Zhang Sanfeng – Tai Ji
Awareness
To have a life means to be sensitive, to be aware of more.
If you can’t be delicately and sensitively aware of your body, then you are not aware of life.
If you don’t take awareness of your body as your main value, you are blind to the principal of life.
To develop your body in this way is to be more sensitive and therefore more aware. Until your whole body is under your conscious control, you cannot make yourself light, sensitive, and delicate, feeling all your nerves awaken and be united as one.
Those who have a strong force, strong desire, or strong passion also have a stronger temper, and temper is power. When temper is out of control, it destroys you, but when temper is in control it provides an unlimited force that you can use. So your temper, excitement, and liveliness have to remain fresh and exciting.
Energy comes from the source of your excitement towards life, which creates what Buddhism calls desire (chi in Daoism), which is the movement of energy.
The movement of energy in your body is like having non-physical eyes. You can awaken your consciousness and nerves. You can feel the energy flow inside your body as if your awareness were your eyes. You can “see” every part of your body. You can find where there is tension and then release it, where you are unbalanced and then restore it. Your consciousness will develop this inner observation ability, making you aware from inside and out, from every angle, so your life is complete.
Most people are not able to be aware of their life; this causes them to want to grab and that causes a lack of balance. If you develop your awareness and find the contentment of your original essence energy, original force, desire, temper and passion towards life, and make them all full around you in a less-tension lifestyle, your consciousness will develop higher. You will be properly aware of gravity and the energy that comes from the ground. You will connect this to your feet and absorb it into your centre, controlled by your waist, and change to any angle to flow and explode with power.
This is the first part of Tai Chi.
Self-God Awareness
Westerners believe that health is mostly to do with biology. However, Daoists and Buddhists understand that behind the physical body there is a true force of life.
Daoism calls this Self-God Awareness. To develop your life is to awaken that power, to make your senses unlimited; to make the unlimited happen is to be sensitive and light. The goal of Tai Chi is to train the whole body to be without tension, light and free.
True Fight
The highest martial arts level is to understand that whoever has the higher awareness ability will win. This means knowing how to trick your opponent, how to pretend, how to make your body free from tension so it will automatically and perfectly follow your intention to trick them. Up is down, left is right, and forward is back. The order of your movements can change at any time. You need to achieve a state in which you confuse your opponent perfectly so they can no longer read your movements, intention, and facial expression.
Always unite your power from the foot, but don’t let them see where that force comes from or how it moves, so they cannot predict how you will use it. Train yourself to be so sensitive that if a fly landed on your hair, each strand would experience a billion different details of awareness about the fly. Make your awareness sharp and be aware of the space so completely that your opponent’s weight, movement, and position are all part of your intuitive calculation.
The best way to create strength is to move like a whip, solid at the handle (your foot), flexible through the centre (your torso), with all the power exploding at the tip (your hand). The whip curves and flows, so it is harder to predict where it will go and there is no straight line to avoid. Let all the energy flow freely through your body, without being blocked by tension.
The best way to fight is to make your body abstract, but that abstraction must be free to change. At one moment, you are as still as a mountain. At the next, you move as lightly as steam. There is no way for your opponent to predict what your next move will be.
If your intention, body language, and facial expression perfectly mirror your opponent, they can’t read you. You are a mystery to them.
Tai Chi is also called Shadow Boxing. If they don’t move, you don’t move; if they move, then you move to a position that is bad for them and good for you. You don’t create any intention to move, you just match your opponent completely. When you feel their weakness, attack it. Stick to their force with Magnetic Technique and let yourself be sucked into their power at a 45° angle, destroying their attack.
To reach such a high level of awareness you have to feel your centre, or dantien. When you understand how that centre is related to gravity and how to move the power up from that centre, the centre will develop an awareness that reacts to your surroundings. Your centre will match the speed and movement of your opponent so you don’t even have to think about moving your body. Instead, you can use your brain power for tricking your opponent.
The true master of high-level martial arts can win even at slow speeds: it is a question of angles. The less distance you have to move, the less time it will take; shorter timing beats faster speed. If you have this kind of awareness, no-one can defeat you.
Tai Chi is not about being strong and fast, it is about wisdom. At the highest level, you can use almost no power, feeling and using only your opponent’s power.
Addition: Sifu once said, a master needs only two things to beat his opponent, his eyes and his feet.
When you do move, you should move like a puma: graceful, sinuous, and powerful.
If you make your consciousness completely aware of your intention, you will see the future before it happens. High-level martial artists are aware of the outcome of any fight. The highest-level martial artists can judge the strength of their opponent from observing just one breath. When the breath is almost silent, it is an indication of a high-level opponent.
Make your body look like it always has a particular pose, but have no tension in that pose and keep yourself free to flow to any other pose. This will help you to master shadow boxing, so that you can match and flow into any pose. If you create tension in your pose, you will not be able to match your opponent.
The healing technique of high consciousness martial arts is to be able to sensitively feel energy moving through the body. Because the awareness is so delicate, you can feel the smallest tension block and use your awareness to release it.
