Interested in Faji but not interested in fighting

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Interested in Faji but not interested in fighting

Postby johnwang on Sun May 28, 2017 12:22 pm

I can never understand when someone said that he is interested in Fajin, but he is not interested in fighting. Faijin is to generate power to hurt/kill people. If you only have interest in health, why should you care about power generation?

Is there such thinking as "I'm interested in fighting, but I'm really not that interested in fighting?"

What's your opinion on this?
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Re: Interested in Faji but not interested in fighting

Postby C.J.W. on Sun May 28, 2017 2:35 pm

I see that a lot with Taiji practitioners whose interest in "fajin" mainly involves being able to generate "long-jin" to push and launch people into the air.

As for "short-jin" that can cause internal damage, I believe many TCMAists are still under the false impression that they will automatically be able to fight and become deadly if they acquire it. The truth is that fajin is just one of the many attributes required to become an effective CMA fighter. Having fajin skill alone will not help you a bit in a fight if you do not have good footwork, timing, reflexes, and entry that allow you to make contact with the opponent's body. Without contact, fajin is pretty much useless.
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Re: Interested in Faji but not interested in fighting

Postby MaartenSFS on Mon May 29, 2017 1:40 am

The funny thing is that there is such a thing as a fake Fajin. Not just any spasm is a Fajin. It's really specific training methods that develop Fajin and without testing it (and your structure) on pads, bags and people, is totally worthless. Once acquired, though, and with a lot of sparring, I believe that Fajin is something that every fighter would do well to possess. It can be used with any part of the body and from any distance, angle and with great, penetrating power. If done properly it also doesn't require a lengthy set-up.
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Re: Interested in Faji but not interested in fighting

Postby Peacedog on Mon May 29, 2017 6:00 am

I'd say the real issue, pun intended, with fah jing is that while it makes a great addition to someone's arsenal if they already know how to fight, it is not a magical power that allows you to defeat all challengers as it is presented by some in the tai chi community.

In Hermetics, we use it as a partner drill for training the structure of the body.

From what I've seen of fah jing work the reality is that you have to be a very competent fighter to use it at all in anything other than cooperative, or semi-cooperative, things like push hands or the like. Personally, I find that my body has to be relaxed in a very specific manner to issue power using the method I know and that under duress it is difficult to do.

While it has slipped out from time to time when people have surprised me, I cannot claim the ability to consciously control the ability when under threat.

At this point if I am in a real fight I am just going to keep punching my opponent in the head until one of us drops.
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Re: Interested in Faji but not interested in fighting

Postby windwalker on Mon May 29, 2017 6:44 am

C.J.W. wrote:I see that a lot with Taiji practitioners whose interest in "fajin" mainly involves being able to generate "long-jin" to push and launch people into the air.

As for "short-jin" that can cause internal damage, I believe many TCMAists are still under the false impression that they will automatically be able to fight and become deadly if they acquire it. The truth is that fajin is just one of the many attributes required to become an effective CMA fighter. Having fajin skill alone will not help you a bit in a fight if you do not have good footwork, timing, reflexes, and entry that allow you to make contact with the opponent's body. Without contact, fajin is pretty much useless.


One of taiji's main tenets is the use and understanding of "jin" as in "dong jin" "fai jin" only refers to the ability to issue and express it. Once the ability and understanding of what "jin" is and how to express is acquired, then normally the work is focused on usage. What is called "jin" behaves very much like a "wave" one of the things that make it very interesting, as apposed to other types of power using matter to transmit the energy. The kinetic energy is transmitted as energy, with out the matter being used to transmit it.

Much of the training to be able to use this type of energy is very counter to the use and way other types of energy is expressed and used, one of the reasons so much time is spent on developing, understanding and then working on the uses of it. For many they seem to feel that once they understand it, they never go on to explore or understand how to use it...

I guess feeling that they know it already just by being able to do it, this often leads to bad assumptions being made about what one can do or not use.....

We can talk of short or long, with most people understanding and working with long...developing and training short is harder, and is not so controllable as the long...Takes a little while to develop.

Without contact, fajin is pretty much useless


While this is true it should be noted, that its not the contact itself but the amount of contact needed. "jin" can be used and transmitted though a finger or any part of the body. The many demos that people often question show this. The ones showing this do so because its very different then what most people would expect or even believe. They want to make a distinction between the different types of forces, ones said to be internally produced, and those externally produced.

In my practice we use three levels of contact. skin, hair, and air. This means that the touch gets lighter and lighter, the amount of contact gets smaller, and smaller. Taiji before being called taiji was once referred to as touch boxing.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hQAfDXrvRpQ&t=45s

an interesting demo, which requires skill
and yet does not confer ability to apply the skill...

