Jesus, Jazz, and Buddhism

These words offered by Jay McDaniel ring true to me.  I, too, am interested in the energetic resonances that dwell within our bodies.  I have been practicing taiji for many years.  This practice is, for me, an ongoing experiment in feeling the resonances: in listening to the ground and swimming in the air. 

To my mind they go together: the listening and the swimming.  We swim in the air when we listen to the ground.  I will say more about this shortly, but I should first say who is writing here, and tell you something about my teachers.

I am an editor at a university press in the United States.  Practicing taiji quan has been an important part of my life for many years; but I should hasten to say that I’m not very good at it.  I’m not qualified to teach, I have zero martial prowess.  I can’t demonstrate the miraculous-seeming tifang, the “withdraw-attack” that sends an opponent flying with no expenditure of effort at all.  And I have no accumulation of qi so great as to be able to repel an attack before an opponent can even touch my body. 

But I have seen and experienced other people who can do these things at an advanced level of the practice; and I have had the wonderful good fortune to receive teachings through a remarkable person, Zheng Manqing, and through his senior students in New York, notably Ed Young and Maggie Newman.  I mention them because, above all, receiving the teaching is the important thing. 

Our taiji practice is very Neoconfucian.  Indeed, since the Song dynasty, all Confucianism has been “neo-Confucianism." This means that one of its first gifts to me was a surcease from the “gifted child” and “genius” notions in Western education: what matters is not individual skill but the study itself (though of course individual skill is not ignored)—the ru tradition is about human perfectibility, about the fact that anybody can listen to the teaching, experiment with it, use it to get somewhere in relation to where he started from. 

I started studying taiji when I was a graduate student at Yale, and I loved the fact that at one time our taiji group contained both the chair of the neurobiology department and a dishwasher from the faculty club—both altogether equal in our practice.  We were just trying to test each other in our basic human groundedness (or well, actually feeling for one another's lack of ground) but in that we were exploring the central Confusion virtue ren which we translated 'human-heartedness.'  One folk etymology I've heard glosses this character, which looks like 'man' conjoined with 'two,' through ren.   There was a lot of Ren in their relationship.  Ren, the character “man” plus “two,” is at the center of Neoconfucian practice.  One folk etymology I’ve heard glossed it, through the similarity of er “two” to the Western equal sign, as an absolutely equality of all individual people.  Another, more traditional one, uses the homology of ren with the word for the part of a seed that will germinate into a plant—you can find the tiny folded leaves if you split any peanut--as the part of a human being that can sprout into goodness.

In the taiji form (the sequence of postures one practices every day) the basic realization of the taiji diagram­­—that is to say, the picture of the universe as how yin and yang change into one another—lies in the alternation of weight from one foot to another. That diagram does, after all, present a very precise account of physical reality. Each moment when weight goes into the ground holds some lightness at its heart—just like the strange fact that one’s foot has an arch, so that one always puts one’s weight down into the ground through a physiological structure of springing up. And when sinking reaches its zenith, the other foot assets its connection, and its lightness becomes full, in turn.

Taiji is thus quite strictly and literally an instantiation of Wu wei er wu bu wei, “Do nothing and nothing will be left undone.”   It’s my own fancy, but in this beautiful Taoist phrase, one could say that yin and yang are at work in the language itself.  The first wu  is an “insubstantial word” or “syncategoremata” in the Latin languages, a word that has meaning only in relation to syntax.  It means “not.”  The second wu is a substantive, meaning “nothing.”  After Buddhism came into China, wu as a substantive was repurposed to signify “nonbeing,” thus changing the syntax and meaning of some passages in the Daodejing. 

But back to taiji as wuwei.  In the opening posture, one allows one’s weight to sink into one foot, and then the rest happens on its own.  Because one’s body is a concrescence of qi, allowing one’s weight to sink into a foot has consequences: the qi  of the body responds—in particular, the arms begin to raise.  It is the first of the infinite, moment-to-moment instances throughout the taiji form where the many become one, where if one thing moves (e.g., one’s knee bends and the weight sinks), all kinds of other things happen, in circles whose trajectories surprise you.  When one thing moves, everything moves.  The many become one, and the one becomes many, too. 

It’s a little bit—but only a little bit—like Buddhist walking meditation.  There, at least in the Theravadin forms I practice, in walking meditation one focuses on the weight being in one foot, and then being in the other foot. But if you have ever felt a bit off balance when doing walking meditation, you may be sensing, perhaps, what taiji has to add:  a lot more that happens when you put your weight in one foot.  The joints open up, the joints turn in the circular way that is natural to them (the taiji diagram, again), something substantial rises up in the arms to counter the substantial in the feet—then that movement of substantiality reaches its limit and starts to recede again as weight shifts to the other foot—and you’re off.

