Who Switched from External to Internal Martial Arts and Why?

[Miqi]

Would it be fair to say that what people label as "internal" and "external" are found in all good Kung Fu systems and styles? This could potentially be any style.

No, for two reasons. One, it's not clear what a 'good' kung fu style is - and this is then usuallly a tautological argument in that people will answer "one that has both internal and external aspects".

Secondly, there aren't many schools which encourage intutive exploration of inate skill and insight - most encourage rigid adherence to form or externally imposed coaching practice. I think this is partly why people often feel the need to 'brealk' with their schools, so that they can finally begin to experiment a bit with their own ideas. Unfortunately, those people so often then try to impose those ideas yet again on others as a prison for body and mind, rathe than recognising that it's freedom of intuition that matters in the first place, and which has to be built into the training practice.

One of the patterns, or keys, I think of from the style I train while reading this thread is "Turning like wheels." I do not consider this to be an "internal" principle or an "external" principle but simply a principle that must be observed in the training. It could be expressed in many techniques both offensively and defensively. But whatever the technique you need the proper execution and co-ordination to do it the "right way" (as others were saying earlier in this thread.) Without the skill-set, the kung fu is not complete.

This is the usual line, but it's only half true which is the problem. Without 'you', in fact, wushu is not complete. Wushu only exists as the 'great achievement' that is you, and the combination of your training method, insight, ability, discipline etc. In the sclerotic traditional systems as they've become now, the 'style' and religious discipline to the school and master have been massively over emphasised, leading to low level outputs. Without you, the wushu is not complete - but it's not enough for 'you' just to be there, at the club. 'You' have to be actively engaged with the material in a way other than just external copying.

[Dragonzbane76]

I am always looking for deeper understanding. However, in this case, I'm not here to ask a question, but to answer it. What I am saying on this subject hasn't been said before, in any of these threads - or if it has, it's been long forgotten and overlooked. And what I'm saying is the precise opposite of the voodoo shamantics we've had peddled to us for so long; what I am saying is simply that 'internal' means that a major apsect of your training should be ann intuitive exploration of wushu, following your own ideas, abilities, insights etc. and that without following that method, you will never really fulfil your potential. However, I wouldn't want to be accused of putting ideas into your head - it might make you might feel the need to tell me just what's wrong with me.

kudos for looking deeper. you say your not hear to ask a question but to answer, well most people in the TCMA community will not listen because they are stuck in a paradoxical sink hole. Honestly I agree with your "answer" but it has been said before by many people, problem is the ones that most people listen to are the mythics and dogmatic. I'm not an internal guy if you haven't noticed. I don't grudge anyone for their views only that there are many many many paths and not to force oneself on others. Many problems in the world besides the internal/external debate that have sprung from that. as you seemed to have dug a little and found something about myself on here (you brought up pai lum) it took me as a statement of looking for something to point a finger at. no grudge knowing something about someone just struck me as a strawman thing.

[Miqi]

kudos for looking deeper. you say your not hear to ask a question but to answer, well most people in the TCMA community will not listen because they are stuck in a paradoxical sink hole. Honestly I agree with your "answer" but it has been said before by many people, problem is the ones that most people listen to are the mythics and dogmatic. I'm not an internal guy if you haven't noticed. I don't grudge anyone for their views only that there are many many many paths and not to force oneself on others. Many problems in the world besides the internal/external debate that have sprung from that. as you seemed to have dug a little and found something about myself on here (you brought up pai lum) it took me as a statement of looking for something to point a finger at. no grudge knowing something about someone just struck me as a strawman thing.

I didn't do any digging, I just looked on your profile and it siad 'Pai Lum' - then I asked if that was what you did. However, your insitinct is spot on - if you had said yes, then I would have considered you an unreliable source, that's true.

I don't know what an 'internal guy' is. However, I know that these debates always include people who say 'it's not worth flogging this dead horse'. The weird thing is, you're actually an essential part of these debates - there HAS to be someone who says that, lol - you're not 'outside' of the horse flogging, you're an essential part of it.

But what this boils down to is you don't think the debate is worth having (other than to say that, of course ), and I do, because I think it's not pointess - I think every so often someone is at the threshold of just understanding this stuff. If Wang Xiang Zhai and a few others hadn't bothered to enter the debate (which was precisely the same in 1930s China, interestingly enough) then I wouldn't have 'got' the meaninng, and moved on to a better uderstanding. It's worth it, as far as I'm concerned.

[Dale Dugas]

lets end the silly debate.

Train more, post less and forget these silly labels which are not accurate. There is no such thing as internal or external. There only is complete structure.

enough said.

