Wuji

 

You’ve heard me talk at length about what I call “the Wuji posture,” or the beginning posture in the Form.  I use this name, despite there being a different name for it in the form.  In the form it’s called 预 备 and it’s pronounced “Yu Bei.”  It means “Prepare.” 

 

You’ve also heard me say “Wuji has a translation, but it isn’t really worth going into it too deeply.”  This is true enough for the beginning student, who still doesn’t know where their hands & feet go without being told.  But once we get to a certain level, digging deeper into the meaning and intent becomes worth the effort.

 

“Wuji” is a word whose definition superficially makes little sense.  Don’t bother looking it up in Google Translate – it will tell you these characters together translate to “promise;” this might be true in an idiomatic reading of Chinese, but in our context makes no sense.  Where we’re concerned, the two characters together (Wu 無 or “without” and Ji 極 “ridgepole” or “polarity”) make more sense in their literal meanings.  “Without polarity” is as good a place to start as any.

 

It is at this point our imagination can easily get carried away with itself.  We can infer from “without polarity” such synonyms as stillness, one-ness, unity, wholeness and so on.  If we know anything about Chinese cosmology, we could also say it means “non-nothingness,” “un-being,” “zero-and-infinity simultaneously,” “Nirvana” and all kinds of other concepts, some more meaningful than others.  To a degree, Wuji means all these things.  But we as tai chi players do well when we distill it into a useful concept, and not waste our time in pointless navel-gazing.

 

A practical way of thinking of the concept of Wuji – over and beyond the details of the posture itself – is shown in the image below:

 

Stillness (Wuji) then Motion (Taiji) then Differentiation (Taijitu)

The “Wuji position” is therefore the motionless moment before we start moving, and before we start differentiating our movements into Yin & Yang and from thence into their different energies and applications.  But like Tai chi, it’s more than just the motion.  It also applies to our mental and emotional states.

 

What does it mean to be “mentally & emotionally motionless” in the context of tai chi?  Here we can use the passage in the Classics defining tai chi as “open, rounded and extended” as a convenient guide.

 

Mentally “open” means attentive both to what’s going on physically inside us and awareness of our environment.  “Rounded” implies non-rigid, non-linear and non-judgmental thinking, and “extended” implies actively sensing and considering possibilities, without expectation – in other words, the opposite of “withdrawing into one’s thoughts.”.

 

Emotionally, “open” means an active (i.e. not passive or fatalistic) acceptance of the present moment and acknowledgement of how we feel physically and emotionally. “Rounded” implies equanimity and a healthy detachment from desire and aversion, and “extended” implies connecting to one’s partner or opponent or, if doing the solo form, with the intent of the postures/transitions – in other words, the opposite of “dissociation.”

 

You’ve seen me write that I consider this symbol to better represent tai chi than the more common yin/yang figure we’re all familiar with:

I say this because that “void” in the center points to an element of “wuji” that is (or ought to be) inside us while we’re doing the form.  This is in keeping with the 10^th Essential Principle “Seek Stillness in Motion.”  One of the more wonderful quirks of human consciousness is our uncanny ability to be fully engaged in an activity, and strangely detached at the same time.  If you’ve ever had the sensation of “watching yourself do something,” you know the feeling.  I don’t know if other creatures can achieve this – if they can, they’re not telling.  But while we’ve accidentally felt this on occasion, in tai chi we’re actively trying to achieve this mental state – being fully engaged and yet simultaneously detached.  It’s different from doing the form absent-mindedly.

 

Ultimately, “Wuji” should be thought of as a jargon-word referring to a state of physical, mental and emotional stillness we assume in order to prepare to do tai chi, and a state we try to maintain while doing the form or in partner work.

“What is the ‘REAL’ tai chi?”

 

A few years ago there was a discussion among the contributing members of a forum on the Yang Family Tai Chi website that attempted to answer the question, “What is the ‘REAL’ tai chi?”  In other words, what did the tai chi of its founder, Yang Luchan, look like?  A lively debate followed (It’s the internet, after all), but the matter remained unresolved – the participants each tended to stick with their ideas.

