When I write this book, I do not expect readers to read it as a novel. I have tried to describe how to learn taijiquan first from the basics, advancing slowly to more demanding and complicated techniques, based on Taiji (tai chi)principles. For the novices, they should practise the techniques taught in one chapter thoroughly before they proceed to the next chapter.
If they do follow the guidance in this book chapter by chapter, they should be ready to embark on the next stage which is to convert their whole body mass into fluid.
I have mentioned in Chapters 6 and 9 that you should develop the feeing that your body is full of water. However, the water inside your body is not stagnant but instead it flows in the direction as dictated by your mind. Just imagine that there is water flowing from your head down through your neck, the chest, the abdomen, and then through the two legs. When the water reaches the feet, you should feel that the water evaporates and becomes steam which rises through your body and causes the body to expand. The steam is in fact the bounce from the ground of the weight of your body.
The reasons why you have to think of other substances to replace your body and your arms are:
a. if you wish to raise your arms, you cannot help moving your arms upwards because you are used to using your muscular power to do this. On the other hand, if you imagine that your arms are two long rubber tubes filled with water, your arms will immediately become very heavy. This is because while your brain can control your arms, it cannot control two rubber tubes attached to your body. Your inability to move the two rubber tubes attached to your body will strengthen your use of your mind to control the different parts of your body. Therefore in order to move or ‘float’ the two rubber tubes, your have to try very hard to ‘sink’ your body; this means that you have to concentrate and move the weight of your body through your spine down to your feet.
b. Many of the muscles that you have to move are involuntary muscles. You can only control them at will after a long period of practice. If by imagination you replace some of your body parts with some other substances, eg, water, you will able able to feel and manipulate such substances more easily with your mind than the involuntary muscles in your body. This in turn helps the control of the different parts of your body.
There is another and more important reason why you should imagine that your body is filled up with water.
When water drains from a basin, there is a swirl at the plughole (not because of the coriolis force as many people mistakenly believe). Just imagine that the ‘water’ inside your body flows through your feet onto the ground with a swirl, like the water that is draining through a plughole in a bathtub. This would result in your body weight being directed from your body onto the ground without actually moving any part of your body. This would bring about the bouncing effect as I have described in detail in Chapter 13. If you can imagine that the weight of your body comes into contact with the ground in a swirl just like the water draining from a basin, the bouncing effect from the ground up to your feet and then your legs through your body up to your head will also have a swirling effect.
The swirl of the bouncing effect, coupled with the rotation of your body and arms as described in the previous chapter, will strengthen your attack against your opponent.
It is not easy to master what I have described in this chapter. However, with practice and persistence, you will be able to feel the downward swirl when you place the weight of your body on the ground as well as the upward swirl when the weight of your body bounces back from the ground.
Master WANG, my teacher, says that substances can be either in a state of being or in a state of non-being. However, taijiquan is in a state between being and non-being. You may not believe that the weight of your body can flow downwards on the ground in a spiralling manner, but after some practice, the feeling will come. However, you cannot find or see it as it is only a feeling – BUT the effect of this feeling is great as it increases your fighting capability by several times.
Apart from using imaginary water to assist you in removing all the stiffness in your body and to render your body relaxed and elastic, you can also use water to assist you in playing taijiquan so that your movements resemble waves. I will talk about this later.
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