Lost in Translation

You’ve heard me say in class, “Don’t get hung up on the words.”  In one of my earlier posts, I discussed the tendency of words in tai chi to be “jargon” – ordinary words used out of (or only barely related to) their original context. 

It happens in English all the time.  To take just one example from my own profession, the word “transit” can mean either a very specific method of measuring angles, or the instrument for doing it.  But it can also mean (to the non-surveyor) a route, the act of traveling along the route, or a change from one perspective or paradigm to another.  “Engineer” is another example.  It can mean the operator of a locomotive, a licensed professional who designs anything from cars to bridges to sewer systems to electronics to construction sites, the act of doing so, or colloquially, just making anything clever or complicated.

Using ordinary words out-of-context happens a lot in tai chi; in addition, dialect and regionalisms may rob the jargon-word of any connection with the meaning its originator intended.  The martial artist Xiang Kairan discussed this in his treatise on tai chi, and noted how it was a problem even within China – how much more vexing and troublesome it becomes when that jargon-word is taken out of its own language and culture!

Xiang gives many examples.  A very good example is our early cluster of moves we call “Grasp the Bird’s Tail.”  The Chinese for this is 拦雀尾, lán què wěi.  It sounds similar (to the Chinese) to 懶札衣 lǎn zhá yī or “Lazily Tying Coat,” which is what Chen and Sun style call the same group of movements (at least I think they do – it’s sometimes hard to make meaningful comparisons).

An example of how ordinary Chinese words are used as jargon in tai chi is the word 掤 or péng, “Ward-off.”  If you look the character up, you’ll find it pronounced bīng and that it refers to an arrow quiver and nothing else.

Our move 单鞭, dān biān “Single Whip” has an ambiguity in it.  The word 鞭 or biān can refer to a whip like Indiana Jones uses, but it can also refer to a metal chain-type weapon and also to a cane.

In yesterday’s class, a brief discussion occurred around the meaning of the phrase “separation kick.”  The student who brought it up thought the word “separation” had to do with the intent of the kick, i.e. that the kick was meant to separate something from something else. 

Going to the first example of the term in print that I can find (“Essence and Applications of Yang Family Taijiquan” by Yang Chengfu), it’s referred to as 左右分脚.  This translates into zuǒyòu fēn jiǎo, literally “right/left separate foot” or in context, “right and left separation kick.”  The character 分 or fēn has a large cluster of meanings, the relevant ones being “part/partition/separate/divide” and so on. 

So far so good.

For his part, Grandmaster Yang Jun says the “separation kick” refers simply to a kick done with the top of the foot, as opposed to the heel.  Being the Grandmaster (and a vastly better Chinese speaker/reader than I), I tend to take his understanding as definitive.  From this I interpret the character 分 as a jargon-word that merely refers to the type of kick, in terms of its shape or appearance, irrespective of the player’s intention for it.

We could go on and on, but these examples all point in the same direction, to wit:  That when we try to discern the meaning of the movement from it’s translated name, we’ll be very lucky if we get close to an approximation.  In the examples above, it’s usually a lot of time invested for not much gain.

This is not the same thing as saying the names just don’t stand much looking into.  That’s not true either.  As I said yesterday and several times before, we can discern a few things from the tendencies in the names:
o If a posture’s name is straightforward (i.e. “Twin Fists Strike the Ears”), the intended purpose is also typically straightforward.
o If a posture’s name is ambiguous, evocative or poetic (“Cloud Hands”), it’s likely to have many intended purposes.

This is similar (and perhaps related) to the tendency that if a move is done only once in the form, it usually only has one relatively straightforward or uncommon use, but if we do it often, it’s either much more fundamental or more multi-purpose.

Tai chi is very much a thinking person’s martial art. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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.