Cultivating the Flood-Like Qi

Abstract

Cultivating the Flood-Like Qi Shuen-Fu Lin With Illustrations by Andrew G. Lin For some years now, to cultivate what the ancient thinker Mencius called the "flood-like qi" (Lau 1970, 77-78), I have used five workouts as warm-up exercises before I do my daily Taijiquan 太极拳 (hereafter abbreviated Taiji) solo routine. Specifically, they are: Fasting of the Mind (xinzhai 心斋), Primordial Undifferentiated Standing Pose (hunyuan zhuang 浑元桩), Level Arm Swing (pingshuai gong 平甩功), Bear Amble (xiongjing 熊经), and Bird Stretch (niaoshen 鸟申). At first, I thought these workouts would only be helpful in getting me into the swing of the routine. I soon discovered that if executed in accordance with the principles of the Taiji I had been practicing, these warm-ups could give me the same health benefits as my main routine, especially if I did them for a longer duration. This discovery led me to think that they could be practiced, not just as brief warm-ups, but as the main exercises. In fact, Primordial Undifferentiated Standing Pose and Level Arm Swing have for a long time each been practiced by many people to maintain health. These workouts have the advantage of requiring no equipment and even less space than Taiji to perform. I began studying Taiji in August 1969, the summer after I completed the second year in the Ph. D. program in Chinese Studies at Princeton University. At the time, I visited the Chinese School of Middlebury College and met Mr. Li, who had studied the 37-posture Taiji (shortened from the elaborate 108-posture Yang style sequence) with Master Zheng Manqing 郑曼青 (Cheng Man-ch'ing; 1902-1975) at the Tai Chi Chuan Association on Canal St., New York City. He gave me a copy of Zheng's book Zhengzi taijiquan zixiu xinfa 郑子太极拳自修新法 (Master Zheng's New Method of Taiji Self-Study). Authored by the Old Man of Five Kinds of Excellence (Wujue laoren 五绝老人), a master of Chinese poetry, calligraphy, painting, herbal medicine, and Taiji, the book included virtually everything Zheng had written [End Page 181] by 1967, including his brilliant "Master Zheng's Thirteen Treatises on Taiji" composed around 1946 and first published in Taipei in 1950. My exposure to this book had so profound an impact on me that in time I learned Zheng's 37-posture form to replace a form I had learned from another teacher several years prior to 1969 as my only daily regimen. In the academic year 1998-1999, Dr. S-Lain Liu 刘思量, a Fulbright scholar from Taiwan, became a visiting scholar at the University of Michigan's Center for Chinese Studies. Liu was a disciple of Master Wu Guozhong 吴国忠 (1932-2016), one of the most accomplished followers of Zheng during his last years. Liu offered a class on Taiji for interested members of the Center, and I could not let such a superb opportunity pass. Under his guidance, I learned the late style of Zheng's Taiji, which has become my daily regimen ever since. Taiji Energy and Center In 1967, Zheng said, "What I have learned in forty years can be summarized in a terse statement: take in the breath of heaven (i. e., nature), connect with the force of earth, and give people longevity with suppleness" (Zheng 1967, I.19). This can be regarded as Zheng's objective in teaching Taiji. About thirty years earlier, he said in "Thirteen Treatises on Taiji": "The unique feature of Taiji resides in sinking the qi 气 (breath, pneuma, energy) into the dantian 丹田 [elixir or cinnabar field]. Sinking the qi into the dantian is the starting work of Laozi's 'concentrating on the qi to attain suppleness.' As it is said, 'People are supple and weak when alive, but hard and stiff when dead.' From this we can see that the way to nurture life is nothing but to attain suppleness" (Zheng 1967, II. 14). Here Zheng takes lines from the Daode jing (Lau 1963, 14, 83) and puts them in the context of Taiji inner cultivation to define the uniqueness of this martial art. Next, he defines movement or yundong 运动, a term that consists of the word for "activate" or "wield" plus the term for "motion," in Taiji: "By 'activation precedes movement...