231. Genchitaofu Baguazhang’s Palms - 艮氣道福八卦掌の掌
By now, some of you would have realised that I am spending a lot of time playing Go with an opponent in the United States (of America) and posting the results online. And you have probably been wondering: What happened to my baguazhang? The baguazhang is still here and I still practice everyday. There is not a single day I go without. It is my life. And that’s the good part. The not so good part is that the journey of baguazhang brings up a whole lot of experiences and questions that are hard to explain sometimes. And as a result, I have the beginnings of an epic episode but nothing in the delivery; if you get my meaning. And so I keep training everyday. This is The Way. That lonely path people keep quoting about on social media. The road less travelled. The same lonely path that whispers in the wind that the art of baguazhang is a dying art form. But baguazhang is not a dying art! It may be extremely rare compared to other forms of martial arts, and at times one may appear insane by going round and round in circles. But at least I am walking the circle: And so that which is truth gets drawn into my reality as represented by the circle, and that which is not-exactly-false but more on the lines of you-do-not-know-what-the-fuck-you-are-talking-about reposted online quote gets slingshotted outwards. To illustrate what I mean, just the other day I had an interesting conversation with my opponent on the subject of enlightenment. It came up because he told me that as the primary caregiver to his children, he had won the right to receive child support payments from his former wife. In court, upon receiving judgement, she first laughed and then cried. And in that moment she received enlightenment the way most people get it: A painful experience far removed from angelic hymns. Society had conditioned her to see and expect things one way, but the law is written in another way. Even the bible has a hidden example of enlightenment. Right there in the Book of Genesis, it says that God moved over the darkness and then said, “Let there be light”. In that moment, enlightenment occurred. While the light was good, God also saw that there was nothing. It is only after this realisation that the process of creation happened. Incidentally this is also the place one tries to reach through Zen. Which is now kind of funny in a not so funny way, because many years ago when I reached this moment for the first time, I completely and utterly rejected it. I rejected it because 1) it was just a state of pure darkness, 2) I was still expecting a heavenly paradise, 3) I was trying to keep it real and grounded, and I was still very much concerned about seeking approval from others (even if I refused to admit it), and 4) in my mind baguazhang is all about the martial in martial arts. But baguazhang is the same. The start of enlightenment through baguazhang is realising that the key word in the name is “Zhang” which means palm and not “Quan” which means fist. Fist implies boxing and ultimately fighting. Had Master Dong Hai Chuan wanted the art to be purely about punching and kicking, he would have called it baguaquan. But he did not. In a world where swords kill, it is the Life Giving Sword that reigns supreme.