Motus Mentis

I just ran across an old article by my sigung for many years, Master Yee Chi Wai (aka Frank Yee). It’s a discussion of the many varieties of ging, or internal power, that are cultivated by the advanced Hung Ga practitioner.

The Hung system, in which the student must endure years of grueling stance and grip training along with high-impact conditioning of the forearms, is generally considered one of the most “external” systems of southern kung fu, and as such it gives the acolyte effective fighting tools earlier on than some of the more “internal systems” (such as ba gua, which by the way is pretty nifty stuff, as you can see here). But as the student advances, and understanding deepens, the system’s internal aspects come to the fore — one’s movements become smaller and more economical, and there is less and less reliance on athletic prowess, imperviousness to pain, and brute strength. In particular, three things happen: 1) the body learns to relax and deliver power only at the moment it is needed; 2) the practitioner learns to bring that power smoothly from the foundation — the legs, hips and waist — to the striking hand, in a rising, gathering wave; and 3) one learns to release all of that focused, concentrated power into the target through the striking hand, rather than letting any of it get “stuck” along the way.

This transition from external to internal as the years go by is a good thing, because, having worked at this stuff since I was 19, I am now a weather-beaten 55-year-old with creaking knees, and am simply no longer capable of the lower-body extravagances the style demands of a younger man: octopus-like leg sweeps, leaping to one’s feet from a floor-level crouch while spinning a seven-foot halberd, and so on.

But the ging! As any lifer like me will tell you, that just grows and grows. And a little goes a long way.

The article is here. It’s rather technical, and certainly won’t win any awards for prose style, but I thought if any of you out there are involved in the martial arts you might enjoy it.