I feel safe in the presence of stress and aggression. I speak bravely and hold a confident attitude because I can kill with my bare hands. What silly rules of etiquette, scary social norms, or sadistic corporate policies stand in my way? What deviant criminal or sadistic fool can harm my good will? None. I can remain calm and watchful in the midst of aggression and chaos.
I won’t need to compromise my principles. I can protect folks close to me (including myself), my family, my friends, and anyone who stands nearby. And I cannot be provoked, with pushing or screaming, into chaotic scenarios. T’ai Chi Chuan — the system of martial-art training methods including martial pushing hands and death point strike training — lets me live so well.
Martial Stillness
I remain calm and present — often achieving more quiet, more calm, and more presence — when confronted with aggression or chaos. I trust that my reflexive responses will be appropriate to any aggressor, situation, and level of violence; I just turn on my senses, wake up. It’s nice. It’s good for everyone’s safety.
You could attend varieties of seminars that teach deadly point strikes. But it’s not enough to know the points and the angles of attack; one must be able to touch such point on aggressors, in the midst of a chaotic scenario. So, while we must build some intellectual knowledge of the death-points, we must also develop real methods to hit them.
To emulate chaos and forces generated by attackers, we train the martial art aspects of Tai Chi Chuan these abstract ways.
- Qigong and natural motion studies instill stillness and an ability to see and hear more clearly.
- Practice Tai Chi Chuan Forms. This way, if done right and well, we program our bodies to strike at particular points at peculiar angles. It’s a perfect, subconscious training device!
- Push-hands using pressure develops a capacity to cope with real force; change speeds and levels of force to learn to accept and divert whatever force presses on us.
- Strike things the Taiji martial art way! Strike mitts and pads using elastic, waist-generated, fast, fierce fight-power — Fa-jing!
- Study acupuncture points from Traditional Chinese Medicine. Learn to touch one another’s points (lightly, never with Fa-jing) to see and sense proper angles, distance, and timing, with varieties of opponents.
Deep-quiet responses may provoke quiet and calm in an aggressor, settling a hot situation rather than heating it. I divert violent tendencies by acting unpredictable. Using my heart sounds and my stillness as a guide, not using common, fearful defensiveness, my actions and choices take on a clearer, cleaner resonance. I bring calm into wild scenarios. Inner confidence overwhelms, projects outward, and assuages others.
Fighting for Peace
Learning to fight, to maim, and to kill expands available choices in every scenario. Widening a spectrum of choices — from backing away peacefully to attacking ruthlessly — creates a vast and powerful array of options. Allowing stillness to enter mental, emotional, and physical bodies, one can allow the heart to guide, choosing proper and necessary actions.
The real challenge: maintain calm under pressure. Too often, I’ve seen soft-stylists tense when they feel real forces approach. It’s difficult indeed and it requires work to teach one’s body to maintain calm even as the pressure cooker of martial-arts training increases. Real stillness, deep calm, and true quiet, however, require these early, preemptive pressure that teach methods to cope with stress and tension while under duress.
Begin soft and end soft but allow for a crescendo of struggle, of force, and of real work inside Tai Chi martial-arts training drills. Use repetitive actions, not random hand-pushing, to create patterns that gain amperage as the pattern develops. A tight, pressurized push-hands drills, for example, may uncover and flush out fears and anxieties. In such a controlled scenario, one releases the emotion and realizes more and more competence and confidence. At some point, the acupoints on the opponent’s body can be seen.
The internal, systematic, martial-art of Taiji Quan, permits studies of aggression and fighting practices that can begin softly and increase in pressure, duress, and intensity as experience grows. Such martial methods explore and release personal stress and tension in safe ways, so that, when (or if) the real pressure is on, options do not diminish, but expand.
Peace of Fighting
Studying fighting, maiming, and killing methods expands awareness about the fragility of human beings, about being alive. I am fragile. I see that others are too. Everyone — even the apparently toughest loudmouth — is vulnerable and fragile.
Because I see and empathize with this vulnerability, I show my vulnerabilities. By showing it, paradoxically, I am safer.
The calm that one can exude in stressful scenarios has, at its root, an acceptance of vulnerability of life, the tedious nature of existence. And we all have it, somewhere, inside. It’s that little something that one can tune to, in others, to let them release their angst, their terror, their aggression, and calm down.
But it take guts. It requires the tender heart of a warrior. And to get that: learn to fight. No one can be invulnerable, but everyone can feel safe. Everyone can tap on the sensitivity and vulnerability at the heart of us all.
Study Death Point Striking. It’s a fragile art of war and a hearty study of peace.
