Lately as I think about what I want to write in my blog, my ideas seem to move in a more philosophical direction. I hope that I can still provide anecdotal illustrations of life in China, but for the next few months I expect I will be writing more about what I am thinking related to my training. First, however, I feel like I need to lay some groundwork for this kind of thing.
First, I want to reiterate that what you read in this blog is distorted by the imperfect lens that is me. What you read here is not a faithful record of my master’s teachings or Daoist practice or Wudang martial technique. I am a student working through some rather difficult lessons, and you are reading the flotsam and jetsam of that learning process. I am likely to be wrong, or at least incompletely correct.
Second, the nature of my training is in essence unintellectual. By writing a blog about it, I bring it into the intellectual realm, but it can not be entirely expressed here. Language bridges the gap between your mind and mine, but this training is a thing of bone and muscle and character, not of the mind, and only a shadow of it can cross that bridge. It’s an common mistake to think once you have read and understood some piece of martial arts theory, you understand martial arts.
So if you read my blog and like what I am talking about, please remember: practice is what makes this stuff real, not comprehension. The Chinese say, “Kungfu equals time plus sweat,” and that is just as true for internal martial arts as external. Reading is fine, but training is what it’s all about. And that training should be monitored by a good teacher, not a blog.
Phew! 🙂 Now that I feel like we won’t fall into the more common pitfalls of this type of writing, I can get on with it…