This is make-believe. We can’t do this.
[NB. In laying out what follows, I run the risk of robbing tai chi of some of its enchantment for the student and reader. I make no apologies for this. Orientalism may make some of the more unfamiliar aspects of Chinese culture appear alluringly exotic and alien, but it also gets in the way of real understanding. The reader may also begin to see how the serious study of Chinese martial arts can lead to topics like Chinese history, culture, philosophy and so on. It really is a rabbit-hole, but a rewarding one to fall down.]
Any
activity has its own unique language which will be more-or-less meaningless to
those not undertaking it. For example,
the only reason I know that “purl” is a knitting stitch is because I went and
looked it up.
Tai chi is no different. However, it has
the added challenges that much of this jargon is in a different language, and
that language just happens to be Chinese.
Chinese is tough for many reasons. First
of course is the fact that it isn’t written out the same way as alphabet-type
languages like English, Italian, Vietnamese or Korean. It’s difficult to puzzle out the meanings of
Chinese words from the characters themselves – you have to have some facility
with the language already before this is possible.
Chinese can be phonetically spelled out, but this presents its own
problems. Writing Chinese words in Latin
alphabets – a process known as “Romanization” – typically follows two spelling
conventions: Wade-Giles and
“pinyin.” Wade-Giles is the creation of
two Englishmen in the 1800s, and pinyin was developed by the Chinese themselves
starting around the 1950s or so.
Wade-Giles has gradually fallen out of fashion in favor of what the
Chinese prefer, but you’ll still see both.
Take for example the name of our art. Tai
chi is a simplification of the Wade-Giles form t’ai chi, and the
pinyin form is taiji. They all
mean the same thing and are pronounced the same. The long form of the art we learn is Yang
jia tai chi chuan/taiji quan which means “Yang family tai chi fist” or “Yang
family tai chi boxing.”
This points toward another challenge in translating Chinese words. Many Chinese words have “clusters” of meanings,
and you have to pick out the correct meaning from the context. We have this in English too. Take the following sentence:
My cool friend and I went to a cool bar on a cool day and enjoyed a cool
drink while a cool band played, but the bassist broke a string and almost lost
his cool, but my friend said “You need to cool down?” and the bassist said “Nah,
it’s cool.”
You didn’t need any help picking
out the correct meaning for all the times I used “cool” in the sentence – you
did it automatically in your head. Well,
Chinese is basically a whole language full of this – it's highly contextual. In the above case, chuan/quan has a
cluster of meanings all related to fighting with empty hands. Tai chi chuan/taiji quan therefore
means “tai chi boxing” or “tai chi empty-hand fighting.” We oftentimes take the word chuan/quan
out in order to de-emphasize the martial nature of the art, or sometimes just
for brevity’s sake. On the other hand, it will almost always be used if the intent is to distinguish empty-hand tai chi/taiji from
the forms using swords, as in tai chi dao (tai chi sabre) or tai chi
jian (tai chi straight-sword).
The word “chi” often causes confusion too.
The sound “chi” means a WHOLE LOT of different things. In tai chi/taiji, the sound means
“ultimate.” You’ll sometimes see tai
chi chuan translated as “supreme ultimate boxing,” but this is a
mistranslation. Tai chi/taiji is
its own word with its own meaning, which we’ll discuss in a future post.
Back to that “chi” word. You’ll hear chi/qi
(note the different pinyin spelling) referred to in many martial arts, as well
as in the word qigong. This word – chi/qi – is pronounced
almost the same as the chi/ji in tai chi/taiji, but they are
unrelated. It has a cluster of meanings
related to breath, air, internal energy, energy-just-generally, and so on. Again, we have to puzzle out the
context.
In martial arts, chi/qi is a sort of untranslated shorthand for all the types of "energy" a person can draw on within themselves to perform a physical task. It's a term with similarities to Western concepts such as “vital force” or
“metabolism,” but there are differences. Like
“vital force” and “metabolism,” chi/qi is unitless – you can’t say
“so-and-so has this many units of qi.”
It doesn’t work like that – it’s not a life-bar like in Mortal Kombat. It’s closely related to the chi/qi in
Chinese Internal Alchemy, a part of Traditional Chinese Medicine, which we’ll
also discuss in the future.
