as…well…um…. This is a (mostly) family-friendly blog, so let’s just say that certain Chinese think of jing as: “Half of what goes into making a baby; specifically, Dad’s contribution.”  

I find this definition altogether unsatisfactory.  First, I believe it's likely a corruption or "garbled transmission" based on dialect, region and ignorance. Second, and following from this, there’s a lot of unscientific hogwash wrapped up in the definition, none of which needs to be discussed further.  But most importantly, it’s chauvinistic in a way that goes beyond mere social conventions.  With few exceptions, most of which are “legendary,” martial arts in China were primarily male-oriented undertakings up until the very late Qing dynasty.  In the context of the Sanbao, the existence of excellent female martial artists is either acknowledged without comment or the subject is talked around – at least that’s my understanding.  We will not discuss this woefully inadequate definition any further.

Other sources – the ones I pay attention to – consider jing or “Essence” as the unique quality of a thing in itself.  In other words, it's the “chairness” of a chair, the “fishness” of a fish, the "houseness" of a house the “youness” of you, and so on.   

Going to our allegorical comparisons, the “candleness” of a candle is the wax and wick, the match, lighter or other source of ignition, and its capacity to give off light and heat.  The “carness” of a car consists of the various raw materials the car is made of, as well as those materials in their finished-and-assembled form (this includes the quality of the materials and the construction); its design, the fluids and chemicals which propel and lubricate it, its capacity to move people and things here-and-there efficiently and safely, and so on.  The “youness” of you is your physical body, the food, drink and medicine that keeps you around, your education, formal and informal, your experience, your inclinations, aptitudes, skills, talents and limitations, your personality, beliefs and consciousness – everything that makes you a unique human being.

Maintaining jing in a candle is simple – don’t let it melt before you need it, keep the wick long enough to light, and keep the matches dry.  Maintaining the jing of a car involves routine maintenance and repair, using the correct fluids and the right sized battery, not wrapping it around light poles or dashing it against concrete barricades, not leaving it neglected to rust and rot in our driveways and so on.  Maintaining your own jing contemplates everything from proper diet, rest and exercise, good hygiene, healthy relationships, going to the quacks when you need to, and mental/emotional/spiritual “fitness.”

Qi
If jing is the “thingness” of things and the “youness” of you – which includes their essential functions – then qi is the that by which these essential functions are carried out.  The qi of a candle is the chemical energy in the wick and wax, activated by the input of heat from the match or lighter.  The amount of qi in the candle is determined by how much wax is in it and how long the wick is.  The qi of the car is the output of the engine, translated into the speed it can go, the alacrity with which it can stop, its roadkeeping, its responsiveness and its feedback to the driver.  The amount of qi in the car is determined by the normal life-span of its component parts, the ordinary wear-and-tear of operating it, the attendance to or neglect of maintenance and repair, and whether we drive like “grandma on her way to church” or “Dale Earnhardt on Turn 4 at Daytona.”  Our qi is our ability to move and function, to perceive and interpret, to think, feel, interact and communicate, etc.  The amount of our qi is determined by our genetics, the wholesomeness of our food and drink, our lifestyle (extremes in any direction are harmful), the quality of our relationships, the degree to which we are mentally/emotionally/spiritually “resilient” or “brittle” and so on.

Everything and everyone has a more-or-less fixed amount of qi; and when that amount is used up, the thing or the person ceases to exist physically.  When the candle’s qi is exhausted, we say it’s burnt out.  When the car’s qi is exhausted, we say it’s wrecked or trashed.  When we run out of qi, we die.  This is the natural state of all things – creation, existence, cessation – but by “cultivating” qi, we can extend the useful life of the candle, the car and ourselves.

We “cultivate” the qi of the candle by putting it out when we don’t need it and only lighting one end.  We cultivate the qi of our car by good maintenance and safe, moderate driving.  We cultivate our own qi by:
o subsisting on something better than a steady diet of Little-Debbies, Big Macs and Red Bull on the one hand, or pseudo-scientific fad-diets on the other;
o finding a happy middle-ground between shiftless sloth on the one hand and “fast-lane” burnout on the other;
o having healthy relationships at work, home and elsewhere (neither being a people-pleasing doormat on the one hand nor a standoffish misanthrope on the other);
o neither being a hypochondriac on the one hand nor a pigheaded sufferer on the other;
o finding some happy middle-ground between the extremes of indolence/hyperactivity, melancholy/ecstasy, and nihilism/zealotry
In other words, the “balance” we’re all striving toward in our tai chi and qigong.

Shen
Speaking broadly, shen can be thought of as an “ultimate purpose” – why does a thing or a person exist?  The shen of a candle isn’t merely to consume itself – its ultimate purpose is to provide light and/or heat.  The shen of a car isn’t just to go fast and stop quickly – its ultimate purpose is to get us and our stuff from where we are now to where we want to be.

What is the shen of a human life?  That’s where philosophy comes in, and it’s also where I exercise self-discipline and throw most of it out.  Allan Watts gave perhaps the most universal and succinct definition of shen (perhaps not even knowing he did it) by saying that the purpose of life is to live it.  We are offered the opportunity of richness of experience, to live a full, meaningful, purposeful life, however we may define it.  By acknowledging jing and maintaining qi, we are better enabled to exercise our own shen as we see fit.

_________________________ 

And this is what brings us back to tai chi and qigong.  The shen in tai chi and qigong is intimately bound up in jing (essence) and qi (energy).  By self-audit, we understand jing.  By exploring and working with jing, we discover and understand qi.  By tempering and training and mastering our qi, we exercise shen – not only within the confines of the class, but within the context of tai chi (the martial art) and qigong (self-mastery, health and vitality), and ultimately better fit ourselves for fulfilling our own “ultimate purpose.”