(Photo of Sword Master Benjamin Lo by Michael Jang)
天衣無縫
- trad. Chinese 'the clothing of heaven has no seams'
As you should know from other posts (or the top of this page if viewing in my blog cattanga.typepad.com) I'll teach a 1-of-a-kind Tai Chi Sword seminar in June this year. The question always comes up (and I've encouraged the topic) with sword: Can we just do drills or is it best to do the entire connected set sequence? Is there any special benefit to performing the full sequence?
Given that I made an entire video teaching bite-size Tai Chi sword drills, extracted as standalons from the full sequence, and then given that I'm constantly ranting about the total pointlessness (pun intended) of fixating on the sword form as a perfomative dance sequence, you might assume I'd answer: DRILLS! Totally! All day any day!
But not so. The form IS the ideal way to practice sword. In a strange way, the very constraints it imposes are mentally freeing, as opposed to isolated drills. With drills you need to think: which ones, today? how long for each one? count by reps or by time? what order should I do them? and much more such trivia. By the time you've explicitly or implicityly answered all that you may as well have just done one full sequence (or a few reps of wherever you know up to) with a mind free to concentrate on the internal power experience. The internal power experience is the pupose of the whole thing.
But then why have I ranted against the form in other contexts? It all has to do with how deeply you understand Tai Chi sword practice, overall. Which depends on what you've been taught so far. In Tai Chi Sword, even more than in the empty hand, the chasm between performance-art version vs. internal cultivation version is extreme. Something about having a physical object in our hands can make us even more matertially and visually oriented than we already are. So with learning the sword form, it quickly become a light physical calesthenic with Chinese characteristics.
You have to learn sword on two level simultaneously, yang and yin, outer and inner. Even the outer part of the practice has been somewhat difficult to pick up, due to relative scarcity of teachers and materials. That's the level of "foot here, hand there, turn to the right, slash". Whatever. But that DOES have to be learned. It's just not at all the point. It's like you have to learn the way the chess pieces can move on the board, but in a strange way those surface particulars have almost nothing to do with the experience, the whole point, of chess. Yet you must know them to play at all. Same with the physical part of Tai Chi Sword.
But then... there's yin teachings. This is where almost every move/technique in the form really comes alive literally in your hands. But when learning that it's actually helpful to step through the moves in a set sequence, as I said above it's mentally freeing - as long as you (a) know the inner content of each move; and (b) focus on that inner yin content with each move in turn as you progress through the sequence, rather than taking it as a dance, almost a race to just get to the end without forgetting anything or messing it up.
So the best compromise is to yes learn the sword form, in proper sequence - but don't worry about finishing it. Take each set as pre-connected internal energy nei gong drills. The difference between doing only the yang aspect of Tai Chi Sword - no matter how beautiful your dance instincts may make it, vs. doing it with knowledge and activation of the inner yin content (based on a few principles, but applying with slight individual nuance to each move in the sequence) is like the diff between throwing a bullet and shooting it. [NOTE: That's a metaphoric image intended to convey a sense of the intensity and depth of pyscho-somatic experience which the internal energy unites when its really cooking, not meant as a combative or hoplological directive of any kind. Jeez, pretty soon my posts will end up like a David Foster Wallace book, one or two lines of text at the top of the page withthe rest of the page consisting of detailed fine-print footnotes explaining what he actually meant and forestalling all the misunderstanding the main text may have engendered *pant*]
So the seminar will be form-based in the above sense. We'll start at the start of the form, I'll of course show and tell the physical dynamic, but right from the very first move right off the bat I'll introduce you to the yin dynamic of that move, and then of almost every move thereafter (those that have uniquely paired yin teaching, which most of the moves do). I'll try to get through the full sequence by Sunday evening but even if we don't make it that far, you'll walk out with a pearl of great price - a collection of amazing hyper nei gong "drills" conveniently pre-strung into an optimized, microwavable, pre-packaged (even if partial) sequence. You would get more from learning both yang and yin of only, say, the first 7 moves in this mode, and then practicing them regularly, fully and correctly than you would from learning the full-yang outer dance and then doing that at home for a week or two post-seminar, til the honeymoon wears off.
I could maybe squeeze in one more person at this point (just because I expect that, as always, two or three early, fully pre-paid registree's inevitably drop out last minute due to the usual human life stuff work, health, family, kids ... STUFF.