If you look at any martial artist – it could be a jujitsu or aikido player
throwing an opponent, a karate player crushing a brick, a muay thai player
kicking someone in the face, a tai chi player effortlessly tossing someone away
– you could describe what they’re doing in a couple of ways. You could use Western scientific and
engineering principles, breaking each action down to a series of force vectors, points of mechanical advantage, centers of gravity, moments-of-torque, Newtons and
kilograms-per-square-centimeter, and so on.
You’d have a huge volume of data on the throw or the punch or the kick,
but it wouldn’t tell you a bloomin’ thing about how it was done. It’s similar to the saying that explaining a
joke is like dissecting a frog – you can do it, but the frog (and the joke)
tends to die in the process.
Or you could simply say the player used his or her qi effectively, and
then go on to explain exactly how. In
this case, the less scientifically-rigorous term turns out to be more
descriptive.
It’s worth taking a moment to lay out what chi/qi is not. It’s not “The Force.” It’s not some all-pervading life-energy that
high-level players can manipulate at will or toss at people like we’re
Airbenders or Jedi Knights. It’s not a
magical force-field that allows adepts to block a punch or a kick with just
their will.
This misunderstanding is partly-but-not-completely a Western New-Age
corruption and commingling of several disparate concepts in Chinese medicine,
philosophy, folklore and martial arts. You’ll
sometimes hear credulous Westerners (I know several) who hold such a belief
about chi/qi – I remember one former classmate alluding to “chi-balls”
and once told me “I can feel your chi is somewhat diminished today.” The truth is I’d been stuck in traffic and
was shaking off the rough commute to class, but he thought it was my “chi aura”
or some such mumbo-jumbo.
I said “partly-but-not-completely” because Chinese culture has many
legends of warriors, magicians, beasts or bandits, and their magical
“chi” manipulation has worked its way into these legends. China has an idealized past very much like our
“Wild West” and fairy tales identical in nature to our own.
What’s more, the history of Chinese martial arts is intimately connected
with other aspects of folk culture like street theater/busking, religion and so
on. It’s quite challenging, even for
Chinese historians, to separate the various interwoven elements, and
trying to separate them is sometimes just not worth the effort.
But in the context of our martial art, the Grandmasters who wrote about "qi projection" are remarkably matter-of-fact and consistent. Regarding the claims of magic chi-balls,
force-fields and the like, the few Masters who have anything to say about it all (most don't even touch the subject) tend
to adopt a position similar to Bertrand Russel’s analogy of the teapot orbiting
the sun directly opposite Earth; it might exist, but no credible
evidence has ever been shown for it and the odds are strongly against it.
Another way of saying this is that the real experts in tai chi are at best "politely dismissive" of the idea.
Chi/qi is nothing more than the sum of all the various kinds of energy
(biochemical, kinetic, potential etc.) inside us at any given moment. We will discuss this concept in class, what
it means and how to cultivate/maintain it, but we won’t waste valuable
class-time tossing chi-balls around like we’re in some avant-garde
Berlin pantomime. My former classmate actually tried
this with a few other students, and it looked just as silly as it sounds. When referring to the outwardly-expressed
energy in things like punches, kicks, throws and the like, the Chinese have a
separate term – they call it jin and it is somewhat more narrowly
defined – we’ll go over this at length in class too.
Here are a few “jargon” terms you're bound to hear me drop in class; fortunately, most instruction in tai chi can remain in English, and I'll usually-but-not-always use the English terms for these jargon-words.
- Lao Gong (often mispronounced “logon”): acupressure point in center of palm
- Yong Quan: “Bubbling Well” acupressure point behind ball of foot
- Dantien: usu. Refers to center of gravity slightly below navel
- Qi: All the available energy in our bodies (not “the Force!”)
- Tui Shou (pronounced “TWEE show”) “Push-hands” or interaction with a partner – we’ll always use the English term but you may hear this.
- Jin: Expressed energy of any different types (e.g., Fajin, Ting Jin, Peng Jin etc.)
- Peng (pronounced “pung”) or Peng Jin: Warding-off energy
- Liu (pronounced “lee-ou”): Rollback – a yielding-neutralizing-and-redirecting movement
- Ji (pronounced “gee”): Press – a focused push on a small area
- An: Push – an “uprooting” energy on a large object/whole body
- Cai (pronounced “tsai”): Pluck – a pulling off-balance
- Lie (pronounced “lyeh”): Split – any of several opening-out movements
- Zhou (pronounced “Joe”): Elbow strike
-
Kao:
Shoulder strike/Body check – like shoving a piece of furniture or "checking" a hockey player "into the boards."
