everything wrote:i'd guess if we surveyed 100k people, it would just confuse them.
If we surveyed 100K people about most of the concepts I work with daily and constantly most would probably be confused, too. Such is life, such is jargon, such is the occult.
The discipline is not for everyone. The work is not for everyone. The strength is not for everyone. Why should the knowledge be? It's gung fu, it's supposed to take time and defy understanding initially.
There's definitely such a thing as going off the deep end. Thinking that reading the classic is just as good as practice, or getting lost in the weeds trying to work out video game-esque style combination and countering theories. That's not really what I'm advocating.
What I'm advocating is that, if you intend to seriously study the art of Taijiquan, you need to be familiar with the literary tradition, ancient and modern, and especially know the theories contained in the older texts. They're sometimes brought out in modern texts in bits and pieces but the old stuff is all gold. There is a lot of extremely good information to be mined from it.
You might not get any value from it, that's fine. Someone else can, and then they can explain things in terms you're more ready to accept and understand, or not. So long as you're getting what you want out of your practice, that's all that matters.
ah the "5 elements" is another one that makes absolutely no sense when you try to overlay the philosophy onto a practical art that had to do with using spears in a mass battlefield. wood is "crushing" because an arrow (made out of wood) is crushing? crossing is "earth"?
So I learned a xingyi 5 element Da Dao system. In that, each of the elements, though not explicitly defined as such, cut a different angle. If you take the plane at optimum cutting distance from your body, you can draw four lines in two directions each for 8 distinct paths that generalize strikes contained with arcs of the circle centered at the opponent's midsection, plus the circle itself. Each of the 5 elements accounted for different sets of these paths. Vertical, horizontal, diagonal from each side, circle.
This is pretty much the same sort of breakdown that the Europeans used in their systems as documented in manuals like Fiore dei Liberi's Fior di Battaglia, but they study them as simple and direct strikes without incorporating the elemental mnemonics you find in the chinese systems or combining multiple strikes into complex movements that the Chinese would consider single postures.
I guess it helps if you approach things in certain ways, like the bagua and taiji and wujing diagrams and theories being systems for organizing information, like the hermetic tree of life. The diagrams express relationships. You can assign intellectually consistent meanings to real life objects and phenomena and approach some better understanding by comparing their relationship in the real world to their relationship as expressed within these mneumonic systems. Or you can simply use them to help retain large and complex sets of information.
Where people get it wrong, in my opinion, is when they start mistaking the vehicle for the journey, or even worse the destination!