Master Ren Gang’s The Heart Treasure of Taijiquan (excerpt 4)
translated by Mattias Daly
The passage below comes from Ren Gang’s ‘The Heart Treasure of Taijiquan’ translated by Mattias Daly and available on our website with free shipping worldwide at the reasonable price of 20 USD:
https://purplecloudinstitute.com/…/the-heart-treasure…/:
Straightening the waist is done to establish the body’s center of command—its only goal is to ensure that the waist is capable of controlling the whole body. If the waist is straightened unto a point of stiffness, other parts of the body will not be able to relax, so excessive straightening is mistaken. If you keep it firmly in mind that straightening the waist is done in order to facilitate a state of song and openness throughout the whole of your body, as well as to create a fulcrum and center of command for your body, then any sort of zhanzhuang posture is just fine!
When straightening the waist, the mingmen area is pulled upwards and towards the front of your body. There is no basis to the assertion that the mingmen area should be pushed outwards.
The deciding factor when it comes to whether or not your taijiquan practice will allow you to “enter the door” lies in the waist. The process of developing the waist is more or less as follows: first you straighten out the mingmen area so that it becomes the controller and governor of your entire body, capable of supporting your own body weight in addition to external forces coming from opponents. In time, just below the mingmen (at a distance of one finger width or so) a small region that obviously commands and governs the body will slowly make its presence known. After it has appeared, you then train in using it to lift and make song your entire body.
If you attempt to lift your whole body via the mingmen as I just described from the very beginning, it is very likely that you will mistakenly angle your waist upwards and backwards, thereby slamming shut the door to the internal martial arts. There is no shortage of people out there who train taijiquan incorrectly. A big part of the reason they are looked down upon by practitioners of other martial arts is that they lack unimpeded, integral power. Much in the way that a lion cub is given a wide berth by other animals in spite of being far from realizing its potential strength and grandeur, a person who has truly “entered the door” will not be looked down on, even if he or she has a long way to go before mastery.
Your doubts and confusion will vanish the day you enter the door. If, after five or six years of training, you are still plagued by doubt, then there is no question that the path you have taken is mistaken. Five or six years of dedication to external martial arts, grappling arts, or boxing will produce a level of proficiency. Even more should this be the case with taijiquan, which is one of the crown jewels of the internal martial arts!
In sum, as soon as you catch a glimpse of the real, you will be left with no more room for uncertainty. If uncertainty continues to haunt you, this simply means you have yet to encounter authentic taijiquan.
Post-Scriptum: Mattias Daly is already working on his next publication, entitled ‘Ten Discourses on Daoist Alchemy’. If you wish to support Mattias’ endeavor to make more classics available to English speaker, please visit:
https://www.gofundme.com/…/translation-of-ten…/donate
Post-Post-Scriptum: Three more excerpts of the former work can be accessed here。
