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.
