Lower abdomen is hard as a rock

[Yeung]

Extract from Sun Lutang. DISCUSSING DISTINCTIONS BETWEEN THE INTERNAL & EXTERNAL SCHOOLS OF MARTIAL ARTS (1929) translated by Paul Brennan:

余曰：「然則鄙人可謂得拳中之內勁乎？蓋氣已下沉，小腹亦堅硬如石矣。」
宗先生曰：「否！否！汝雖氣通小腹，若不化堅，終必為累，非上乘也。」余又問何以化之？

I said: “All that being the case, can I say I’ve obtained the internal power of boxing arts? My energy has sunk down and my lower abdomen is hard as a rock.”
Song said: “Oh, no no no. Even though energy might be getting through to your lower abdomen, if it doesn’t transform that hardness, it’ll eventually just make you feel overworked, and that isn’t the highest level.”

A misconception of breathe down to the Dantian?

[jaime_g]

A misconception of breathe down to the Dantian?

No, just different steps/exercises to develop and use dantian. Being able to create a dense, full, and taut "ball" it's important but ,as Song said, there is much more.

Breathing helps the conditioning but it's not essential for the exercise that Sun mentions.

[D_Glenn]

My teacher has a Dantian that is solid as rock, if he sinks the qi but then it’s passively solid for the whole time he’s practicing martial arts in the day. But it can also be very pliable when he wants it. He can do all the yoga Nauli Kriya Abdominal waves- rolling it side to side, rolling it up and down. He can also do some of the other Dantian tricks that you may see or feel the Chen Taijiquan guys doing.

Don’t know if that’s what the text refers to. However, that snippet of text lacks real context and the fact that it’s nearly 100 years old and no direct connection exists to the author. So how could we ever really know what it means?


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