I thought I might do a post on a well known Form-Intent Boxing (Xing Yi Quan) training routine. This is just the first part, as my time permits I will be finishing it, but I wanted to get part of it up to get the thread going so to speak.
Take care,
Brian
Xingyiquans 5 Elements Linked form
Introduction
Forms in Chinese martial arts serve many purposes and each form has a specific idea or concepts that it is trying to get across to the practitioner. Xingyi forms certainly follow this, but---although one will sometimes find discussions, often very good discussions, of how individual moves within forms are correctly done, what is far less common is concrete discussions of what the form is trying to teach in a broader sense. Note my emphasis on concrete discussions, vague talk is often the norm, but vague talk is not particularly helpful to the development or preservation or learning of traditional Chinese martial arts.
So—let me present some concrete ideas I have concerning a fairly standard version of Xingyiquans 5 Elements Linked form. At the outset I need to be honest about something. The views I express in this article are mine. I am not claiming that what I say here is traditional xingyiquan “doctrine” from a specific school (e.g. Hubei, Honan, Shanxi or wherever) nor is it the specific teaching of a teacher (Li Tsun-I or Sun Lu Tang or Di Guo Yong or Hung Yi Hsuing or anyone else.) It is my view of things. What I have come to call Guang Ming Li xingyi, named after the village here in Taiwan where I have been working on my system.
I realize too that ones view of things changes over the years. My view of 5 Forms Linked was different when I was 25 years old and first learned it, then 35, then 45 and now at 49 years old. My view changes (hopefully it is evolving for the better, but in any event it is changing).
I use western boxing vocabulary and concepts when I talk about xingyi. This often drives Internal Chinese martial arts purists nuts. They will claim that the original Chinese language terms (qi, jing, song and all the rest) ought to be used because xingyi is different that western boxing and that the terms reflect some unique Chinese way of doing things. I simply disagree. Movement is movement, generating power via human motion is the same in Qing China as it is in the Los Angeles Boxing gym circa 2007. Well, this is not the place to debate that, but simply I am saying I will use western boxing vocabulary.
The illustrations I use come from Jiang Rong-qiao’s 1934 manual on the form. I use them because I have them at hand, they are in the public domain and they are reasonably clear and show a basic stock version of the form. Okay then enough preliminaries, turning to the form.
Specific Goals of this form
There are in my analysis three major practical goals with this form:
First: the form is about as long as the average street fight, it is teaching you to go all out, balls to the wall, for about 90 seconds. I really like this form for that reason, not too long, not too short, just the right length of time. The lesson here is you gotta be able to go full tilt for about a minute and a half to two minutes. Gas in a fight=lose. And lose on the streets=(maybe) die.
Second, this form is teaching you to throw combos, to put it in Mike Tyson terms to combonate your punches. The very first two moves of the form, the Pi Quan (splitting fist) and the Beng Quan (crushing fist) are in fact a jab-cross. And there are a number of other 1-2 and 1-2-3 combos in the form.
Third, this form teaches you that all important idea, hands up, chin down, jab. The opening three moves are specifically designed to train this core reaction.
Those are, in my analysis, the three combat ideas that this form is designed to teach. On a more mental level Di Guoyang Laoshi (a very respected xingyiquan teacher in China whose books have been outstandingly translated by Andrea Falk) mentions three other goals of this form. And I agree with him. He writes:
A this form teaches you to have a brave air
B. this form teaches a chase the wind and the moon spirit
C. this form teaches you to use different rhythms and speeds
I will talk about these more mental goals a bit later.
Important Note about the pictures!
Chinese is read right to left (opposite of english which is left to right) and so the illustrations are seemingly backwards. For example the first two illustrations, picture one is on the right and then the second move is on the left.
Move Number one (on the right, the guy with his hands at his side) is called the Wu Ji posture. Wu Ji is a Daoist philosophical term that refers to the cosmological state before there was any split into yang and yin. On a more mundane physical note, this is the preparatory posture. One thing that is often overlooked, and I am quite guilty of this too, is blowing off this initial move as unimportant. In fact, in many ways this opening move is the most important move in the form. The reason being that it is in this posture that you do two things:
Mentally calm yourself—and mental calm is not just for the space hippies, fighters need mental calm too.
Align your posture—static alignment is given too much attention in most discussions of internal Chinese martial arts but, nonetheless, it does matter and it is in this first posture that you internally review your alignments.
Okay then, I need to close for now. I will pick this back up when I get a chance. In the meantime, what things would others add?
Take care,
Brian