We can only approximate an answer – Yang Luchan left no writings of his own.  We know the following about him:  he learned Chen style tai chi at Chenjiagou (“Chen Family Village”), and became very good at it.  He got a job teaching martial arts to the Imperial Palace Guards, and then adapted it by slowing it down, the better to teach others besides soldiers.  His sons carried on the tradition and one of them, Yang Banhou, first wrote “Explaining Taiji Principles” sometime around 1875.  There are older texts, such as the “Salt Shop Manual.”  But the books – much like this blog – aren’t manuals in the sense of “How To,” so much as they’re discussions of the underlying principles.  It wasn’t until Yang Chengfu (Yang Jianhou’s son) that Yang tai chi took its present form and we started seeing “How To” manuals with photos and illustrations.

Depending on what legend you believe, the “original” tai chi was either a REALLY long form with more than 300 postures, many of which are now forgotten; or it was no “form” at all, but rather the postures we’d recognize (more or less), performed in a variety of combinations.  There are some obscure forms of Yang family style that claim to be “secret” or “inner family” or “original” styles. 

Underlying all such styles (and most Asian martial arts more generally) is the premise that what passes for tai chi nowadays is a shadow of its former self.  Such thinking is not unique to martial arts – Chuang Tzu and Confucius both mention “the ancients” as being morally and philosophically superior to the people of their own times.  Nor is it unique to China – Aristotle and whoever wrote Ecclesiastes both groused about how things were better “back in the old days.”  And within modern Stoicism, the philosophical tradition I try to follow, considerable energy is expended (I’d say wasted) in asking whether this-or-that idea or thought is in keeping with what the tradition’s creators had in mind. 

One of the “Old Stoic Masters,” Seneca the Younger, had quite a bit to say on how to treat one’s slaves.  This is completely incompatible with modern thinking.  Likewise, his thoughts on women have no place in contemporary Western society.  In an online discussion, one woman asked if we shouldn’t re-translate his work to fit modern society.  While acknowledging the fact that we’ve moved on from many of the concepts that were day-to-day reality for him, I suggested it may be best to leave his writing and thinking as it stands, and either accept, modify or outright discard it as we each see fit.  Remember, I told her, that Seneca and other Romans were building on the Stoicism of Greeks like Zeno; if they thought it was perfectly acceptable to build on, adapt, improve or modify the foundation others laid down, what’s stopping us?  I told her, in short, to write her own book.

I tell this story because it’s the same approach I have to tai chi, both learning it and teaching it.  It’s one thing to venerate “the ancients” and be profoundly grateful for their wisdom and effort.  This is healthy and encourages a rational humility; if I'm going to change something, I'd better have a VERY good reason why.  It’s another thing altogether to turn the founders into plaster saints and their art into an inflexible exercise in orthodoxy.  This stifles growth and leads to what more than one martial arts master has referred to as a "dead art.

 In the same sense that my Stoic philosophy has to adapt and change to fit in the modern world (yet still preserving the foundational principles), the foundations of tai chi can and ought to be built upon, adapted, improved or modified.

Philosophically, I think I’m on pretty defensible terrain.  The descendants of Yang Luchan - particularly Yang Chengfu - did precisely this.  Yang Jun himself has made no secret of the fact that his expression of tai chi is influenced not only by his grandfather’s teaching, but also by his degree in physical education.  Yang Jun is not only building on and improving how tai chi is taught, but also how tai chi is done, and this is noble & admirable.

You’ve seen me say here and you’ve probably heard me say in class that my goal as a teacher is to get my students to a point where they need a better teacher than I am.  I sincerely hope my students get better at the art than me.  How can the art grow and improve otherwise?  Keeping the idea of a "growing and improving art" in mind, I find the question of “What is the ‘REAL’ tai chi?” trivial to the point of meaninglessness. 

The “REAL” tai chi is what you create with your effort in class and your practice & study at home.  If it doesn’t look like anything Yang Luchan would recognize as such, so what?  As long as we adhere to its Essential Principles, which haven’t materially changed in nearly 200 years, there doesn’t seem to be much point to orthodoxy, unless it has something useful to teach us.

The statues in the image above are cool to look at, but our art itself isn't set in stone like they are.

Expression

 When you see someone “doing tai chi,” the verb for what they’re up to is often “performing.”  This is certainly what we do when we’re learning the form.  It’s like choreography; the tai chi player is doing what they’ve been taught to do, and doing this the best they can.  After a while, though – when the form itself is familiar, when we don’t have to be told what to do next, and when we’ve begun to understand the energy and applications, “performing” isn’t such a good word. 