Not that you can feel this the moment you start practicing taiji.  Recall that I am an editor for a university press.  One of my authors took a few classes and said it made him realize he had “somatic dyslexia.” Well, so do we all, and this is one of the first things taiji teaches us. The legends say that some of the grand masters, including Professor Zheng mentioned above, began to learn after they had been very ill—and that their very success owed something to this fact, the fact that their bodies were in such bad shape that they offered no resistance to learning how the qi would move on its own. For the rest of us, let me appeal to the fact that we almost never stand on our own two feet, almost never fully feel the weight of our bodies sinking through our legs into the ground (hence the considerable pain and burning in the legs one experiences in practicing taiji). 

At the dawn of “Western” art a recognition of this can be observed in the shift from the hieratic pose of archaic statues to the contrapposto of classical Greek art—of figures whose weight is not dropping through their legs into their feet but being kept out of the ground by a complex interaction of tensions and counterpositions. Interestingly, in some Roman copies of Greek statues, this imbalance registers in the need to add discreet props of stone so that the whole thing wouldn’t just fall over. Those of us brought up in the “West” just do stand this way, and to study taiji is to begin the long journey of trying to learn to stand otherwise.[1]

It’s in part like a child who is just heaving himself upright. His legs are bent and his center of gravity is near the earth’s.  But unlike the child, who is usually “double-weighted” (not distinguishing between which foot is full, which empty) and thus will shortly topple down, the taiji player is also like a mobile, with the top of his head suspended from heaven and every portion of the ensemble of his body attentive to gravity and moving in response to that connection to gravity, and in connection to each of the other parts.

As Jay McDaniel said in the passage quoted earlier, one is becoming attentive to the non-human energetic resonances and prehensions in one’s own body.  One’s weight sinks into the earth through one’s foot, and in consequence a substantial arm rises up. When this reaches its point of fullness like a wave breaking on a beach, ah!, something develops out of the other foot. And then . . .

One of the origin myths of taiji is that it was created by a monk who had watched a snake defend itself against a bird. I believe this listening is encapsulated in the sequence of postures “grasp sparrow’s tail,” which repeats several times in the form I practice. It has a lovely formulation in canonical English literature, in Milton’s description of the serpent in Paradise Lost as “by indirections find directions out.” (Of course in Milton one is supposed to find this description negative—but set that aside here.)

So, listening with what? With the “energetic resonance”; in short, with the qi. And to what? Probably, in short, to the “energetic resonance”—the qi.  Traditional Chinese cosmology is deeply monist in that there is no difference at all between matter and “spirit,” “body” and “mind.”  The character xin, translated “heart-mind” but obviously a picture of a heart, is the traditional touchstone here. One does not feel this as discrete sensory perceptions, but one listens as an aggregate of many somatic sensings that do not resolve themselves into five senses. 

One of the instructions for the taiji form given in my school is “swimming in air.” As one listens to the weight dropping into the earth, and in consequence the qi filling up and then receding from parts of the body, like the motion of waves, one’s body becomes “lighter” and one can, supposedly (and this is easier on a humid summer day, when the air really is heavy), feel the air surrounding one—the air is, after all, qi—as a material medium, a source of resistance, through which one is moving the qi  of one’s own body, withdrawing from it, filling up against it.

Oh, but now it gets hard.  In taiji listening is not only listening to one's body and to the earth, it is also listening to other people.  Taiji is, after all, a martial art.  One first listens to other players as one imitates one’s teacher and practices the form with others. The body can pick up and perform things beyond what the mind with its words can formulate—sometimes for a little bit, sometimes for longer than one thinks—and one is trying to achieve this all the time in taiji.  In learning the form, one tries to match one’s moves to what the teacher is doing.  But above all, in doing the form with other students one is exhorted to “stick”—to let the movements of one’s body happen in response to the movements of their bodies, or better, to match a listening to the inner energetic resonances in one’s own body to a listening to what is going on in their bodies. It feels a bit like catching a wave. And of course not just the mythic origin story but the names of many postures—“Golden Cock Stands on One Leg,” “Bend Bow to Shoot Tiger,” “Pat the High Horse”—indicate that someone, somewhere, was listening both to animals and to the relationship of one’s own energy to animals when discovering those postures and making these names.

But the real crux comes in “push-hands,” the two-person exercise. And this is where one most likely will get deeply, permanently, and as a matter of lifelong agon, in touch with one’s somatic dyslexia.  The principle of push-hands isn’t that hard to grasp conceptually.  Given what I have said above about listening and principle in the taiji form, it is obvious enough: you put your postures—keeping all this stuff in mind, specifically the snake-fights-bird posture, grasp sparrow’s tail—in relation to another player’s postures, and then you let the other person’s body tell you how well you are doing. Oh wow, what a bummer.  I don’t know anyone -- and OK, I’ll admit to doing this practice for forty years -- who gets a lot of positive reinforcement at this point.  Perhaps only a very few.  At one level, the principle is like that of the medieval quintain, used for training in jousting. 

The quintain pivoted around a central pole (it was, in a way, a cross-cultural translation of the character zhong center); on one side was a target, which a jouster sought to hit; on the other side was a sandbag, which would pivot round and hit the jouster in the back if he forgot that martial movement happens in circles, that for each impetus there is a reverse impetus, and you’ve got to situate yourself in relation to them both.
            

