There’s a Daoist teaching story about a farmer who found a horse running wild that no one claimed, so he kept it as a ‘freebie’. His neighbours were all jealous of his good fortune and said he must be really happy to have received something so expensive for nothing at all. His response was “maybe”.
After a while, his son learned how to ride the horse. But eventually he fell off and broke his leg. This time the farmer’s neighbours came by to offer their condolences. When they told him that he had been unlucky, his reply was “maybe”.
Before his son’s leg healed, a press gang came through the village looking for fit young men to take off to war. They checked out the farmer, decided he was too old then dismissed the son because of his leg. The neighbours again went to the farmer and told him that he was lucky. Again he said “maybe”.
One of the issues this story raises is the importance of understanding that there can be many different ways of looking at a specific situation. It isn’t essential to know what exactly the other possibilities are, but just to know that there could be other ways of understanding something. The farmer didn’t know that his son would break his leg and probably had no idea that an army press gang would show up in the village afterwards. But he did understand that getting a free horse might not be an unmixed blessing, and, that his son’s broken leg might be a cloud with a silver lining.
It’s the same thing when you practice something like taijiquan. You really don’t know whether or not a specific way of doing things is right and it’s important to be willing to suspend judgement and just try something to see if it works.
One practical example of this is my experience with the lotus kick. At one time I used to pump up on the ball of my foot in the belief that I was storing tension in the tendons that run along the spine and release it when my other leg rose up and swung across in front of me. By doing this, I was able to kick quite high and put a lot of ‘umpf’ into it. Moreover, I had seen others in various martial arts films do the same thing.
Later on, someone asked how to focus power into a lotus kick on-line and I suggested this way of doing it. Someone else I believed deserved my respect pooh-poohed this answer in a comment. He said that you can have just as much power with your foot flat on the ground without the loss of stability that comes from rising up on the ball of your foot. I decided to put some work into doing it this way, and I found that while I couldn’t get my other leg as high in the air doing it this way, it seemed that I did have greater stability and if anything, more force in the kick.
The importance of this anecdote doesn’t have to do with a specific move. Indeed, the lotus kick is probably one of the least useful moves in the taijiquan open-hand set. The important point was how I responded to criticism. I didn’t get angry (I’m not saying I’m a saint---just in this particular instance, I did the right thing), instead I listened to the alternative explanation as an opportunity to learn, and then put in the time practicing to see which was the better way of doing it.
This is one of those situations where a person can learn a lesson from studying a martial art and apply to the rest of her life.
Please note, however, that having an open mind isn’t the same thing as giving up any attempt to be skeptical about a given set of beliefs, or, never developing your own way of doing things. Instead, it’s about being willing to try something different in order to see how well it works. And you can’t do that if you have developed a belief system that implies that you already know it all.
This raises another point that needs to be mentioned.
If you are one of those very few who really get into taijiquan as a part of your life, there is often an urge to start to teach it to others. This is not a selfish thing. You found something that really helped, and, you have good intent towards others, so you want to share with them. Unfortunately there are three problems with this initial interest.
First, odds are that you don’t know as much as you think you do. You probably have found out something new about yourself, but that doesn’t mean that you can generalize from that to anyone else. People really are different, they have different lives, and, different problems. Unless you have deep knowledge of humanity, you simply aren’t going to know enough to diagnosis problems in their physical and psychological make up. Medical doctors put years into training, and they really don’t know much more than a tiny fraction of the different things that afflict their patients. Where does the newbie taijiquan player have a chance to do more than show other people the set and suggest that they have to figure it out for themselves?
Second, as a form of Daoist meditation, taijiquan suffers from the same problem that bedevils all forms of meditation: your ego fights back against any attempt to gain control over it.
When I was going through years of intensive sitting meditation, I went through various phases that are common to many people. At one point I went through excruciating pain that caused tears to roll down my cheeks and puddle in my lap---making it look like I’d wet myself afterwards. At another point, I kept falling asleep---whether or not I had gotten enough sleep lately. I also had vivid, wild hallucinations that involved strange experiences and even what seemed to be genuine psychic phenomenon.
The teachings I had studied on the subject told me that these were ‘Devil Illusions’ or ‘Makyo’. They are things that the mind throws at you to divert you from your ultimate goal. In the case of sitting meditation, the goal is that of seeing yourself as you really are instead of how believe yourself to be. I stuck with the practice and refused to fixate on any of these distractions, and they all eventually went away on their own.
I think it’s much the same thing with regard to urge to teach taijiquan. Once you make any progress in it, your ego will attempt to stop it from changing the way you live in the world. One of the ways it does this is by cranking up the idea that you want to become a teacher. But just like my pain etc went away while doing sitting meditation---I also eventually lost the urge to found a school and teach classes.
One last point needs to be learned. Taijiquan isn’t for everyone. In fact, it’s for almost no one. The gain can be enormous for some people. But the costs are also extremely large. To really benefit from it, you have to put in long hours over many years. And if you do get it, that work changes you.
Any long-term practice that helps you see yourself more clearly and objectively will set you at odds with the world around you. Our society is based on brute force and routinely crushes anything that is subtle, gentle, or, wise. Once you really attempt to understand the deeper elements of human movement, you will invariably begin to notice similarly hidden currents in both human psychology and our society at large. And once that process begins, you will be doomed to see all the horror that most of us have become oblivious to through habituation.
The "maybe" outlook is one of the most valuable lessons I have learned from the Dao. A lifetime of obsession over control and outcomes is slowly giving way to just letting things unfold they way the will and trusting things will be alright in the end (tempered by the knowledge that we are all ultimately mere straw dogs).
I wish I had some of the insight in the latter half of the piece before I became a schoolteacher for a short time - but then again I am now convinced there were reasons for that happening even though it didn't work out for me in the end. I don't even have to know what they were; it just feels better sometimes not beating myself up so much for the questionable decisions I've made.