The main problem that I see with the obsession with fighting through IMA is that the fighting mindset gets in the way of truly developing IMA skills.
Consider how people think of fighting: us vs. them, me vs. him, good guys vs. bad guys, a clash of two forces, etc. Notice the sharp splitting of two elements in each of those examples and the antagonistic relationship between them. IMO this is what IMA specifically seeks to avoid and this is why IMA is different.
In IMA we don’t seek to oppose the “enemy” (notice the quotation marks). We seek to blend and flow with their movements and make them aware of their mistakes in order to return them to “harmony.” Naturally, they might feel very harmonious lying on the ground. 
But we don’t oppose them.
Peter Ralston in his book Cheng Hsin: Principles of Effortless Power
One time I came up with a phrase. This was around 1973. I was standing out in my backyard in the pine trees. I had walked out there, and I had a sense that somebody was around. It was very dark, and I had some apprehension. I wondered: “Am I going to have to fight somebody, a burglar or something”? As I was standing there in the yard, I truly opened up to the possibility of that event, and suddenly everything became safe. I guess that’s the only way I could say it. The realization was at the time — what I said out loud into the yard was: “There is no such thing as a fight, there never was and never will be.”
This took me years to figure out, and I’m sure I haven’t grasped all of the subtleties to it yet. But notice how his “opening up” (with all that entails) caused the mental idea of the “enemy” to drop. Once the mental idea was dropped, the physical could relax and feel safe in the moment. There can be no fight if forces aren’t opposed.
This is the heart of what we should be doing IMO.
22 responses so far ↓
1 transit // Mar 22, 2008 at 12:05 pm
hi,
i have to disagree with this one - ‘In IMA we don’t seek to oppose the “enemy”’
in encountering force there are at least 5 vectors anyone can use to meet it. one of these vectors is meeting incoming force head on.
i’ve been taught (yiquan) both internal and external use this vector. the difference being that IMA meets force on this vector before it becomes fully developed thereby overcoming his hard before it truly becomes HARD.
transit
2 Dave Chesser // Mar 22, 2008 at 1:36 pm
Well, that’s yiquan perhaps. As I’ve said before, we aren’t all doing the same thing.
3 wayne hansen // Mar 22, 2008 at 5:32 pm
years ago my teacher told me he met a guy we both called (cosmic ken the aikido man).he was the hippy extreme every thing was chi there was no reality.
my teacher told me ken had said,if your chi is strong enough no one will ever attack you.
i said to my teacher why didnt you hit him(the ultimate zen lesson).
my teacher replied it wasnt up to him to enlighten ken.
i ask again ,if everone stopped using combat as a yardstick what is their criteria.
these arts were passed on to us as chuan what right do we have to delete the fist and still call it ima.
dont get me wrong i dont practice for combat.
i practice to find the best me i can,but please dont throw the baby out with the bath water.
and if you do please dont call it chuan.
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4 Dave Chesser // Mar 22, 2008 at 6:50 pm
Wayne,
You might want to re-read what I wrote. I’m not saying what you think I’m saying.
5 Joseph Crandall // Mar 22, 2008 at 10:14 pm
You are preaching to the choir, here.
6 Christoffer Lernö // Mar 23, 2008 at 1:46 am
I I think this is what you’re saying:
“If one learns to remove the differentiation between object and subject in a confrontation, then loss or win loses all meaning. As one is no longer attached to the opponent’s actions (they become no different from one’s own), one stops working against an opponent, and the task simply becomes to move oneself in harmony with oneself. There is no fight because there is are no two people fighting.”
If so, then this touches on the same idea as that of “mushin” in Japanese arts, and they in turn borrow from the idea of non-differentiation present in (for example) zen buddhism.
I wouldn’t say that this is something special for IMA, but rather that it has a much wider range of application, including, but not limited to, non-IMA.
7 Scott // Mar 23, 2008 at 2:44 am
This is some of the best evidence that IMA come from Daoism, the martial part being an afterthought.
The Daodejing chapter 50 is about this:
Emerging at Birth; Entering at death.
Three in ten choose life,
Three in then choose death,
and three in ten, though they regard life as precious, make choices that bring about premature death.
Now, why is this so?
It is because they regard life as thick.
You have no doubt heard of those
That are good at nourishing life (yang sheng)
When walking through the hills, they do not meet rhinos or tigers;
When they go into battle, they don’t wear armor or carry shields;
The rhino can find no place to pierce with its horn;
The tiger finds nothing to tear with its claws
And weapons find no place to stab their blades.
Now why is this so?
Because there is no ‘death spot’ on them.
———-
I took this from the comments on this post:
http://northstarmartialarts.com/blog1/2008/02/06/continuum/
8 Jay Gischer // Mar 23, 2008 at 5:41 am
My feeling is that we are, in some sense, stuck on the word “combat”.
One of my goals is to be able to “remain calm under the hell of the upraised sword”. Put more mundanely, I want to develop the ability to stay soft under pressure, to conquer my fear, keep my posture and my peng, and execute my techniques. To that end, I seek a graduated level of stress, culminating in someone actually raising a sword at me or throwing a punch at me, full speed.
I don’t try that on day one, though.
I believe this kind of training can be part of an “internal” approach, though I have no idea whether traditional CIMA does it. I haven’t been taught that way, but that means nothing, since my teachers explicitly said they were training for health. My readings suggest that some teachers in the tradition did exactly that.
9 wayne hansen // Mar 23, 2008 at 11:05 am
sorry if i got you wrong dave.
i believe in all you are saying i just want to say that i see too many stretch for the tao before they get their feet on the earth.
10 Dave Chesser // Mar 23, 2008 at 11:21 am
Wayne,
Well, the tao just might be under their feet.
