Tai Chi is the Deadliest Art
Tai Chi Chuan is probably the most overlooked art on the list of deadly arts. Oh, people do that when they are old, or for health, or any other number of reasons. Yet, after studying a wide variety of arts for over forty years, the truth of the matter, I’m convinced that Tai Chi has the most potential in a fight.
The first thing one should know is that Tai Chi does not make powerful the body. What it does is make powerful the space of the body. When you do one of those slow postures you are feeding awareness into the body, and, eventually, you reach the conclusion that all that meat and bone and stuff is merely a space within the universe.
This leads us to the rather intriguing concept of how do you hit somebody with space? Actually, it is easier to hit with space than with a body, if you aren’t stuck in the notion that the body is a bunch of meat. It is far easier to perceive and move the space of body when you understand that the body is merely a portion of space.
You aren’t sending a message through the nerves to move a muscle to move a mass of bone and meat to collide with a chin somewhere over there. Instead, you are outside the space, almost puffing on it with your desire. And the space of you, without being locked into any of the mechanical pieces, moves quickly and efficiently to collide.
The fact of the matter is that you are colliding, you don’t strike or hit with Tai Chi. And, when you perceive the body as space you have so many other weapons to choose from that striking is usually not the weapon of choice. Indeed, striking is rarely the weapon of choice of a good Tai Chi-ist.
What is fun is to harmonize your space with the space of another and unbalance it. That is a handy art of tremendous value, and it is, quite honestly, much more fun than bashing the meat of your fist upon the bone of his cranium. The trick is to shift your space so that the incoming missile misses, and adjust the trajectory and relativity of the involved spaces so that no more attacks can be forthcoming.
If he draws hand back, his space retracts, which is a direction, which can be wafted away with a puff of intention. If he pushes, his space expands, which is a direction, which can be sucked past with a twist and a puff of intention. Indeed, the poor fellow, stuck on the plane of two feet, has no possible defense or attack against something which isn’t there, which is what the definition of space is.
To strike is a concept that is done through meat and bone. Space, however, doesn’t have any meat and bone to get in the way, so the decisions made of space are ten times faster than decisions made of meat. The really, funny thing about all this is that your body can’t be destroyed when you realize that it is space, for how can you destroy nothing?
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