Master Ren Gang’s The Heart Treasure of Taijiquan (excerpt 3)
translated by Mattias Daly
I first met Ren Gang in the spring of 2011, when his disciple and good friend of mine, Zhong Yingyang, invited me to join them for an outdoor lunch in an orchard in suburban Shanghai, where the peach trees were in full bloom. Yingyang had already spoken to me of the long, circuitous route he took before arriving at Ren’s doorstep, and of the massive gulf between the “real” taijiquan Master Ren practices and teaches, and that which most other teachers are capable of presenting. At the time I still lacked the experience necessary to judge the merits of Yingyang’s opinions, and not having the chance to touch hands with Ren during the lunch, I found it difficult to believe that this fellow with a something of a polished gentleman’s air knew much about the fighting arts.
Later that year, Yingyang invited me to attend a lecture Master Ren delivered at the Natural Path Academy in eastern Shanghai. Ren shared stories about his and some of his teachers’ and grand-teachers’ paths, and a whole lot of philosophical ideas tied to Daoism and Buddhism. I enjoyed the storytelling and philosophizing, but Master Ren did not demonstrate his martial skills during the event, and I walked away convinced that he was propounding theories of little practical value. Nevertheless, I couldn’t write Ren off. At the time I was training Wudang martial arts under Master Gao Tieniao in People’s Park, and it so happened that a fellow student, Chen Peng, knew Ren Gang and had also personally studied under Ren’s teacher, the late Dong Bin. In addition to being able to perform martial arts forms with enviable grace, Chen Peng once gently twisted my wrist and made it almost impossible for me to move, even though I was not in any pain. After this, we got to talking about Dong Bin and Ren Gang. Chen Peng agreed that he found Ren’s theories nearly incomprehensible, and said he figured that most of Ren’s students were in the same boat. But, he said, while Ren’s words may be difficult to fathom, whatever he is doing is most definitely real. Chen Peng enjoined me to never to pass up the chance to touch hands with Master Ren should one arise. As it happens, some years later he formally became Ren’s disciple.
In 2013 I left Shanghai and returned to Beijing, nearly precluding any chance of finding my way to Ren Gang’s studio. In 2017 I returned to the US for six months, more or less convinced I had reached an impassable plateau in my internal martial arts training. I had by then failed to meet a teacher who could or would demonstrate to me the kind of skill described in Wang Zongyue’s Treatise on Taijiquan, and yet I was content to be thankful for what I had learned, and to simply keep practicing the things which clearly benefited my health. During this six-month period, a good friend and fellow alumnus of the Beijing University of Chinese Medicine, Jeff Chen, was living nearby in rural Connecticut. Since he had reached a similar plateau on his own path in martial arts, we began meeting once a week to train for as long as ten hours at a time. We put down almost all of the forms and techniques either of us had learned in our combined four decades of training, and instead began exploring internal martial arts principles in a completely pared-down manner.
To our shock, by removing everything but the fundamental points of taiji philosophy and the simple act of pushing on another human being, we began to be able to do things that seemed impossible. As the months wore on and our experience deepened, we became capable of dispatching with quite aggressive, full-strength attacks from one another by keeping the mind and the body empty. While ours was a controlled training environment and we were under no illusion that we could maintain the empty state in an unexpected brawl or in an MMA ring, we could see that we had at long last tapped into something that was more than mere imagination. And, to my further surprise, the language that we used to communicate our insights to one another began to sound more and more like the contents of the lecture I heard Ren Gang deliver in Shanghai six years prior.
I began digging up bits and pieces of Ren’s writings online, and it was clear that his words had simply flown over my head when I first heard them. Coincidentally, in 2016 Zhong Yingyang had asked me if I would be willing to translate Ren’s book. I sent him an email in the spring of 2018 to ask if Ren was still hoping to put out an English version, and Yingyang replied that he was. I was by then living in Taiwan, but I made a point of scheduling a stopover in Shanghai during my next work trip to China. On my first visit, Ren still gave off his trademark coiffed, vaguely aristocratic air, but I was no longer looking for the blatant signs of martial prowess an actor in the role of a kung-fu master might be expected to exude. After satisfying himself that my linguistic abilities were up to the task of rendering his book in English, Ren stood up and suggested we touch hands, to make sure I would get a feel for things that defy conveyance through words. As I document in detail in the many footnotes in this book drawn from sparring with Ren Gang, it was anything but a disappointing experience. I was terribly outmatched, not because of Ren’s size or strength or speed, but because of something else altogether. That something else, it is our hope, is pointed to as clearly as can be between the two covers of this book. To taste that something else, is to taste taiji.
-Mattias Daly
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://de.gofundme.com/…/translation-of-ten-discourses…