11 BL // Mar 23, 2008 at 11:52 am
(The main problem that I see with the obsession with fighting through IMA is that the fighting mindset gets in the way of truly developing IMA skills.)
form is no other than emptiness, emptiness no other than form.
Form is exactly emptiness, emptiness exactly form.
http://www.dzogchen.org/chant/heartsutra.htm
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bf0DNMElas8
teacher Wang refers to this passage in his demo on taiji.
Dave, I really agree with your thoughts. When people come to me for taiji training I tell them my taiji is not to learn how to fight, its to learn how not to. Fist how not fight with your self, and later with others. If you still want to learn from me then we can begin.
Taiji, talks about empty and full, open and close, 4oz can over come 1000lb, who really practices in this way, what do these things really mean? the most important question. Is it true?
Is it true, depends I feel on ones own clarity of understanding and sincerity of practice, this enables one to encounter it. some come to it later in life after reaching a certain self understanding, some are lucky or fated and meet a teacher who has such an understanding willing to share it, and some will never find it blinded by their own misunderstanding.
The last group conversely also seems to be the most vocal about what is and is not, not understanding that those who have it need not say or do much, understanding that the it that some might feel they have, is actually not it, its beyond words or thought.
12 Joseph T. Oliva Arriola // Mar 25, 2008 at 12:10 am
Well, I guess I’m in the minority here.
Though, my practice is built around the “survival of the fittest”, I am actually quite fearful.
I fight and prepare for the fight because this is what happens in nature. I must hunt to eat and to feed my family. If I don’t someone will hunt and feed on me.
I tell my students. “It’s like a basketball game. some people play the game and others sit in the audience. And yet, life is not a basketball game. You will be forced to fight. Life will grab you out of the stands. You will lose a job. You will lose a loved one. Someone will attack your reputation. You may be mugged.”
As such, when I do martial arts I am doing life and combat is always a part of it.
13 Dave Chesser // Mar 25, 2008 at 8:45 am
Joseph,
Please notice the quotation marks around the word fighting. What I’m saying is that when we engage the person opposite of us, we seek to blend our actions with theirs. We don’t oppose their force with our force — “fight” against them.
The path to accomplishing this starts in the mind before it can be done by the body.
So it’s not that we don’t engage in combat but that the way we do it is completely different.
14 Joseph T. Oliva Arriola // Mar 25, 2008 at 9:26 am
Dave,
I am in agreement. Though, it is a hard thing to accomplish…blending and using my mind first…rather than simply reacting. I still have a long way to go. More push hands.
15 Richard Eton // Mar 26, 2008 at 12:24 pm
Although I do understand your point, I’m a little confused by this post given your past posting of full-contact fights
http://formosaneijia.com/2008/02/17/guoshu-leitai-fights/#more-885
I appreciate your willingness to make the distinction between IMA and fighting. IMAs have many benefits, and while familiarity with some defense techniques are among them, comparison with other forms of preparation, such as this video or other forms of MMA
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G0OprCc07Cw&feature=related
indicate its weakness in this respect.
16 cloudhandz // Apr 2, 2008 at 9:36 pm
“What I’m saying is that when we engage the person opposite of us, we seek to blend our actions with theirs. We don’t oppose their force with our force — “fight” against them. ” - DC
I think this highlights that the greatest “IMA” skill displayed in modern times have been by the Gracie clan.
It’s not that they meditated all hours and gained spiritual enlightenment but trained and tested their skills honestly and realistically. It’s one thing to disregard your fears in a moment of clarity, and quite another thing to overcome in the face of violence.
That Ricksons Yoga practice is pretty awesome shouldn’t be entirely lost on us either i suppose..
17 neijia // Apr 2, 2008 at 10:38 pm
I agree with your point, cloudhandz, though I don’t totally equate “ima” with other “soft” arts. Still, yoga expands and opens the joints and prepares one for meditation, so Rickson’s practice is not that far removed from one of “meditating all hours and gaining spiritual enlightenment”. I see these things all on one spectrum. A quote from Wikipedia’s spectrum that makes this analogy clearer:
In these uses, values within a spectrum are not necessarily precisely defined numbers as in optics; exact values within the spectrum are not precisely quantifiable. Such use implies a broad range of conditions or behaviors grouped together and studied under a single title for ease of discussion.
18 Dave Chesser // Apr 3, 2008 at 10:14 am
The fact that Royce has to take steroids now seems to imply that BJJ isn’t an internal art as some had hoped.
19 cloudhandz // Apr 3, 2008 at 6:24 pm
Fine logic and grasp on reality that.. maybe we can see him in the cage in his fifties beating 25 year olds if it was a real IMA!
20 wayne hansen // Apr 4, 2008 at 4:56 am
just realise that yoga breaks almost every rule in the tai chi classics.
not to say it does not have value because it does.
on the other hand bjj seems to obey those rules and appart from the chemicals mentioned it is basically a soft art,that does not mean it is internal.
21 neijia // Apr 4, 2008 at 5:24 am
yeah good stuff for other reasons, related to qigong and more. the yoga classes i go to don’t talk about prana or qi. they do say “breathe into x or y” body part. not sure how much the instructors know about prana and deliberately don’t tell us.
on the internal/soft not same thing idea - does internal always have a soft approach? how do you characterize xingyiquan or yiquan? internal and hard?
22 wayne hansen // Apr 4, 2008 at 12:36 pm
no i practice hsing i as a soft art with focused energy.
the whole point in standing in i chuan is to drop all the hardness.
hard/soft its all the same these are realative terms.
when my students tell me i hit the hardest is when i feel the softest.
when a ballet dancer gives the most dynamic performance is he hard or soft.
his training was hard[difficult] so his performance can be soft.
a western boxer hits hard but watch the way he hits a bag relaxed and energetic.
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