In my book Juice Radical Taiji Energetics, I have an Appendix where I compare the teachings of ZMQ37 (Professor Zheng Manqing's version of Yang family Tai Chi) with the Daitou Ryuu teachings and trainings of Sagawa Yukiyoshi. I never met Master Sagawa myself, but I've made a careful study of all published materials about him and I've known and practiced with a number experienced martial artists in Japan who either trained under Sagawa himself, or with one or more of his most senior inner students, for example Kimura. Some readers may disagree with some of my interpretations in this article, and that's ok. If you don't like how I've done this, do it yourself.
Master Sagawa was interesting not only in being one of the foremost internal martial artists of all time, but also in (1) his methods of self-cultivation and then (2) his approach to "teaching". It all begins with the parallel quotations that I cite in the Appendix of the Juice book. Parallel meaning that I line up similar-sounding internal teaching points from both Zheng Manqing alongside selected points made by Sagawa to his senior student Kumura.
From those you can see that Sagawa was basically talking along the same lines as the Tai Chi greats. Please look at the Appendix in the back of Juice for numerous citations and the original quotations relative to all this. He strongly and repeatedly rejects and repudiates all use of strength and muscle in martial work, most particularly in the shoulders and arms. He continually emphasized the necessity to forego all use of upper body strength. He says power comes from the legs and hips. Then he puts extreme focus on 'training' the lower body - hips, pelvis, legs. So then we need to look even more deeply into the scanty published notes about his self-training and teachings to his students to get some idea of what he meant by this continual emphasis on 'training' the 'power' from the legs and hips. We are left with the questions, what exactly is this lower body power? Just muscle? Something we can cultivate via leg machines or power snatch at the gym? Or is it instead some characteristic attribute of trained movement and atheltic coordination? Or what?
So: what did he really mean by this 'lower body' emphasis, in his own training and in his teaching to students? That's where things get murky. Although he did run a dojo for decades in Tokyo, he was actually very secretive and selective in his teaching. The vast majority of his time was spent on his own solo drilling for hours every day. If you've read Kimura's two books and other first hand accounts, it's pretty clear that his extraordinary and extreme martial arts power was sourced from his own solo training time - not from endless sparring with his students or anybody else. It appears that the 'students' at his home dojo were tolerated mainly as demo dummies for him to prove to himself and others how powerful he was, and also as convenient experimental lab rats whenever he had an epiphany in is solo practice, he could take it for a test drive that very evening in the home dojo class, with decently skilled conventional martial athletes. By all reports, he never taught them any details of his personal solo practices. He just had them wrestle one another under a general dictum of constant reprimands like "you're still using strength!".
The one bread crumb he left us in that regard was his occasional urging Kimura (in particular) to work on a special version of the sumo classic drill of "shiko" - alternating squat and leg raise. However this was supposely a fine-tuning of the standard sumo shiko, not the normal practice thereof.
Let's be very clear: I am in no way a kickass martial arts steely-eyed dealer of death, the kind of "one hit one down" master that Sagawa was. Nor am I any other kind of master of anything. Not even remotely close. However! I have found a number of "bite sized" drills that develop the experience of what I will call a "non physical" power which surges up from the lower body and extends itself into your relaxed upper body, arms and hands. Even though this body is trained by, and experienced within, your physical body, I call it "non physical" to distinguish it from the normal muscular/nerve athletic conditioning results that are taught and practiced everywhere. This is a more specialized thing. It's actually widely talked about under the names of ki or qi, but most of the common methods for cultivating those internal energies lack the crucial incorporation of a certain kind of lower body emphasis. They are mostly arm waving with simple breathing exercises.
My own experience, in my own much more humble sphere (mouse v. lion!) very much parallels Sagawa's realizations, as also mirrored by Prof. Zheng (see Appendix in Juice). There indeed is a form of "non-physical" power which:
- is mainly trained solo. Partner work, like kuzushi and push hands, can be an occasionally useful adjunct training if desired, but never the main point, not the main training method
- is mainly trained via lower body emphasis, at least in the visual/physical aspects of the drill forms. The upper body is relevant in a subsidiary role, limited to remaining relaxed, receptive, but mental aware of the almost 'automatic' power transmission from the lower body.
- requires detailed knowledge of both physical/visible principles and internal/mental aspects of any number of "bite size" drills specialized for cultivating this power experience
"Bite size" means that you don't want to get lost in long conventional forms or sequences and 'styles' except for special auxiliary purposes. The core work requires relatively little space and time (in the sense of time required to perform a tangibly productive 'set' of any given drill). That doesn't mean these drills are easy. They require discipline to power through the physical aspects. Even through the physical aspects are not the goal, they are an essential component. From a few scattered references, we can infer that Sagawa had quite a number of personal/solo drills for lower body power cultivation, which he never emphasized in the dojo classes, and perhaps never explicitly taught at all. He evidently worked these for hours every single morning on his own, alone in his home dojo.
Over many decades I have assembled what I consider to be a good sampling of drills of exactxly this type. In my case, they are sourced or inspired by traditional systems such as Tai Chi, Xingyi, Bagua, Mantis, and Yiquan. However, after my extraction and refinement they are now (mostly) stand-alone. Extracted and refined to function exactly as I infer that Sagawa's continually evolving (by his own report) inventory of solo power practices. The power effects you will eventually experience from dedicated practice of these will begin to mirror any reasonable interpretation of Sagawa's self-reports about lower body centric power cultivation.
In this year's seminar, details pinned at top of this blog (click link 'Home' at the top of this page), I will again do my very best, hopefully better than ever before, to convey in practical detail how to do this kind of work and what kinds of effects it has. We have a small tight group so I hope to deep dive and somehow make it real for every attendee. Contact me at taichisingularity (gmail) with questions, expression of interest, and/or intent to attend.