4.7 Ronin
When it comes to the pseudo-martial component of Tai Chi training the go to method is push hands, as the qualities trained in Tai Chi are of most use at the point of contact. But what happens when you have nobody to push?
In feudal Japan there was the concept of a ronin. A ronin, literally translated as 'a person of the waves', was a type of samurai who had no lord or master and in some cases, had also severed all ties with his clan. A samurai becomes a ronin upon the death of his master or loss of favor. Wikipedia reliably informs us that in modern Japanese society, the term is usually used to describe a salaryman who is unemployed or a secondary school graduate without a university place. Both lucky escapes in our opinion. The ronin concept definitely resonates with us and has much in common with the reasons we started our own less that conventional association and school. And this concept permeates all aspects of our lives where what is conventional often seems somewhat ridiculous, now more than ever in our post-truth society. It’s almost as if truth is now culturally alien, like stepping in to the most foreign environment you can imagine where every gesture doesn’t hold meaning or correct meaning for you, everything lacks context. That makes it somewhat more understandable and less frustrating when the people around you can’t see for looking. But we digress, back to all things martial….
Aiki jiu jitsu founder Sagawa Yukiyoshi was renowned for his internal power and combative abilities, defeating all comers. Historic accounts have his father being his only training partner and his legendary power primarily acquired by repeatedly working a single drill, which still features in contemporary Aikido training as ‘aiki age’ where you may have seen it before. It’s a hard one to describe (and easy to call bullshit on), check it out for yourself on YouTube or better still find a skilled Aikidoka to demonstrate on you.
Push hands is the main currency when it comes to meet ups between Tai Chi practitioners, but this has proven to not be particularly helpful in terms of style politics because few schools play by the same rules. So these kind of exchanges given their lack of knock out decisiveness have often ended in differing accounts of events and accusations of poor sportsmanship. As much as rolling around with other sweaty people on mats of questionable cleanliness doesn’t appeal (this is an opinion we’re unusually divided on, we have all done some form of wrestling and one of our number still trains), BJJ has done a fantastic job of having a fairly universal competitive system where nobody has to have their face ruined prior to their Monday morning meeting.
As referenced above we have all trained combat sports so know what it is like having a wriggling mass on the end of your arms. In fact being well versed in clinch wrestling makes it all the harder to adopt a push hands format with all of its nuances because ultimately you could muscle your way to a win when rightly or wrongly, that has been declared not to be the point.
So what do we do when we meet up? Well we do some zhan zhuang focusing on the energetic component, because an energetic experience as a group is a very different one. You can take turns leading the group which can vary from just a quick kicking off instruction and keeping an eye on a timer to talking everybody through a meditation or pathworking. If you’re deep in the world of energy work you could do a partner exchange where you can can try a transmission, flavouring it in various ways (elemental etc.) and ask for feedback. That of course isn’t everybody’s cup of tea.
Our main forms of physical play are firstly free form movement. As you will be aware if you have worked our training material or been brave enough to keep up with our ramblings on this blog, we ditched the traditional family style forms some time ago and now only play with something that is not dissimilar in principle to jian wu from Yiquan. So when the group gets together this element normally takes the form of a circle where everybody takes their turn to get in the middle and show the kind of movement ideas they have been working on. Basically a b-boy battle for the middle aged :-) We joke but that is actually a really good analogy. It’s fun and you play off each other’s ideas. You can even put some tunes on if you want.
The final part of our suite of partner work (which fills the void of having no push hands) is striking hands. Of course san shou can be translated roughly in the same way but that is generally used to refer to self-defence applications or the sport of San Shou which sits somewhere between Kick Boxing and Muay Thai. Our in-house terminology for striking hands practice is ‘Four Element Hands’. Because very rudimentally speaking, a strike corresponds to the fire element where as water, air and earth correspond with inside/outside blocks, upwards blocks and downward blocks respectively. This also somewhat sits in the periphery of the float/sink/spit/swallow paradigm from the Hakka arts, something we will address in a future blog post or training package. What makes the game or dance format of Four Element Hands so easily adoptable and politics free is that it is semi-cooperative so you are not looking to win as such. That being said, going back to our breakdancing analogy, if your partner pulls out some cool moves you are going to give them a knowing nod and smile to acknowledge they have played the game well. Fundamentally, all you are doing in this game is feeding techniques (fist, palm or animal shape for example) and allowing your partner to deflect and counter. It is done at the speed of a Tai Chi form (albeit there is some ebb and flow either side of that pace) and as such is a game that everybody can learn and enjoy in seconds. Higher levels of skill are attainable by perfecting footwork, adding in kicking, attacking the different gates, and varying techniques with the most advanced practicioners inbuing their techniques with elemental energy to the point it is tangible to the recipient.
Interestingly, highly skilled Karateka who have come to Tai Chi later on in their martial arts career have often settled on a version of push hands which is much more practical and includes close range striking. Many high profile professional fighters no longer engage in high intensity striking in the gym. Not only to prevent damage, but when you are working in that fear/anxiety zone you are not learning. When you are in that ‘play’ zone the body and brain are developing.
What makes our practice different from the “chasing hands” trap (excuse the pun) that bad Wing Chun can fall in to is that as with most things we do, what we are chasing is the feeling of the energy and the moment. On a serious note you are developing distance and timing skills but with awareness that combat sports or real life violence does not look like a slow motion kung fu movie.