TaiJi and XingYi For Self Defence Part 8 - Lost in Translation

 

I’ve used the sub heading lost in translation for this piece because I want to look at how many modern martial arts, not just TaiJI and XingYi are misunderstood and as a result trained ineffectively as far as practical self defence is concerned.

 

Before we get into the nuts and bolts of the issue I want to bring forward a concept in Psychology known as “confirmation bias” this is the tendency to seek out and prefer information that supports our preexisting beliefs. As a result, we tend to ignore any information that contradicts those beliefs. We’ll come back to the implications of this tendency shortly.

 

If I ask you to stop and think what martial arts look like, depending upon your background, you may bring to mind a gentle and elegant TaiJi form (Xing), a rapid and sharply delivered Karate Kata, a boxing / Thai Boxing bout or perhaps an MMA bout going to ground for a submit. They are all perfectly valid visions of aspects of Martial Arts but in reality none really look like fighting for survival at a town centre bus stop at 3AM. If we are honest we would probably acknowledge that the MMA scenario looks closer to self defence, but it’s still not the same, you really don’t want to be dropping heavily to ground and staying there. If you’re not sure why, we’ll examine that in a future post.

 

This is where confirmation bias kicks in. What we see in our regular training, possibly in sports media and potentially in entertainment media is what we will allow ourselves to think of as self defence. One of the most common aspects of competitive martial sports is the use of certain fighting distances, in boxing, kick boxing, sport karate etc for example, we tend to see a “consensual” distance between competitors. In kicking sports it’s around 2 meters (just outside kicking distance) and in boxing sports a little over one meter (just outside arms reach). Much of the bout involves entering and exiting this controlled distance. 

 

This “understanding” of Martial Arts often results in teachers attempting to explain techniques from a Kata / Xing in terms of applying them from a consensual distance. Anyone who regularly attends classes or a training workshop will probably be able to bring to mind several, possibly dozens of ways they have been shown to deal with a straight punch. That is clearly ridiculous, if you allow yourself to think about it for a moment, but confirmation bias allows us to take in all of these defences to a straight punch and think little more of it. There’s a reason western boxing has so few defensive techniques, if all you are dealing with are jabs, crosses, hooks and the occasional uppercut from a consensual distance, you don’t need many defences. Just be good at the few you need, a very good bit of advice!

 

The issue and what has been lost in translation is the understanding of distance and particularly the acceptance of competitive “consensual distance” as being valid for self defence. In my last post one of the passages touch on the issue of distance although not explicitly: 

 

“I stick to him and go along..” this confirms the previous point, that you are NOT pushing the person away, you stay close and stick to the opponent, you don’t separate (come away) nor do you clumsily bump into them (crash in). The aim is to take momentary control of your opponent, not engage in an extended phase of pushing hands. Having taken control you are then in a position to strike your opponent from close range with them not being in a position to defend against the strike. This phase of the conflict is similar to the “HikiTe” (grabbing) technique seen in traditional Karate.

 

I mentioned the Karate concept of HikiTe, which is a grabbing and often pulling technique. This concept was until quite recently an idea that had become largely lost to modern Karate which had heavily focused on points sparring for several decades, it was an idea which was, as they say, hidden in plain sight. That’s not to say Karate was the only art that slightly lost sight of grabbing concept. That’s not to say Karate was the only art that slightly lost sight of grabbing concept. Both TaiJi and XingYi lost their way to varying degrees, TaiJi primarily because of its excessive focus on 'energetics' within the solo form and pushing hands training that was used as a proxy for combat and XingYi, due to the desire to focus on solo drills that emphasised large dynamic movements.  

 

I say lost in plain sight because HikiTe techniques were clearly illustrated in an early (possibly the first) Karate manual known as the Bubishi that was in circulation in Okinawa from at least the mid 19th Century. The Bubishi came in many slightly different versions, not surprising since each one was usually hand copied.

 

The Bubishi was in itself a copy of an earlier Chinese book, the WuBeiZhi, early Okinawan martial artists travelled to southern China to train and brought back their own copies, the coloured images in this article are from a copy of the WuBeiZhi. I’ve also included some images from XingYi and TaiJi training manuals, you will note that they all look remarkably similar and also the images I’m sharing all include aspects of grabbing and hitting. Both XingYi and TaiJi have tended to focus on solo drills and Xings and combined that training with pushing hands of various types. The XingYi images are from a paired practise called An Shen Pao, this was a relatively early development in XingYi, the TaiJi paired set is a more recent creation, I can’t find reference to it prior to late 1930’s. Nevertheless it gives some insight into application, although it’s interesting to note that many of the illustration of the sequence show excess distance between partners, bordering on the previously mentioned consensual distance. This was probably done to make the movements flow more easily, the text the images are linked to makes references to grace and elegance indicating the direction that training was going in when the text was published in 1943.

 

 

In the next post we’ll look at why martial arts in general went off track and the implications for our training if we want to better understand how we should develop our training and also how we can better understand and analyse the  TaiJi / XingYi Forms (Xings).

 

 

 

 

#selfdefence #selfdefense #martialarts  #taijiquan #XingYiQuan #taichichuan #thirteendynamics #taichi #bubishi