Internal arts and new paradigms

Eric Caulier PhD in Anthropology, Alumni of Beijing Sport University (Internal arts) Taijiquan teacher (6th duan)
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China: cradle of modern martial arts

400 styles, schools or traditions
2 major streams (external and internal)
Internal work

- form

- elastic force

- breath

- intention

- state of mind
# Internal arts and traditional Chinese thinking

* taijiquan : yin/yang

* xingyiquan : five elements

* baguazhang : mutations
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# Taijiquan

Dynamic balance
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# Xingyiquan

Whole body power
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# Baguazhang

## Circular walk
Invented tradition

* no evidence of continuity

* compensation in case of upheavals

* identification need takes precedence over historical reality

* metahistory
# Cognitive science lighting

* memory is a recomposition

* transmission is a reconstruction

* crossbreeding is the rule
# Méthod : transdisciplinarity

* bring together knowledges (traditions, arts, sciences)

* several levels of reality, perception and representation
<figure><img src="image_5.png" /><figcaption>Practitioner
for more than 30 years</figcaption></figure>
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# Searcher
for more than 20 years
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Teacher

for more than 30 years
Practitioner-searcher-
teacher

• hyphen thrown over abysses

• speak to the three modes (I, you, he)
Authenticity

* rediscover a universal kinesthetic disposition

* to be carried away by forces that give birth to forms

* to appropriate the forms, to be true

* perform a gesture that is both fully universal and completely unique
Everything is a question of
intention

* first master the technique

* a way by "subtraction" (undo the "nodes")

* access to our deep resources
Passage to mastery

* stop slavishly imitating the master

* inhabit gesture

* from passage to mastery to mastery of the passage
# Some markers

* norm: access door to freedom

* minimalism requires maximum commitment

* only a master can awaken to the inner dimensions of the gesture

* reconnect with the spirit of classics
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# Motion capture and tensegrity

## Biomecanics et coherence
Revisit internal arts with
new paradigms

* complexity

* flow experiences

* enaction

* new cognitive schemas of action

* integrative health

* ...
# Humanist researcher

* the three paths of Antoine Faivre (purist, eclectic, humanist)

* seekers (essentialist approach) and researchers (contextual approach)

* communication of a humanist researcher
Useful links

* website (free ebook, *Espace Taiji* magazines, videos):
http://www.taijiquan.be/

* publications (downloadable thesis): http://ericcaulier.strikingly.com/

* blog (analysis movements, readings, reflections, etc.):
http://www.eric-caulier.be/

* email: eric.caulier@skynet.be
Thank you for your
attention
## Internal arts and new paradigms

Eric Caulier PhD in Anthropology, Graduated of Beijing Sport University (Internal arts)
Taijiquan teacher (6th duan)

### China: cradle of modern martial arts

China, with about four hundred different styles, schools or traditions, is often considered
as the cradle of modern martial arts. The appropriate generic term is wushu / martial art.
The word guoshu / national art, used during the republican period (1928-1937), is still
found in Taiwan and Hong Kong while the term gong fu / kung fu, adopted in the West,
refers to the idea of « accomplishment" and is not limited to the field of martial arts. In this
great diversity, specialists distinguish two major streams: external styles using more
muscle strength and internal styles favoring internal energy. The Exoteric school is related
to the Shaolin Buddhist temple and Indian monk Bodhidharma; the esoteric school is
connected to the Wudang Mountains Taoist center and the Taoist hermit Zhang Sanfeng.

### Internal work

Internal work relies primarily on the following five parameters: form, elastic strength, breath, intention, and state of mind. Forms (a set of codified gestures) attach great importance to the notion of alignment. Alignment facilitates relaxation, relaxation promotes elasticity. Elasticity allows opening and closing of different body places, a prerequisite for breath circulation. Multidirectional elastic force developed simultaneously in all three planes is applied continuously and naturally. In internal arts, intention, a kind of creative imagination, represents a major quality for refining perception and inducing physiological and psychological changes. This "heritage" of ancient Taoist alchemy uses operative power of internalized images. Thinking can only be creative when practitioner is in an adequate state of mind: a state of availability, openness and connection.

### Internal arts ant traditional Chinese thinking

The three best-known internal arts - taijiquan / great ultimate boxing, xingyiquan / body and mind boxing and baguazhang / eight trigrams palm - refer to the three pillars of traditional Chinese thinking: yin / yang, five elements and eight trigrams. Taijquan is based on taiji (yin and yang union), xingyiquan five basic techniques correspond to the five elements (metal - water - wood - fire - earth), baguazhang movements are inspired by the eight trigrams. Internal arts favor opposites coincidence, systemic approach and interdependence; they opt for a beings and phenomena dynamic conception.

