256. Genchitaofu Baguazhang’s Shen-hood - 艮氣道福八卦掌の神方向

The Way through Baguazhang - 八卦掌道

At some point in the baguazhang practitioner’s journey along the Tao, there comes a moment when the practice of baguazhang loses its glamour and the practitioner will quit. This isn’t a case of things getting too hard, but rather it is becoming too easy and in a sense it loses its challenge. When this happens it is because deep down inside the baguazhang practitioner has been persisting in trying to learn the style as if it were an external martial art, where all the physical experiences come from the outside in. Now, just to be clear, this does not happen to all baguazhang practitioners. Only to those not wishing to face the truth of what baguazhang is, and sometimes to those who have learnt a bagua form as part of a martial family or clan style. For a real baguazhang practitioner, getting to the place where the physical movements become easy to do is just the start of what lies ahead for them, because now they must confront a world in which those same skills will be tested in ways usually not foreseen by the practice itself. Most baguazhang practitioners will go into this situation blind, but a few will study the I-Ching 易經 and the Bagua 八卦 for guidance on what comes next. While someone may disagree on what I have just said, the reality is that baguazhang is underwritten by the eight elements known as the Bagua. It is these eight elements and their relationship to each other, which is usually for baguazhang in a circular pattern, is what powers the bagua forms. In order to align itself further to more traditional Chinese martial training techniques, in baguazhang the eight elements have been transmitted into eight totemic spirit animals that give a visual guideline of what the moves are supposed to look like, and in a certain sense be a key to what the given action is supposed to do. Now, here, I must put in a special note to remind the listener that each style of baguazhang has its own variation on how a move is supposed to be done. There is no true perfect style. That idea is a myth. What matters is that the style chosen is in alignment to one’s body shape and temperament. And that the would-be practitioner realised that each style has a history to it based on the baguazhang master who created it. And that history is only meant to take the practitioner so far and no further. At that point has been reached, it is now time to walk their own bagua path and to create in its wake a new history that others can learn from. Which means taking all that training and practice and applying it to real life. For example: Lockdown because of the coronavirus… How many of you stopped training because you were told to stay home? How many of you stopped practicing because you got overwhelmed by all the news or simply wanted to be like your neighbour? And how many of you adapted to the changing circumstances, kept on training and saw it as an opportunity to advance one’s own understanding and comprehension of this fine art? Judging by the dwindling numbers out there, the answer is a pitifully low number. Mind you, the technicians of the arts are nearly always out of touch with practical reality, and blaming Millennials for everything is just a poor excuse. And Chinese numbers are nearly always exaggerated by the numbers of school children doing it at school as a wushu elective. And the feeling that baguazhang is a dying art is also an illusion. The martial art of baguazhang is not dying. It has always been a niche style, where it is just a fact of life that you are going to lose people as you get better and better at cultivating your inner alchemy or neigong 內功 as part of your drive toward your Shen-hood 神方向.