Chinese characters and commentary for Taiji quote.

[neijia_boxer]

What are the Chinese characters for Taiji's phase, "Zhan, Nian, Lian, Sui", 'Stick, adhere, neutralize, follow'?

[D_Glenn]

粘黏连随

.

[taiwandeutscher]

Bu diu bu ding?

[Slim]

I guess "bu diu bu ding" is way of approaching "zhan, nian, lian, sui." Hard stuff to get in practice.

To anyone who's interested, check out the Taiji fashuo. It's a great read. Chapter 4 is entitled "zhan, nian, lian, sui," and chapter 5 gets in to the whole don't lose contact and don't resist thing. Douglas Wile has a translation of it in his 1996 book.

[nianfong]

粘黏連隨

[taiwandeutscher]

粘黏連隨

Much nicer, thanks.

We call them "5 methods of feeling", Zhuaimo wufa 揣摩五法. And we have a different order for the 1st 2 and different writing for zhan:
黏 nian
貼 zhan, also read as tie.
The 5th method would be
Bu diu (bu) ding 不丟(不)頂.

[Wuyizidi]

What are the Chinese characters for Taiji's phase, "Zhan, Nian, Lian, Sui", 'Stick, adhere, neutralize, follow'?

Both zhan and nian mean sticking. In Chinese there are subtle but important differences between the two. Zhan means you're sticky, and whatever you touch, comes with you. For example, while eating lunch your hand got sticky, you rest it on a piece of paper napkin, when you raise your hand, the napkin comes up with it.

Nian means you're sticky, someone cannot get away from you. We commonly use it to describe young children. For example, a lot of time older kids don't like to play with their younger siblings. But the younger sibling just hangs around, refuses to go away no matter what you do. He's not causing you any big trouble directly per say, but he's preventing you from doing what you really want to do in peace.

The ability to do zhan well is usually taken as the key indicators of advanced mastery. In CMA rooting is one of the basic abilities all styles emphasize. So plenty of people have roots so strong that even opponents of much larger size cannot move them easily from where they stand. In Taiji, a typical way to deal with this is to use Zhan: you apply a strong downward force, if the opponent responds with a strong upward force, you stop the downward push while maintaining the illusion of continuing to do so, you don't lose contact, you follow his motion - when he goes up, your hand, which is above him, moves up with him. The next move is to push him off balance now that he is uprooted. Because your hand is above him, to the outsider this creates the illusion of you picking him up from above, as if your hand is sticky. To people who don't know Taiji, this is a bizarre, inexplicable sight. Hence the expression "real taiji quan skill looks like magic trick (fake)".

In Taiji we all know the theory is that you're like a ball, when an outside force comes, you rotate to the side with less pressure and make his main force go of course. In practice we know things are not that easy, unless the force is really pure (simple) and the attack is really committed. In real life a lot of time people can sense their force will not have desired effect. When this happens, a natural thing to do is disengage and try again. This is where Nian is really helpful. He wants to go away, but you don't lose contact, you go with him, and cause him trouble. One classic example of this is in the four hand push hand: you do Peng, the opponent neutralizes with Lu, you change to Ji, and he neutralize with An. So you withdraw, but the opponent sticks with you, and attack with Peng... This is a classic internal vs external jin skill: Person A attacks with external jin, after the first attempt (fa jin) fails, he needs to store energy first (by withdrawing to create some distance) before releasing again, Person B, by using internal jin (which can store and release continuously), after neutralizing the first attack with internal jin, sticks with the A's withdrawing motion and can issues his jin immediately to cause the Person A trouble before Person A can store enough energy to do something.

Lian does not mean neutralizing, it means linked, connected.

So here's a classic example of lost in translation: when there's no perfect translation, it's better to just keep the original words, which will naturally cause the non-native speaker to seek the full explanation, rather than having that quest stopped by imperfect translation.

And as we can see here, these are not really 4 completely independent skills, to do any one skill well requires doing one or more of the other skills well.

[D_Glenn]

.

[Wuyizidi]

I guess "bu diu bu ding" is way of approaching "zhan, nian, lian, sui." Hard stuff to get in practice.

To anyone who's interested, check out the Taiji fashuo. It's a great read. Chapter 4 is entitled "zhan, nian, lian, sui," and chapter 5 gets in to the whole don't lose contact and don't resist thing. Douglas Wile has a translation of it in his 1996 book.

We can summarize everything we're trying to do in martial art by saying it's basically generating a force to cause opponent death, injury, or incapacitation. When confronted with such a threat, what do people do? The natural reaction is flight or flight (I would also add freeze).

Flight, getting away from that threat, is diu. Fight, going against it directly, is ding. Both way would not work too well if that force your opponent is generating is bigger than anything you can come up with at that moment. In internal martial art we say there's a third way: there's more to force than just quantity. There are many other attributes we can manipulate to render it ineffective.

Bu means "don't".

In Taiji Quan, the approach is called kong dong - not physically moving that contact point between you and your opponent (if an opponent push our elbow against our body, we don't try to suddenly move the elbow away, or butt against his push with elbow), but doing something else to render that contact point empty, a poor conduit for transmitting opponent's force to your body (Lu: by rotating the hand of that arm around the index finger, the forearm rotates, which changes the contact point on elbow in relation to the opponent's hand, causing his force to go outside).