### Taijiquan

Taijiquan, by privileging dynamic balance, offers the possibility of very strongly slowing the movement, even to stop it at any time.

### Xingyiquan

The simple, powerful and functional movements of xingyiquan, made in a linear movement, make it possible to use the power of the whole body.

### Baguazhang

Circular walk of baguazhang combined with palm transformations makes the practitioner move easily in all directions. This circumambulation would find its roots in ancestral meditation techniques reproducing the movement of the earth revolving around the sun.

## Invented tradition
No one can bring the evidence of a concrete historical evolution between old Taoist practices and internal arts.

This discourse of a tradition legitimization built on a largely artificial historical continuity is characteristic of invented traditions. The discourse of continuity appears as a compensation in case of major upheavals. At the beginning of the 20th century, the Chinese had to reinvent their martial arts to bring them into modernity. Their role was to participate in the construction of a society in the process of restructuring. Similarly, in the West, extraordinary exploits of past masters, reference to fanciful genealogies are part of a strategy to build a structured tradition in which practitioners can recognize themselves. Identification need and social cohesion prevails over historical reality and facts veracity. We can therefore say that the West has also recreated internal arts tradition according to its history, worldview and expectation horizon. Tradition would no longer be a legacy of the past, but a present construction. Internal arts, therefore, don't exist in themselves, they are what men and women who practice it do and say.

For Henri Corbin, most traditions transmissions are not based on notarial acts, registered documents. We must then speak of metahistory because it's still a story of real events, although it escapes what we commonly call real history.

## Cognitive science lighting

Joel Candau says: « memory is more a recomposition than a restitution ».

For Olivier Morin, transmission is not a memorizing, it's a reconstruction. For him, vertical transmission is overestimated, horizontal transmissions is very important.

Acculturation is constitutive of cultures. Therefore, there is no "pure" culture or "pure" tradition. All traditions are to varying degrees « mixed ». Crossbreeding is the rule.

## Method: transdisciplinarity

Studying human being and his environment interrelationships can't be done from a single scientific discipline. It's the same for internal arts. Their approach can only be transdisciplinary. The purpose of transdisciplinarity is to bring together knowledges from inner experience (traditions), arts and sciences.

New scientific approaches recognize the multi-dimensionality of human beings and reality. We are paradigm shift witness. For Basarab Nicolescu, transdisciplinarity recognizes several levels of reality, perception and representation.

## Practitioner

I've been practicing internal arts for more than 30 years. In the nineties, I did fifteen study stays at the Beijing Sports University. Teacher Men Hui Feng passed me the 5 taijiquan major styles (Yang, Chen, Wu, Wuhao, Sun).

## Searcher

For more than 20 years, I have travelled between disciplines: from physical education to philosophy through sociology. The transversal approach of anthropology suits me particularly well.
## Teacher

The Taijiquan School founded in 1987 with Georgette Methens-Renard educated more than 10,000 people, taught more than 4,000 students and trained more than 70 instructors.

## Practitioner-searcher-teacher

In fact, oppositions between theory and practice stay really strong. Practitioner-searcher: this internalized hyphen is a bridge thrown over an abyss. My practice area is my research area. I pass on results of these joint experiments in various fields. I can speak to three modes : I, you, he. My goal is not to format people but to guide searchers to discover their gestural / perceptual and attentional resources and to better use them in their professional activities and in their daily life.

## Authenticity

I think that practise authenticity isn't found in the attachment to a genealogy often fanciful, nor in belonging to a so-called secret current. It seems to me to point to a way of practicing which aims at the rediscovery of a universal kinesthetic disposition. The master doesn't reproduce ready-made forms. He opens and lets himself be carried by forces that give birth to forms.

An authentic form is a form that drives us to be true to ourselves. It can only be done by making ones own gestures. This approach also implies, I believe, a re-appropriation of terms, concepts and images. Every master has forged his own vocabulary, his own images, his own methods of describing / transmitting his gesture which is both fully universal and completely unique.

## Everything is a question of intention

Jérôme Ravenet, in his in-depth analysis of taijiquan classics, highlights the most important sentence of the treatise attributed to Zhang San Feng, the essential reference text: "It's all about intention". Everything is a question of intention from the moment when one has mastered the various technical means. Only a relax body can adapt adequately to the situation, perceive veins of least resistance and insinuate. Subsequent treaties will specify the concrete details of this physical preparation. How does this transition take place from acting to non-acting, from voluntarism to letting go? What is the key of the mastery ?

