Talkin' retirees blues

Almost a year ago, my qigong friend Debra Doubleyou asked me if I would speak to a group of retired staff at Large State University about taiji. She had given a talk there, and they asked her to recommend someone, so I said sure, I'll do it. The nice lady at LSU emailed me, I sent her my information, and months went by. Finally, a few days before the event, I decided I'd better put something down on paper so I don't stammer aimlessly through the appointed hour, and it turned out to be an interesting challenge: what to tell people that they haven't heard before, and not put them to sleep right after lunch?

Well today was the day. The meeting room was all set up, and I even ran into a couple of my professors from graduate school in the lobby on the way in. To my surprise, I kind of enjoyed giving this little talk-and-participation on a subject that I care about, therefore, since recycling is socially responsible, I thought I would (com)post it here:

Good afternoon. I’d like to talk about taiji in three strands, or ways of approaching a practice – different strands that cross and intertwine so much that they are virtually inseparable. These strands we can call: 1) taiji as exercise, a recreational activity for general health and well-being; 2) taiji as a martial art, a training program for acquiring skills in self-defense; 3) taiji as meditation, a spiritual practice that reminds us of our connection with the earth, the elements, the universe, and each other.

First a disclaimer: I really like to talk about taiji, but I would much rather DO taiji with you all, and that presents a small problem about discourse. There is so much that could be said, and we would still be scratching the surface of a historical or philosophical or therapeutic understanding of an essentially nonverbal tradition. I’m guessing that you already know much of what I would say if I gave the conventional talk about the history, principles, and benefits of practice. Since we only have an hour, I will try to do what I CAN do with language - to initiate a conversation that can, at best, circle around the art of taiji and help us intelligently observe what we’re doing when we get around to it.

By necessity, I will leave out a lot. So I’ll cut to the chase. Taiji as exercise IS self-defense; taiji as self-defense IS meditation; taiji as meditation IS exercise. Meditation protects us from harm and restores normal physical function. Self-defense quiets the mind and tones muscles. Knowing taiji consists in practicing, not in conceptualizing and analyzing techniques and principles; practicing yields a deeper understanding of techniques and principles, which, in turn, helps to fine-tune the practice. How do I know that? I read it somewhere. [laughter…] The more I practice, the more I keep coming back to that very pragmatic notion. I’m 54, and I’ve been doing taiji a little over half my life, and I learn a little more about it every day.

That said, it might make more sense to DO a little taiji, and then come back to our discussion. So…I invite you to stand and join me in two or three Basic Movements.

[They stand up, I lead them in 'hold the ball'…'cat stance'…'horse stance', they sit down.]

Thank you for indulging with me in that. My ulterior motive is that I always feel better talking about taiji after I’ve done some movement, for reasons that will become apparent. Now, what were we just doing? One strand of the tradition might say we were conditioning the muscles, nervous system, bones, and joints to withstand attack, enhancing our ability to live to fight another day (what they used to call education of the physical). Another strand of the tradition might emphasize that we were reconstructing our movement habits in concert with the pull of gravity, and by aligning ourselves with those forces outside ourselves, we bring our skeletal-muscle and cardiovascular systems and our everyday conduct into a more harmonious balance (what they used to call education through the physical). Someone else might say that holding the ball, cat stance, and horse stance are ways of making peace with the space in and around the self by locating our center in an electro-magnetic field of energy in a relationship with other energy fields in this room, in this city, on this planet. (Something like what was once called education in the physical.)

The vocabulary changes, and the aims of individual practitioners vary greatly, but the somatic principles are the same: head up, tail down, breathe naturally, stand rooted in the legs, find your center, move the limbs from your center, observe the consequences. Where did these principles and techniques come from?

When we shift our weight from right to left, we are filling one leg and emptying the other, making one side active, energized, working, or yang, which makes the other side rest, recover, relaxed, or yin. The complementary opposites commonly called yin and yang had already been part of the discourse for centuries, when the so-called Neoconfucians, during the 11th through the 14th centuries, took the next step in developing a system that incorporated those ancient, anarchic Taoist ideas, along with more recent and potentially more dangerous, nihilistic Buddhist ideas, and packaged it as the new, improved Confucianism. Brilliant! How do you say thesis-antithesis-synthesis in Chinese? About 800 years before Hegel, the Neoconfucian response to the growing contrarian influences of Taoist self-cultivation and Buddhist contemplation was, in a word, taiji.

One of the strongest voices in the centuries-long debate among Neoconfucians was my hero, Wang Yang-ming, who coined the term “unity of knowledge and action” (chih hsing ho-i) which, I personally feel, best expresses the educational value of taiji while anticipating my other heroes, C.S. Peirce, William James, and John Dewey, by about 600 years. Taken as an epistemological statement about what it means to know something, this implies that there can only be real knowledge in the presence of human intention expressed in action in the world. Contemplation and abstract theorizing are not enough; social action demonstrates and validates understanding. Taken as a moral injunction about what people ought to do, it advocates testing and refining our understanding of ideas in the arena of concrete problem solving.

This is where practice-driven theory and theory-driven practice meet in taiji praxis. Legend tells us that a wild mountain man named Chang San-feng discovered something about himself and the universe by watching birds, snakes, rocks, trees, clouds, and rain. He invented an art of movement that found its way into villages and cities. There are more documented records of the transmission of secret taiji forms within the Chen family, eventually to a dedicated servant who founded the Yang lineage and their forms, and subsequent forms developed by the Sun and Wu schools. Schools and forms have proliferated, but most trace their lineage back to those roots.

My teachers have either been students of the Yang family in China or studied with students of the Yang family. Huo Chi-kwang studied with Yang Cheng-fu, then came to Chicago and taught hundreds of people like me at the Chinese Cultural Academy in Evanston. Ch’eng Man-ching also studied with Yang Cheng-fu, came to New York and taught hundreds of people, including Ed Young, who taught Michael Robbins, who taught me at Oberlin College. Grandmaster Ch’ang also studied with the Yang family, taught his modified Yang form to Daniel Weng, who came to Columbus and taught hundreds of people like me at Ohio State. I had been an athlete, played basketball and ran track, then began exploring the broader possibilities of movement in modern dance and yoga. In taiji I found a practice that would help me heal my injuries, that I could sustain indefinitely and actually improve with age.

My practice, therefore, is like a soup or stew that has been cooking for hundreds of years, with each generation taking their cupful and adding an ingredient here and there, a pinch of this and a pinch of that. Taiji convinced me that physical education was my path, and academic teachers like Ruth Brunner and Vivian Hsu at Small Liberal Arts College became part of my developing taiji experience. Various permutations of the ideas I’ve quickly touched on here brought me to Large State, where mentors such as Sy Kleinman and Phil Smith have had huge impact on my practice and my work as an editor. Of course, I owe a lot to the many students with whom I have had the privilege of practicing. Are there any questions?

[They asked a bunch of good questions - Do you ever practice to music? (yes) Is this related to Japanese and other arts? (yes) Does this involve breathing? (yes) - allowing me to run my mouth a little more. So much for an essentially nonverbal tradition.]