September 20th, 2008 at 8:59 am
Dim mak is a very interesting topic. I keep reading in Erles work that he learned Dim mak from the WUdang mountain people when he was invited back to china after the communists gave him a piece paper satying he was a master for his floor routine type performance( wushu tournament commie style) of the old yang form which nobody in China had mentioned seeing before. So he was invited back to China that same year and taught some hand weapons and some dim mak stuff, it is important to note that there is nowehere in the Yang family tradition the presence of dim mak as learned by Erle, which is why he got it not from the yangs or their students but from the Wudang people.
Erles dim mak book contains the same points as those taught in aikijutsu, George Dillman published a book with the same points, but he stole it from an aikijutsu guy who taught in london for a time. Dillman published the identical points as Erle and the same number of them, with similar applications. This is during the era where kempo started getting big due to parker promoting things and dillman in london there was a group of martial artists together doing including tai chi players, Aikidoka, Kempo and others. Erle was in london during part of this time and learned soem cheng fu from a Mr. Chu, he also mentions learning some aikido from a man whose name I do not know. I am very cuieous to know if someone can tell me the name of the aidio guy that Erle studied with in london. The man he says Mr. Chu bounced around when the aikido guy got pissed off. Anyway the dillman system that was taken from the aikijutsu (not the same as aikido) was incomplete and there are almost 300 points in the aikido system, dillman only covered the ones he got by vidoetaping a presentation, had the presentation given all of the points dillmans book would have had much more than his limited number of atemi.
I write this comment because there is the presentation that dim mak is a part of tai chi, it isn’t. It is a part of the very effectiv WTBA reflextive or sudden violence system, but it is not related to the Yangs according to historical record and their own tradition. Interesting enough however some tai chi system have some dim mak type moves or applications. There is a secret hand weapon that I was taught by my teacher, that he was taught by his teacher so on and so forth, and it comes with a few applications (all lethal) but it isn’t dim mak.
Dim mak confidence is a lot like having a gun on you, I have mixed feelings about that, I guess I think the death touch isn’t for everybody. I know that I have no interest in dim mak in my tai chi studies but my tai chi lacks thinks like bagua, dim mak, and other such addendums that inform the WTBA system.
September 20th, 2008 at 9:43 am
Admittedly, my use of the term dim-mak is less accurate than it could be, relying instead on the popular use of the term. Really…
In a purist sense, dim-mak is an advanced martial arts technique for promoting health and well-being….its training cannot be cleaved into portions. (The Book of Dim-Mak, p.xv).
Moreover, Chinese is a language I am quite unfamiliar with; I nevertheless concede that the strikes and applications of internal arts are not all Dim-Mak (Death Points) but Dim-Hsueh (Blood Gates) and Dim Ching (Incapactitations) and others. Dim-mak is used as an overarching term, in the popular sense.
The points themselves are so interwoven into the matrix of Chinese Traditional Medicine, that it must be part of Taiji. I give them – the form and system designers – that level of intellectual and natural talent. If they didn’t include these well-known (to CTM practitioners) points, then they’d not attain such great martial and healing feats.
That it’s not written about in Taiji texts does not disrupt Taiji’s link to it (it just makes it more private, as you suggest with your teacher’s knowledge). Remember all that fanatic secrecy!
That modern practitioner (except some) lack the knowledge of Dim-mak contributes to the declining martial and healing strength of Taiji, and does not reflect Taiji’s lack. The subtle details of form, as one advances, include more and more little bits of this kind of knowledge.
On a personal level, the detail, when sitting-back-ready after press (or push as you might call it), Dim-mak visions of ST 3 applications offer a specific and peculiar motion the makes Taiji – Taiji. It’s these internal details that make it, well, internal.
September 20th, 2008 at 9:59 am
Oh, another thought: Erle’s contribution to Dim-mak is far more comprehensive than the other artist’s works you mention. In the Encyclopedia of Dim-Mak, Erle Montaigue and Wally Simpson detail, in articulate, anatomical detail, the exact locations of points, connections, direction of strike, damage, set-up points, antidotes, healing applications and uses, and techniques that use said point for self-defense. HooAh!
September 27th, 2008 at 9:05 am
Very interesting.
The meridian system work of china seems to have a vedic basis. You may know of the vedic version of the meridian arts where chakra based energy paths are used to heal or kill with a touch. The vedic system seems to predate the chinese system and have even authored the latter, but can be found in vedic martial arts that contain all the basics of Tai Chi. This pertains to the vedic mountain warriors who traveled the regions and taught martial arts, these people were recorded as daoist saints in China and are linked to the development of Chinese internal arts.
That dim mak wasn’t written about indicates to me that it is not a part of tai chi at all. Even true the meridian exercises and flows that have been kept in the yang oral tradition have been written about and indicated. The Chen village papers documents meridian work and other aspects but not dim mak. The papers contain the vocal heng-haw qi-gong exercises which are outside the experience and understanding of many tai chi players, yet they contain no dim mak.
