Thread: Bowstring Power
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Old 02-16-2012, 05:27 PM   #1
David Orange
Dojo: Aozora Dojo
Location: Birmingham, AL
Join Date: Feb 2006
Posts: 1,511
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Bowstring Power

It's an old saying in tai chi, that the "intrinsic power" of human beings is used like a bowstring, drawn, then released for great penetrating power. This explains the tai chi man's ability to drive an opponent sharply back, or back and up into the air, or back and straight down to the ground. It's said to be the power behind aikido. I did a lot of both tai chi and aikido, but I had a lot of trouble understanding quite how you would actually make yourself like a bow string, and how that would create the effortless but profound power for which tai chi is known. And then, tonight, telling a friend about my experience with Minoru "Ark" Akuzawa, I had a flash of understanding.

Before I met Ark—creator of the Aunkai method—and felt the bizarre power he could generate, I had seen videos of him in action and demonstrating the strange exercises he credits for his amazing power. Trying these exercises myself, with my background in Japanese and Chinese arts backed up by years of experience with the ways of Moshe Feldenkrais, I conceived of Aunkai as a way to "tune" the body to gravity. When I attended Ark's visit to Atlanta a couple of years ago, he was very excited to hear this idea. He described his Aunkai method as choritsu, showing me in his electronic translator the English meaning of choritsu: tuning.

Watching him and feeling his power, I realized that he was almost magnetized to the ground and anytime I dealt with him, I was dealing with the direct force of gravity, somehow channeled through his body and back into me. Moreover, he insisted that he did no technique to me, did not put any force into me, but only did things inside his own body in response to any force put upon him, mainly readjusting his location and posture to adhere to gravity. The result was a disruption of the person who was putting force against him. By putting their force into him, they lock themselves to him and the only way they can be "stable" is through orientation to him. And he suddenly moves. He was like one of those little plastic toy standing men, multiple segments joined by string, controlled by a button. When you press the button, the string goes slack and the figure collapses. When you release the button, the string tightens and the little man snaps back upright and rather sturdy. Ark could be as loose as a puppet, standing in an upright column of gravity. You couldn't push him out of it or pull him out of it. He would absorb your distorting efforts just so far, and then his body would suddenly snap back to the upright column of gravity, as if pulled by powerful magnets, the movement happening so suddenly and with so much force that he could slam through you like a big rock hurled by a catapult.

Up to this point in reminiscence, I was telling my friend how glued Ark was to the ground, how every push against him served only to press his feet into the earth. But then, I just snapped into the awareness that Ark's tuning was not only down, but vertically upward, as if, equal to gravity's pull, a powerful upward pushing force was pulling his head and spine straight upward. He was both pulled and pressed, both upward and downward. He was like a violin string or guitar string that vibrates when tweaked, but doesn't move out of its place. Or maybe one of those double-end punching balls, tied to the ground on one side and the ceiling on the other. Or maybe just a big rope tied to the ground and the ceiling. Imagine you try to push that rope. If it gives a little, it will spring back and maybe even throw you off of it. And then I realized: like a bowstring.

So how do you make your body like a bowstring?

You tune your body to a fine degree to adhere to the vertical column of gravity between earth and sky. That's fire and water as Ueshiba spoke of them, yin and yang, in and yo, up and down interwoven inside one's body, being both pulled and pushed in both directions as well as forward and backward and left and right. You feel your feet sink into the ground as you feel your head pulled straight up, toward the sky. When the connections, both pulling and pushing your body in all six directions, are firmly felt in your whole mind and body, your ki will be tuned to three-dimensional stability within the vertical forces, and it will be hard for anyone to get your body to leave that orientation. By practice of tai chi and other arts, the Chinese have learned to train the body in that way. And Aunkai is based on those same principles, tuning the body in ways involving the history of esoteric Buddhist warrior training (the fierce temple guard statues at the front gates of Buddhist temples in Japan: A and Un). So the practitioner is stabilized very magnetically in three dimensions. When he moves, that multidimensional clinging makes him extremely solid and hard to stop.

I think you still need some technique to be able to apply the "bow string" kind of power in martial context. In tai chi, this would be clearly shown in the roll-back sequence, and now I suddenly realize that Mike Sigman has talked a lot about these four directions for human energy, basically toward oneself, down, away from oneself and up. The head and feet don't move much, but the middle of the body draws back, then moves forward…almost like a bowstring being drawn and released.

This brings the opportunity to imagine the ki of the body drawing back, drawing the attacker's ki toward oneself, sinking, moving toward the attacker, then going up. But each end of the defender's ki is simultaneously attached to the earth and the sky, and these only need stretch so far before the attacker reaches the limit of his ability to extend toward the defender, based on the placement of his feet and arms. Just as a violin bow can only push the string so far before it has to change to pulling. When the push changes to pull, the string vibrates in the perfectly appropriate direction to receive the disruption with resonance. But it doesn't move.

So the small drawing movement of the tai chi rollback sequence also sort of stretches the ki…like a bowstring…so that it snaps back toward the attacker…who has placed himself firmly in the position of the arrow. Instead of attacker, it would be easy to say victim, at this point. In the drawing movement, our ki should connect with his ki, so that when our ki and body move, his ki and body are drawn with us, to their extension, and he is thrown back by the release of the bowstring both in us and the bowstring we find in him and pluck.

So now I think I know what they mean about the body's power being like a bowstring. I think it's the same kind of thing in China and Japan, but that the two cultures express and develop it in different ways. And knowing this, it gives me a whole new level to look at when practicing tai chi, bagua, xing yi (where I can really feel that power) and aikido. Now I don't want to think about putting power into the attacker, throwing my power at or through them: I want to just keep myself upright, keep my power inside myself and let the other person's relationship to my bowstring determine how it affects them. If they grab on, they will move when the bowstring moves unless they are more finely tuned than I am—which is really very likely, at this point, in almost anyone with basic physical coordination. But I'm still trying, so I might get better.

I'm working on shedding all unnecessary stuff and letting myself merge with that vertical up-and-down pulling and let it support me. If I can do that, I think my main effort can be simply to keep myself tuned and responsive to that force. If I can physically do this, the attacker will find it hard to move me and very hard to stop me. And with a master of this kind of power, like Ark or Chen Xiao Wang, the attacker finds it very hard to remain on his feet around the bowstring power.

Thanks for reading.

Please grace this with your insights.

David

"That which has no substance can enter where there is no room."
Lao Tzu

"Eternity forever!"

www.esotericorange.com
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