In order to achieve kong dong we must be bu diu but ding. So bu diu bu ding is not so much a specific skill/technique (technique/skill is something you do, not something you "don't"), but a more general quality/ability, which is achieved by doing Zhan, Nian, Lian, Sui.

[bailewen]

One part of that that I feel is worth restating is about "diu".

It really just means to "lose (something)" but in the phrase "bu diu bu ding", as is so often the case with classical or semi-classical Chinese, the grammatical object is not stated. It's only implied. I would suggest that rather than thinking of it as "don't lose contact", a better interpretation would be "don't lose connection"

Flight, getting away from that threat, is diu.

My point of clarification on Wuyizidi's comment is that "getting away" does not necessarily imply losing contact. Sometimes in push hands you metaphorically "flee" from an attempted qin na or other attack by trying to speedily reposition your body in a way where the attack is no longer a threat but ideally you are supposed to welcome the attack and transform it. Many people, for instance, say that the way to escape a joint lock is to "get a head of the lock". This tactic could still be considered "diu" because you are fleeing the attack rather than embracing it and changing it's nature. A more proper response according to Taiji tactics would be to change the angle or your posture in such a way that it creates a reversal or the lock, not simply an escape.

[Wuyizidi]

One part of that that I feel is worth restating is about "diu".

It really just means to "lose (something)" but in the phrase "bu diu bu ding", as is so often the case with classical or semi-classical Chinese, the grammatical object is not stated. It's only implied. I would suggest that rather than thinking of it as "don't lose contact", a better interpretation would be "don't lose connection"

Flight, getting away from that threat, is diu.

My point of clarification on Wuyizidi's comment is that "getting away" does not necessarily imply losing contact. Sometimes in push hands you metaphorically "flee" from an attempted qin na or other attack by trying to speedily reposition your body in a way where the attack is no longer a threat but ideally you are supposed to welcome the attack and transform it. Many people, for instance, say that the way to escape a joint lock is to "get a head of the lock". This tactic could still be considered "diu" because you are fleeing the attack rather than embracing it and changing it's nature. A more proper response according to Taiji tactics would be to change the angle or your posture in such a way that it creates a reversal or the lock, not simply an escape.

Agree with use of the word "connection" over "contact", and love the neutral tone of the word "transform" (there's no hint of fear in it).

I think qin na is one clear case where following is absolutely essential, because most of the time it's our only choice. In qin na a smaller person can disable a much larger person because he has mechanical advantage (eg. using his whole body weight to twist my wrist outward), the other person needs to produce a force several times the attacker's in order to resist successfully. Fleeing is difficult too, as a lot of times they don't even need a strong grip to prevent that from happening. So once the attacker get into that superior position, we really have no choice but to go with his line of force initially, and make change along that route.

The trick then, is how to change that angle, given that the contact point is where the opponent is most strong. One thing I got from seeing my teacher doing it last time: the reason I couldn't detect the changes he's making was because he's not making any direct changes at the contact point. Since every part of his body is perfectly connected with every other part (liu he), when I apply a force on one part of him, it automatically cause another part to move, literally driven/propelled by my force, and the movement of that other part either results in change in the angle of contact, or causes me trouble directly (If I try to push his left shoulder back with my right hand, his left shoulder doesn't really move back, he pushes me on my left with his right hand, causing me to move). So I feel like Elmer Fudd, I shoot bullets down a rabbit hole toward Bugs, and somehow they get turned and channeled back to hit me.

[nianfong]

粘黏連隨

And we have a different order for the 1st 2 and different writing for zhan:
貼 zhan, also read as tie.

did your teacher write it like this? that's very strange... I've never heard of tie1 having a second pronunciation.

[nianfong]

I think of it like this:
zhan = the initial stick on. when you zhan something onto your clothes or hand, you typically don't know you did it. this means it's a stick without them knowing you've stuck onto them.

nian = the annoying stickiness. when you nian onto someone, they try to get you off of them, but they can't.

lian = connected. you can feel where they are, and where they are going.

sui = follow. you follow how they move and use it against them. 捨己從人

[taiwandeutscher]

粘黏連連

And we have a different order for the 1st 2 and different writing for zhan:
貼 zhan, also read as tie.

did your teacher write it like this? that's very strange... I've never heard of tie1 having a second pronunciation.

Sorry, I was unprecise in the foreign tongue. But yes, we have
Nian 黏 sticking,
then
Tie 貼 attaching

My teacher called 粘 a simplified writing for 黏, which has 2 readings, as in 拈 nian and 沾 zhan. To use 2 in fact identical characters and their 2 different pronounciation was not perfect to describe 2 methods, maybe a certain way of keeping a meaning hidden. I think, he follows ZMQ here and felt that the 2 characters in short hand and classic writing have the same meaning and confuse peoples grasp of 2 different methods, therefore they used Tie to clearly show the 2nd method.

Lian 連 joining
Sui 連 following
Budiu (bu)ding 不丟(不)頂 static and dynamic equilibrium
English translation from some former US students, only as a reference.

[nianfong]

hm, interesting, i didn't realze the 2 chars were the same... the dictionary verifies that.
and it seems to me that how I've thought of it, was how I thought of 沾
http://humanum.arts.cuhk.edu.hk/cgi-bin ... holerecord

perhaps it should be 沾黏連隨 then