If you are the kind of person who believes that what is said in poetry could be said a lot simpler and more to the point, then you are not going to like this article. Because my contention is the opposite: that there are analogies, similes, metaphors and other devices of communications that are actually the most efficient because they allow the finest degrees of shading.

For instance the instructor, George Xu, likes to talk about the sea and the boats. When he tells people to move their arms he says these are like the boats. And the sea (body) moves boats. The boats (limbs) do not move themselves. This is a great analogy. It is great for a number of reasons, one of which is because not only is it true for Kung Fu, but also because it depersonalizes things. He doesn’t say that your biceps should alter to a 14 degree angle while your psoas engages in  cantilevered actions … In one sense, this is very precise and in another very inaccurate, because it does not represent the total action. It is precise in its naming but inaccurate in that it cannot represent the total action.

There are, in CMA, many analogies which people assume are poetic. For example: “When you move, you should move like the wind.” There are at least two specific points being made here. The first is that when the wind moves, it all moves together. Any real wind is moving as a totality. In fact, it is wind just because all the air is moving together.

The second point in the comparison is that when it moves, the wind goes around everything. It cannot be stopped. It flows around everything. Sometimes you will hear the expression, “Wind through a forest,” meaning  that the trees do not stop the wind. They stop everything else but the wind just adapts and flows around them. This is one famous analogy.

Another, from the classical elements, involves the idea of wood. The idea of wood is that is grows, and as it grows it seeks. Now this is an excellent analogy because many times in Kung Fu practice, when you are uprooting then throwing someone, you are doing it with so-called Growing Energy (Sheng Jin). Why this must be more like a root than a human being is revealed in the inability to analyze your way through  your opponent’s defenses. Instead, you have to expand and find the leaks. Or, more properly, your body will flow INTO the leaks and thereby accomplish its purpose.  Again, the analogy is better than the description—as you can tell from what you are reading right now.

A third well-known one is “to stand like a mountain.”  Again we have to see this as a Chinese concept. We know that a mountain is strong and Yang. But the idea also refers to the caves in the mountain. So what they are talking about is to stand firmly but with the potential for Yin inside the Yang that allows changes such as movement, shifting and internal adaptation. A good example might be to stand in a horse stance so firm that anyone can barely move you, but then to act, when you feel like moving, so fluidly you disappear as though you were collapsing into the Yin then re-forming somewhere else.

This, again, is an analogy based upon observations of Nature. Not physics, certainly, but still canny observations of the natural world. They are applied to human beings not only to teach them what to do, but to get them out of that distinctly claustrophobic way of thinking that human beings engage in when they envision themselves.

Photos by Debbie Shayne, of course