[ShaolinDan]

a major apsect of your training should be ann intuitive exploration of wushu, following your own ideas, abilities, insights etc. and that without following that method, you will never really fulfil your potential. However, I wouldn't want to be accused of putting ideas into your head - it might make you might feel the need to tell me just what's wrong with me.

I totally agree with this statement (as does my teacher, who was just speaking about this at the end of class yesterday), but I feel like when you call that "internal," it's redefining the term... "internalization" maybe. But, whatever works for you is what really matters. Words are just tools to help us understand phenomena, as long as they help us, then we're using them right.

[Miqi]

lets end the silly debate.

Train more, post less and forget these silly labels which are not accurate. There is no such thing as internal or external. There only is complete structure.

enough said.

For you, the debate is silly, because the terms have nowhere else they can take you - well, you think they can't, and you're not open to the possibility that they can, which amounts to the same thing. So that way of thinking is dead and pointless to you.

As for 'complete structure', this is just the new term for 'internal' - i.e., a shift of terms, to describe what is otherwise not perceptible, or probably even real in any real sense - or at least, if it is, I can't see what it is that you do that could possibly be being described by this term. Which, I guess, means that it's something that I have to 'believe' is there - or worse yet, travel half way round the world to 'experience'. Right?

Bottom line - why are you even involved in the debate, if the debate is dead for you?

[Miqi]

I totally agree with this statement (as does my teacher, who was just speaking about this at the end of class yesterday), but I feel like when you call that "internal," it's redefining the term... "internalization" maybe. But, whatever works for you is what really matters. Words are just tools to help us understand phenomena, as long as they help us, then we're using them right.

For me, by 'internalization' is meant practicing something until it becomes second nature. In which case, as we all know, we can actually 'internalize' a lot of really bad habits and useless, pointless things. For me, 'internal' simply means that, by and large - and in harmony with good coaching and training methods designed to enhance this process - we can actually develop quite quickly if we explore our movement skills through a fairly free, intuitive and experimental method. The problem is that this is not quite what many people want from a kung fu class, so it's a bit more for a later point when all those forms are already learned and practiced a thousand times, and nothing is really progressing anymore. At that point, people might - just might - decide to set themselves a bit freer and start exploring what is that is naturally right for them.

Having said that, there is obviously more to it - I do believe, for example, that we have a much greater 'natural' ability than we think - i.e. that we are much more powerful than we generally think, especialy when we learn how to use our body more efficiently. And this is one of the reasons why people might want to do this.

[Dragonzbane76]

But what this boils down to is you don't think the debate is worth having (other than to say that, of course ), and I do, because I think it's not pointess

because I've had this debate hundreds of times and no one ever in the end from either side changes or moves from their mountain and your answer will not move anyone of them any further than they already have moved.

[Miqi]

because I've had this debate hundreds of times and no one ever in the end from either side changes or moves from their mountain and your answer will not move anyone of them any further than they already have moved.

To have had a debate hundreds of times and learned nothing is bound to make you think that there's nothing to learn. The problem is, there's no 'debate' between equally wrong viewpoints - so, you haven't really had any debates at all. Now that you actually have a real answer - one that has, actually moved many people forwards - you still haven't learned anything. That could be my fault, in failing to get across the significance of what I'm saying, or it could just be that the significance is lost on you. Or, I have to face it, it could be that what I'm saying has no significance for anyone else but me. Either way, if all you're saying is that you're worried about me wasting my time, then maybe you'd be better off worrying about why you're wasting your time telling me that I'm wasting my time.

[Miqi]

As many have pointed out, the usual definitions of ‘internal’ and ‘external’ have been discussed to death. Those old ways of thinking are, in fact, dead, in that they don’t really lead anywhere at all, except to posturing over arcane theory, usually to hide poor actual ability.

Following an implication of Wang Xiang Zhai (who actually said that he didn’t know what ‘internal’ meant) I argue that ‘internal’ really means that the real ‘Quan’ is not really in forms or techniques (which dismisses most schools from the equation, including most orthodox JKD), but in natural ability, which has to be ‘unfolded’ via intuitive practice.

I will say more about that in a moment. However, what I’m trying to get across here is that one of the very important aspects of ‘intuitive practice’ is the recognition that thinking about wushu is very important. As opposed to, for example, all those brute assertions of ‘shut up and practice’ and ‘kung fu is not in the mouth’ that people, usually of very low level, like to spout – presumably to prevent people actually thinking about the very low level of the person who said it.

