New article by Yang Hai: Hard force and soft force in Xingyi

[jjy5016]

[quote="GrahamB"]Hey John, good to have you back - where you been?[/quote

Mourning the passing of my teacher and trying to drink myself to death.

(I didn't succeed)

[GrahamB]

Good. That would have been very wasteful.

[GrahamB]

So cruel Tom, so cruel......

[JANAV635]

how long should u stand in Santi in the begining to develop power? is 5 minutes on each side good? or count to a 100 breaths on each side then switch to the other side? does standing in Santi build a bridge? what kind of power does santi build? is standing a Santi a chi gung in itself? and if it is what kind of health benefits does one reap from standing in Santi.

[nianfong]

JANAV, I think you might want to start your own thread to ask those questions.

[JANAV635]

new to this dont know how this works.

[Joe L.]

new to this dont know how this works.

Back out of here and go to the main page, and hit 'New Topic'.

Put at the title something about the hows and whys of Santi, and then copy and paste your questions you already wrote.

I'm sure someone will break them down for you. Good luck.

[edededed]

Glad to see you back, Little John! (Robin Hood reference there )

[jjy5016]

On the bit about not pushing with the legs I've always been told that the movement should come from the waist or dan tien. Only several years after I began doing taijiquan did I learn that it was the same.

The kua are the biggest joints in the body, then the knees & shoulders. It made sense to me to use the waist instead of the other two to issue and direct force. I found that by pushing off the foot to generate force it compromised the integrity of the waist making me lean forward unless I adusted the opposite leg & the kua as well. Also the base (legs, root etc.)is much more stable when the knees and ankles are locked.

Sam Tam did a demonstration for me and one other person in a hotel room after a workshop about 6 years ago in Florida. He had my friend get down on the floor and place his hands palm down on the floor. Master Tam then stood on this fellow's hands and pushed (launched) me. The fellow who's hands Sam was standing on said that the pressure on his hands never changed and that there was no push. The force came from master Tam's waist and his "hard force".

I believe that the hard force Yang Hai is talking about is the same thing as the steel that taiji refers to as steel wrapped in cotton. In other words a very powerful peng jin (hsing, frame) which comes from hours of zhan zhuang and doing the five elements with certain obvious physical aspects for developing power and proper technique.

[Wuming]

John,

That's a really interesting anecdote. So there's no groundpath there? Very curious about this.

Thanks.

[jjy5016]

There's a groundpath Wuming. I just don't push off the ground to generate force. Take a machine gun that is mounted on a tripod. The legs of the tripod don't push forward and up to make the bullet fire out of the chamber at a higher velocity. That's done by the explosion of the gunpowder inside the shell. The legs act as the base or root for the gun.

A big mobile crane that is on wheels or treads with a turret from which the boom lowers and rises will somtimes have struts that extend out and rest on the ground to keep the base stable as the boom lowers and rises and the turret rotates to move a heavy load from point a to point b. What would happen if in the middle of moving the load the mobile base started to move or the support struts came up? It would be disastrous. Same thing if one is moving his legs when supporting the load of an opponent.

Same thing applies when moving. Take for example the standard Hobei hsingyi five element linking form. After the first pi with the left side forward the right side of the body moves up as the left hand comes back and the right fist does a beng quan. Kind of like a door closing using the hinges attached to the frame to keep it level and correct within the door frame. Whereas we are dealing with two points of stability in the left and right feet planted on the ground once that righ foot comes up next to the let it becomes one point and has to be as stable as if it were a post driven several feet into the ground. If I try to push off of the feet there goes the stability and the force from the kua closing will be compromised greatly.

[GrahamB]

John - that sounds like the Hsing-I way of doing things to me too. Pushing off the ground is more of a TaiChi thing as far as I understand it.

[jjy5016]

Why do you think taiji is different?

The classics talk about the waist being the commander and power being directed by the waist.

To me they are both the same in this respect.

[GrahamB]

Why do you think taiji is different?

The classics talk about the waist being the commander and power being directed by the waist.

To me they are both the same in this respect.

To be more precise the Tai Chi classic you mentions says: (and I'm sure somebody here will want to quibble about the exact translation, but just ignore that - you get the general sense of what it's talking about anyway)

"The chin [intrinsic strength] should be
rooted in the feet,
generated from the legs,
controlled by the waist, and
manifested through the fingers."

Note - the feet and legs being a big part of generating force that is then commaned or controlled by the waist (which is the bit you quoted).

Later, you can see in the same classic how the legs and waist are considered together, and the unit that drives things:

"The principle of adjusting the legs and waist
applies for moving in all directions;
upward or downward,
advancing or withdrawing,
left or right."

In contrast Hsing-I classics tend to go more for the idea of everything being the driving force together:

"The top wishes to move, the bottom automatically follows. The bottom wishes to move the top will automatically lead. The center section moves, the top and the bottom will coordinate. Internal and external are combined, the front and the rear mutually required. This is what is called threading into one."

This to me sounds more like what you are describing that your teacher was explaining - the machine gun like effect.

Historically Hsing-I and Tai Chi Chuan evolved separately. It was in the early 20th that people (like Sun Lu Tang) started mixing them together and call it all Neijia (sure, they didn't invent the term, but they owned it), hence you get the intermingling of ideas which I should stress isn't necessarily a bad thing, but if you look at the history of Hsing-I (and its precursor XinYi, which I consider all as evolutions of the same art) then its a relatively new phenomena in the lifetime of the art.

This idea might seem crazy (and very controversial) to people today, in the post "neijiaquan" world, where it's all about the 'ground path' and 'peng' in all 3 arts equally, but just look at the history on a timeline. In fact, I have no expectation of anyone to really agree with this, but just ask that you put aside preconceptions and look at the history and classics with fresh eyes.

[jjy5016]

I guess it depends on how one interprets what is being said in the classics and who's done the translation.

The example using the machine gun was mine Graham just to illustrate the stability the tripod gives to the machine gun firing, not adding to the velocity of the bullets.

Since this has now gone way off topic I will agree to disagree with you for now.

small John