One might assume that there is a secret aspect to it, however there is little to hide in regards to this.Granted yang Luchan invented the public style form and hid the michuan form, however oral records exist and students were recorded(it was illegal not to keeps such records during the lang Qing) Now it has been more than hundrwed years since Yang luchan completed his (more than 2 decades long) extended training in Chen village, and we have a lot of interesting tai chi styles and forms (more than 10) but dim mak remains something that seems more independant.
There are also fighting records of the yang family (Ban Hou and Luchan etc), the accounts of theirs fights relate encounters using redirecting and bouncing techniques where the opponents were thrown quite far away using technqiues that are taught by pretty much every tai chi school that retains grasp sparrows tale.
I believe that Erles dim mak is effective martial arts material in most cases, however I don’t believe that it comes from the Yangs or Chen village. I could be wrong and my research will continue, but I don’t think that the power of tai chi has anything to to with death point striking, or sudden (cold jing) movements.
Can you point out some refferences on these classic teachers of tai chi who were great healers? Or a refference about a tai chi teacher using lethal technqiues in consensual combat? Some versions of tai chi history are harder to verify than others. I keep an open mind, but I am not a tai chi for $$$$ type of guy, my only motive is a love of the art. I believe that if people master the 13 postures then dim mak will seem obsolete to them.
September 27th, 2008 at 10:37 pm
Though I like legends (like the one where Yang the Invincible throws the guy on the roof with his spear!), if you believe the legends of Yang Lujan are accurate or true, we must end our discussion. Jackie Chan is a finer martial artist: you should see Who Am I? That’s evidence!
If you hang on the term Dim-mak, the contemporary author Yang Zwing-Ming uses the term Chin-Na, to seize or catch, to include 5 other sub-categories, one of which is Dian-Xue (or Dim-Mak), cavity press. I believe that he writes a book on Taiji Chin-Na, or something like it.
One should never write about Death Point Striking, except in a democracy (or some political scenario that resembles one). They’d a been fools to write about it. So if you expect an articulate, written text, you shouldn’t.
Healing diagrams of meridians and points should be enough to generate Dim-Mak concepts. Names of points are suggestive too: Heavenly Pillar, for example, BL 10: what might one do to it to use it for fighting versus healing? Get my point?
For me, it’s obvious that Dim-mak is inside Taiji. And I can tell how well folks know it by their movement. But others may seek the same intellectual certitude that you do. Here’s a more articulate reference, someone who wondered how to answer you: Paul Brecher’s book Old Yang Fighting Style of Tai Chi on page 46-48 describes something like what you seem seach for (and it’s a free download).
December 25th, 2008 at 1:00 am
Dim Mak is like carrying a loaded gun that fires as fast as you need it to and never really runs out of bullets. Nowadays people can actually carry around a loaded gun, so it’s less of a big deal. But back in the ages when dim mak was invented people fought mostly with their bare hands and they fought a lot. So those who invented dim mak definitely were willing to go to great lengths to keep it secret. They didn’t want their newfound knowledge to spread about the country. It was kept so secret you didn’t know about it unless you knew it. It wasn’t written down because then anybody could get ahold of it. Dim mak was the deadliest thing since the sword. Dim mak isn’t hidden in taiji, dim mak IS taiji and taiji is dim mak. Chang Sangfeng is credited for creating taiji, but he didn’t creat taiji he created dim mak. Dim mak was referred to as Hao Chuan (don’t quote me on the spelling) or loose boxing because of the way the body moves when doing dim mak proper. The styles of taiji everybody practices today didn’t come about until hundreds of years after Chang Sangfeng died. So what do you think they were doing during that time? Given the fact that’s one of the bloodiest times in Chinese history for martial artists, I doubt they were doing slow forms for health purposes.
Having been training in taiji, real taiji, for some time now, and having been learning how to kill with nothing more than my hands, it has completely changed my life and how I view it. The health benefits are amazing, no need to go down that road though, I’m sure that’s another article. What taiji does for my mental well being is also amazing. It takes the fear out of life. Having a gun is one thing. Knowing how to use a gun is another. Knowing why to use that gun is of utmost importance. All that owning and know how to and why to is followed by why NOT to. The things you learn in taiji and dim mak (same thing), when done on another human will end their life. There are few techniques that do less than that. And the ones that will do less than that are still brutal and devastating. But I’m ok with that. You have to have a nasty heart to misuse this stuff. It’s heavy, heavy stuff. I feel good with what I know and I doubt I’ll ever have to use it. But if that day comes, the training I’ve had will show through, of that I’m fairly certain.