Once one realises the significant power of actually engaging with their training in an intellectual way – i.e. with independent, genuine desire to think about what you’re doing and why – then the importance of ‘conceptual tools’ becomes clear. Conceptual tools are major resource of the intuitive method. One major conceptual tool is to realise that you’ve actually been told most of what you need to know, time and again, but never really realised the significance before. (For example, the realisation that ‘internal’ method really means ‘proceed via intuition’). The second conceptual tool is a bit more tricky. People in CMA are massively programmed to ‘appoint’ the expectation that terms like ‘internal’ have these massive meanings. And because the usual definition of ‘internal’ is spouted by frauds who’ve disguised their fraud by endless superficial doctrines about qi and meridians and internal force etc., these ‘expectations’ about what internal really means grow massive. When you hear the real truth, it seems like ‘Oh, jus that? Is that all? I already really knew that!’ – because the lie always grows massive – but by contrast, the real truth is often very simple.

It can take quite a lot to ‘dis-appoint’ these massive expectations, especially when one has bought into them for personal reasons. Most instructors, for example, are not going to let go of complex explanations, because that’s what they sell. For everyone else – i.e. for people who realise that the intuitive method is about ‘active’ personal engagement with training – there will be a sense of ‘dis-appointment’ when the moment of realisation comes, and the meaning of an idea – such as ‘internal’ – is revealed to be ‘oh, just that, I already knew that’. Of course you did – that’s the essence of the intuitive method.

But that’s only part of the equation. Seeing the significance in these ideas is quite another matter – and here those with fairly dull insight will pipe up again with ‘Just get on with training forget about all this philosophical clap trap’. The real truth, of course, is that it’s not philosophical clap trap, it’s just fairly simple ideas. I can't say that these ideas are 'true' - that's not how it works. What they are is 'active', in that they 'unfold' deeper meaning the more you understand them. Very often, as ideas (like internal and external) reveal themselves as straightforward, the more profound the implications become. Hence, it doesn't really matter if the ideas are 'true' in any historical or scientific sense - what matters is that they are 'active', and designed to prompt deeper insight, and in turn, for this to condition your training and lead to higher level ability. This is the essence of the intuitive method.

All of these implications were always present in these discussions, and in the theory of wushu that we inherited from the past – we just didn’t see the significance because we expected something massive that would stroke our egos and makes us ‘special’ if we learned it. And we also expected the training of wushi to be dead and static - as in, you learn this techniquem then that, etc., where as the intuitive method is an 'active' process of continually unfolding deeper insight, until you get to simple ideas with profound implications, and using this process to inform your training. This is quite difficult to do within a sclerotic 'system', and with a teacher who isn't skilled at facillitating this 'growth' of awareness and concomitant improvement in skill. The real truth is, the philosophical clap trap comes from those people who just want you to shut up and carry on buying what they are selling – the same old tired, pointless training regimes which led them to have to tell people to shut up and stop thinking in the end, just to prevent people from realising that they don’t really know the slightest think about wushu at all.

Anyway, intuitive practice does not mean have no teacher – it means that the real ‘dachengquan’ or – ‘great achievement fist’ is a process, not a style or a destination, although it is a continual ‘product’ – i.e. you. It’s an interactive process between training methods and intuitive exploration of potential and new ways of doing things. It’s ongoing – and so anyone who claims to have ‘learned’ a ‘style’ is very far from the real Quan, at least in terms of its most profound meaning. Again, that is a very great ‘dis-appointment’ to those who learned martial arts so they could rest their ego on it.

The next realisation is that while many claim to already follow this method, they mostly don't - they are fully trapped in the illusion of 'systems' and 'styles', which they then try to make work - which is not the same thing at all.

[Dragonzbane76]

Or, I have to face it, it could be that what I'm saying has no significance for anyone else but me.

hammer meet nail. I'm done with this conversation, you seem to want to come off condescending and I'm not all for that. You can put whatever you want out there but like I said the debate has been done a million times and your not special and what you've stated has been said. Not disagreeing with it because I take a more modern perspective myself, just your coming off like a d!ck.

peace

[Dale Dugas]

blah blah blah.

Post less, train more.

all you have to worry about.

[Miqi]

hammer meet nail. I'm done with this conversation, you seem to want to come off condescending and I'm not all for that. You can put whatever you want out there but like I said the debate has been done a million times and your not special and what you've stated has been said. Not disagreeing with it because I take a more modern perspective myself, just your coming off like a d!ck.

peace

Thanks for letting me know.

[Miqi]

blah blah blah.

Post less, train more.

all you have to worry about.

Think more, gain more. No worries.

[No_Know]

hammer meet nail. I'm done with this conversation, you seem to want to come off condescending and I'm not all for that. You can put whatever you want out there but like I said the debate has been done a million times and your not special and what you've stated has been said. Not disagreeing with it because I take a more modern perspective myself, just your coming off like a d!ck.

peace

On a thread about hard-soft, internal-external person put ..."coming off like a d!ck?" Perhaps that is some internal...I mean [modern terms] Total body release from intention and thought or intent thought expressed physically...

No_Know