Anyway, in push-hands, assuming one of the grasp-sparrow’s-tail postures, you put your hands (lightly) on your opponent’s joints (wrist and elbow initially), and then you try to listen—through your palms, through the soles of your feet, through the movement of your weight.  You are supposed to be listening to the movement of weight and qi in the other person’s body in relation to your own, the two less in balance than precisely listening for imbalance, which is the point at which you try to arrange it so that your transferals of weight and fullness “uproot” the other person.
            
And here’s where you start to get in touch with, and struggle with, and struggle again with, and  keep at it for years beyond count: the arrogance of contrapposto; the movements (e.g., aggression) that may come from chemical means outside the pure physics of taiji (e.g., adrenaline coursing into the blood as one gets in touch with one’s anxieties and fear of personal threat); quite simply, the utter stupidity of how we hold identity as a matter of muscular tension in eyes, and wrists, and in a frontal presentation of the torso. Of how our concrescing as subjects has registered for years and years as habits of tension and stiffness in our bodies, and how unnecessary and out of line with the physics of the world this is.
           
Let’s leave me struggling with push-hands, struggling to listen, to be pushed receptively (and to enjoy being pushed, because that’s the only way you learn), to hear the other, with the maxims and instructions of the form passing through my mind as my weight moves to and fro. Leave me not in harmony but, to borrow a small phrase (not the whole Apocalyptic whoopmaroll) from the last plate of Blake’s Jerusalem: “living going forth & returning wearied” in each week’s renewed attempt to sink my weight, to undo this block of recalcitrant tension in my hip, in living touch and hearing with people who are, not too precisely themselves, not actually of interest to me as concrescing subjects at all, but as poles (ji, you will recall, in taiji, means “ridgepole”) in the constant oscillation of my listening, of my attempt to learn, and who as such are the utterly necessary means through which I can be called outside myself into that shared space of learning. (That is, for me, the essence of Confucianism.)

Let me end with a few words about the two-person practice that at the moment I practice the most: dueling with the taiji sword (which is, pretty much, just a piece of wood).  In homage to one of my own favorite theologians, Catherine Keller, let me begin with a fantasized creation story, to counter Genesis 2. 

In this fantasized story, the human beings (let us call them Adama, nonetheless) are not made out of clay. Rather, Darwin-style, they rear up in their flesh the knowledge of the animals, all of whom, like them, formed out of ground.  But instead of, in their first act, attaching names to the animals, the human beings feel their feet of clay root in the “bubbling spring” acupuncture point where their feet touch the earth.  Then they feel themselves sprout upright, really, almost without intention, like the trees with which God graced the garden. And after their head, via the “mud pill” acupuncture point, has then communed with heaven, they realize that they are both plant and animal.  They are, in fact, a triad with heaven and earth (the position of the human in traditional Chinese cosmology).  They bend their knees, sink some weight into the earth, and then, as their hips rotate, reach out and wrap a newly freed paw as fingers around a stick, straighten up, relax a bit further into the other hip, and feel the energy course out of earth and into heaven through their body then through the stick—out for three miraculous feet beyond their body—and then course back again as it recedes, and circle, as the hip relaxes and turns, and then course out again . . . And at some point they give a great whoop or sigh, one like the cries of all the other living beings (say, especially, the birds), and they feel that life is good.

Ach, teknê, you may say.  But this is what humans do, and it is incredibly fun (though of course also incredibly difficult) to listen to all this—the movements of the qi, the distribution of weight in another person’s body, that person’s martial intentions—through a little bit of stick that you pick up, invest with your qi through the sword form, then set against their stick and listen. As quietly as you can—if there is a sound of wood against wood, you aren’t hearing properly. My, it’s certainly surprising what circles there are that you don’t anticipate, and to survive you must have a serious continuing discipline of trying to hear, and to anticipate, and balance in the circles and fluctuations in the weight and all that follows that are your, well—um gee. What word would you offer here? Not “body.” “Energetic resonance”? But by then, if I’m really working at it, things start gradually moving away from being “me.” The foot becomes substantial as the weight sinks into it, the arm fills up (really hard for me—women aren’t supposed to be substantial in this culture), then it reaches the point where the wave would curl and crash, and the insubstantial foot takes on a new sensing in the metamorphosis . . . and then weight, well gravity, physics, ground, and the joy reaching out through that piece of wood.

           

[1] See the wonderful book The Expressiveness of the Body and the Divergence of Greek and Chinese Medicine, by Shigehisa Kuriyama (New York: Zone, 2002).  The traditional Chinese representation of the body is, of course, not a contrapposto stance with lots of well-defined exterior muscles but a bag with the microcosm—mountains, rivers, etc.—inside.

My sincerest thanks to Jay McDaniel, both for inspiring me to write this and for his sagacious help in opening up its beginning and excellent suggestions throughout.