I think taijiquan is a way that works by subtraction. Many repetitions in slowness not only allow to refine gesture by relieving it of all the parasitic movements but also aim to grasp the essential principle from which the slightest modification of intention is reflected on gestural quality. These tens, hundreds, thousands of repetitions, little by little, provoke exhaustion and extinction of will. When muscles and will are exhausted, a breach opens, other resources appear.

## Passage to mastery

Mastery comes when the student ceases to slavishly imitate the master, when he finds the inspiration, when he realizes in himself "that sensibility of perception which treaties
call 'spirit'". In other words, transition to mastery takes place when correct gestures are transformed into inhabited gesture, at this "moment when the master indications 'meet' the student - 'meeting' by which the practitioner finally awakens to the spirit dimension of the gesture, a "mysterious" moment, which "can not be thought of a priori, prior to the experience ».

My doctoral thesis in anthropology was concerned with this theme: "from passage to mastery to mastery of the passage ».

## Some markers

Experience has shown me that:

* norm in its most biomechanical dimension is one of the safest and fastest ways to reach living and inhabited movement.

* minimalism of mastered gesture requires a maximum commitment: beginner who succumbs to the law of least effort permanently deprives himself of means to abolish effort later. At bottom and behind no action is the most intense activity.

* Only a master can awaken to gesture inner dimension by an inoculative / contaminator / incubator gesture.

I think it's time to reconnect with classical treatises spirit and to follow path inaugurated in Europe by Catherine Despeux (1981): to have learned from famous masters and to give an account of it with best contemporary scientific tools.

## Motion capture and tensegrity

Internal arts movements are designed to maximize energy flow, universe animating force. Alignment, understanding of force lines of one's own postures and those of the partner, body use as an integrated unit mobilized from the center, make it possible to generate very great force with minimum effort. For 3 years, I've collaborated with Mons University: research on expert gesture.

Tensegrity (tension-integrity) is an interesting model for understanding and explaining elastic energy and light responses of internal arts. Architecture notion used for the human body (biotensegrity) characterized by its rounded shape disperses energy and information uniformly across the structure.

Niels Bohr and his quantum physicist friends in Copenhagen in the 1920s loved cowboy movies. White hat is waiting for black hat to take out his pistol before taking his own. Yet he still wins. Bohr experimented with fake guns.

See adage in taijiquan: "I start after my opponent, yet I arrive before him". Bohr deduced that black hat must think when he takes his gun. White hat simply responds to first movement and so bypasses rational mind, reducing considerably the response time. Fast communication through a continuous network : this effect is observed in lasers, superconductors and superfluids. All 3 are characterized by a very high coherence degree.

## Revisit internal arts with new paradigms

For more than two decades, I've revisited internal arts with new paradigms:

* complexity: third party included logic, recursion, hologrammatic principle
* flow experiences: completely absorbed, time suspended, everything flows

* enaction: knowledge acquired in action, incarnated in the flesh and in which the subject co-constructs himself with his environment

* cognitive science: the high level athlete doesn't follow a pre-established plan, he opens himself to the possibilities. His cognitive system is a unified system taking together "body-mind-world"

* deep ecology: experimenting with energy management, recycling, transformations in one's own body

* integrative health: bringing together conventional and unconventional approaches to make the patient a player in his health

* ...

## Humanist researcher

Regarding the ways of approaching traditions, Antoine Faivre developed a particularly enlightening concept: the three paths. The "Purist" way emphasizes importance of authentic, ancient and uninterrupted filiation. Representatives of the "eclectic" way practice "shopping around" by catching everything that interests them in the vast spiritual humanity treasure. Proponents of these two paths oppose to everything that doesn't belong to tradition. According to the third "humanist" way, a traditional spirit is enriched by sciences exploration (psychology, anthropology, biology, physics, etc.). For these bridges builders between various fields of knowledge, the notion of "Tradition" refers less to an immutable deposit, than to a perpetual renaissance.

In esotericism, Dominique Jardin distinguishes seekers and searchers. "Seekers" think and believe that esotericism gives access to hidden "essentialist" content (they search like gold diggers). Essentialism considers there is a things and beings essence immutable and true from all eternity. "Searchers" know that this content is built by esoteric currents that claim to transmit it (they look like archaeologists). So, it's never a "ready-made" practice that is transmitted, but a practice in the making. The practice is what practitioners do in a given context.

The ideas presented in this paper are those of a humanist researcher.

## Useful links

Thank you for your attention