 

A better word for what we’re up to at this stage is “expressing.”  We’re expressing how we feel, how the energy is moving through us, how we interpret what a given posture/transition means to us at that moment - you've heard me say I don't do "Cloud Hands" the same way twice in the form.  It’s a good word for what the form looks like when we’re competent and comfortable in it.  I prefer the term “competence” over “mastery” because the latter word is loaded with extra meanings, and because in a real sense, learning to “express” the form is itself a step toward mastery.  Expression comes first.

 

Over the last few years, I’ve shared images and videos of several Masters expressing the form.  Some, like Yang Chengfu and Chen Weiming, were photographed but never filmed; and those before Yang Chengfu were never photographed.  Some of the Masters were more apprehensive about being filmed than others.  We are told Yang Zhenduo was reluctant to be filmed, because he understood that the film would simply show how he felt and expressed the form on that day and at that moment, but future students would consider it "The Video of Record" and attempt to copy him as exactly as possible.  This reluctance on the part of Yang Zhenduo shows his wisdom in understanding both the art itself and his role as Grandmaster and Lineage Holder. 

 

When we watch a Master expressing the form or study photographs – whether it be of the Traditional “Long” Form, a shorter one within the Yang curriculum or one he came up with himself – we do well to take a number of things into account:

 

The age of the Master
There are but few films of Fu Zhongwen expressing the form – perhaps no more than three, and they were all made toward the later part of his life.  Same goes for the films of Cheng Manching.  Compare their expressions to those of Yang Jun or Yang Zhenduo when he was younger; or even one of Yang Zhenduo at a younger and a more senior age. 

 

The state of the art at the time
One of the privileges of the Grandmaster – one we don’t talk about much but it’s there nonetheless – is that of interpreting the legacy he’s been given, as he sees fit to interpret it.  Tai chi has always evolved, grown and transformed, within the context of the Ten Essential Principles and the nature of martial arts generally.

 

What the Master wanted to communicate
This is a difficult thing to puzzle out, especially if we don’t spend much time reading what this-or-that Master has said about the art.  Nearly all the Lineage Holders left a written account of their thoughts on the art, and it’s important to read them – tai chi is a thinking person’s martial art.  I submit that these records are at the very least complementary to the films and photos, and in many ways superior, simply because we can’t always know what the Master had in mind in filming.  Some, like Yang Chengfu, Yang Zhenduo or Yang Jun, understood they were preparing study materials their students would scrutinize.   

 

Some films may have simply been aids-to-memory and not a “video of record.”  Cheng Manching’s most widely-viewed video of his 37-posture form has this sense to it.  Superficially the form appears languid compared to others.  A shallow, discourteous critic might go so far as to say it looked careless or lazy.  But look more closely – you’ll see very clearly that every last one of the Ten Essential Principles is perfectly expressed – only without the outward power of Yang Chengfu, the effortless grace of Yang Zhenduo, the liveliness of Choy Hok Pang or the thoughtful precision of Yang Jun.  And that may well have been all he cared to communicate in the film – he may well have considered anything else to be something best taught in class or discovered by the student themselves.

 

This last point deserves a bit of expansion.  Anyone who’s been in a tai chi class has learned that there’s a lot to know about the art – you simply can’t learn tai chi from imitating what you see on a video.  No teacher can teach another student just by preparing a video; no matter how high-quality the video or the instruction in it, the teacher can’t see what the student is doing.  Trying to teach tai chi exclusively by video is about as futile as trying to teach Pacific Islanders ballroom dancing over a shortwave radio.

 

Take a look at this composite photo of seven Masters, all doing Brush Left Knee and Push:

In it we see, from left-to-right:
Yang Chengfu
Chen Weiming
Fu Zhongwen
Cheng Manching
Choy Hok Pang
Yang Zhenduo
Yang Jun

 

They’re all doing the same thing, but there’s something different and unique to each.  Each of them is “right” and none of them is in any way “wrong.”  Each has something to teach us, but only one of the men in this composite is still alive to say what he’s up to in it.  Each – whether part of a photo series or part of a film or video – becomes clearer when we read what the Masters had to say about the art.  Each is a reflection of how a given Master expressed his tai chi on that day and at that moment.  We owe it to them, to their legacy and to ourselves, to understand the nature of these visual documents, and what they do and don’t show.