In the title it says "deifies physics"
actually it does not
Last edited by windwalker on Mon May 29, 2017 7:27 am, edited 5 times in total.
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Re: Interested in Faji but not interested in fighting

Postby windwalker on Mon May 29, 2017 8:05 am

It should be mentioned that once this way of expressing power is ingrained in the body it's really not possible to go back to the old ways of expressing power. It's not a choice as many seem to imply it's simply a different way that the body has been trained to use and express power.

If one feels that it's a conscious decision I would suggest that maybe they have not trained it enough so that it is not.
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Re: Interested in Faji but not interested in fighting

Postby everything on Mon May 29, 2017 8:34 am

For one thing, these kinds of skills are good in contact sports, which believe it or not, more people find more fun than MA, at least if participation is the metric.

For another thing, it's interesting and relatively safe. As long as you don't have illusions about fighting, these are two good reasons.

I can see why that seems odd but really it's not.
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Re: Interested in Faji but not interested in fighting

Postby GrandUltimate on Mon May 29, 2017 11:45 am

I think one issue is that a lot of people who are not interested in fighting still like to say they train/teach a martial/fighting art.

As a result, things like fa jing are extremely valuable for such people as well. The idea being that if they can pull it off and do something like launch a person off his feet with little visible large movement, it somewhat validates the notion that, even if they don't fight, the art they teach/learn has lethal potential behind it.
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Re: Interested in Faji but not interested in fighting

Postby johnwang on Mon May 29, 2017 12:38 pm

GrandUltimate wrote:I think one issue is that a lot of people who are not interested in fighting still like to say they train/teach a martial/fighting art.

It doesn't make any sense that you are interested in:

- women but you don't want to touch any women.
- "CMA application" but you don't want to "apply CMA application".
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Re: Interested in Faji but not interested in fighting

Postby Steve James on Mon May 29, 2017 1:18 pm

The interest and emphasis on fajin was always based on its martial application. Those tcc styles that didn't fajin obviously were considered to be less than effective. Fajin, in fact, was considered what made tcc effective at all. But, then, the emphasis seemed to turn to developing the mechanism for fajin. Those methods were/are all very specialized, but not limited to tcc. I do recall people saying that it was too dangerous to use on someone.

The reasons and explanations about how fajin is generated are also fascinating. Anyway, none of this has anything to do with any individual's fighting ability. Emphasis on it, like emphasis on the dantien or qi or form, is just something that people do.
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Re: Interested in Faji but not interested in fighting

Postby johnwang on Mon May 29, 2017 2:04 pm

Steve James wrote:Emphasis on it, like emphasis on the dantien or qi or form, is just something that people do.

Are you saying that people are truly interested in fighting but they just don't want to admit it?

Here is an example.

A: I teach CMA for health. I don't teach CMA for fighting.
B: But you train "iron palm" yourself. Are you saying that "iron palm" training is good for health?
A: ... :-X
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Re: Interested in Faji but not interested in fighting

Postby Steve James on Mon May 29, 2017 2:34 pm

Are you saying that people are truly interested in fighting but they just don't want to admit it?


I wasn't saying that. But, I think it's true for some. I think there are plenty of people who say that they do tcc "just for exercise" because they don't want to get into conflicts.
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Re: Interested in Faji but not interested in fighting

Postby northern_mantis on Mon May 29, 2017 2:52 pm

These days it makes more sense for people to do some kind of pseudo martial art. For most people who will never encounter serious violence (this is certainly the case in my part of the world) it would be counter productive to get involved with fighting. Just playing at being warriors seems like a perfectly reasonable activity to add to any well being regime.
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Re: Interested in Faji but not interested in fighting

Postby Niall Keane on Mon May 29, 2017 2:58 pm

johnwang wrote:
GrandUltimate wrote:I think one issue is that a lot of people who are not interested in fighting still like to say they train/teach a martial/fighting art.

It doesn't make any sense that you are interested in:

- women but you don't want to touch any women.
- "CMA application" but you don't want to "apply CMA application".



Its called a "fetish" John! Plenty of "Gimps" out there!
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Re: Interested in Faji but not interested in fighting

Postby windwalker on Mon May 29, 2017 4:55 pm

northern_mantis wrote:These days it makes more sense for people to do some kind of pseudo martial art. For most people who will never encounter serious violence (this is certainly the case in my part of the world) it would be counter productive to get involved with fighting. Just playing at being warriors seems like a perfectly reasonable activity to add to any well being regime.


I don't know, some people like shooting guns, but really never think of or like the idea of shooting someone and yet I think most would agree
that learning to shoot a gun is probably one of the best MA out there. They practice things like trigger pull, reloading, drawing the weapon shooting from different positions and angles.

Ya some might say its a " pseudo martial art" and real its counter productive getting shot to find out if its real or not, and yet the other aspects are very reasonable actives that help prevent one from getting shot, and insuring one understands what shooting is all about...no matter if they encounter serious violence or not, I'd say they were well prepared.

what say you?
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