by Nick Lowry
A wise old sensei once pointed out that if you take a whole variety of different hard stylists and watch their kata, an educated eye can tell them apart , but when you take that same lot of hard stylists and put them in a contest, it all winds up looking like a boxing match or kickboxing game and the styles seem to vanish.
What’s left behind, under the duress of contest is the nitty gritty, the basic core stuff , the principles, which in the hard styles are basically variants on the theme of “Force meets Force”…block counter punch, deflect and blast em.
The rest of the stuff that delineates and differentiates the hard arts are stylistic preferences largely grown up around heuristic needs and personal strategies. Much grandiosity accrues to such preferences… and as such, here is where we have all the silliness about the superiority of one art to another. But apples and oranges are not even close….
If we apply the same concept to grapplers we get a similar picture. Watch a Greco roman wrestler, a judoka, a sumo man , a ju Jutsu stylist, and Mongolian wrestler train and you will see plenty of distinct attributes, but put them all naked into a ring with minimal rules and watch them do their thing and the picture becomes far less distinct. Grappling reduces to its fundamental principles which are basically variants on “Force joins with Force” …the centers converge and merge and hit the deck and then wind up rolling around on the ground until something or somebody gets stuck, or broke, or unconscious. Distinctive elements are not so completely dissolved as with the hard stylists; a well trained ashi waza judo man will still have foot sweeps unlike anything in the wrestler’s arsenal… the jujitsu fella will be hellish in the submission end of the game, no doubt… the sumo will have a few choice advantages as well…. But overall they all wind up doing pretty similar plays. Hook it up and stuff em down til it all gets quiet and gentle.
When we look at the internal or soft stylists, we again find that the particular methods and qualities pale in contrast to the basic principled similarities. Here in the upper end of the Akidoka and tai chi players, the soft form Gung Fu artists, and some Baugua and Xingyi and Systema guys, its fair to say we are in a world that “Avoids Force” and “Exploits Force” … simultaneously.
The Soft Style operates in a field built out of whole body movement and internal isometrics. Out of seemingly effortless and meticulous sensitivity and reactivity and subtle control of reflex and vector. This is the magic stuff because it exists on the frontier of what we can describe in our simple language, and when we step over that edge and the language fails then the experience stands on its own in a state of undescribed/indescribable reality. When its really right in the internal arts it is past what our nervous system can account for. Magic seems as good a term as any.
Some of it is describable though… This “magic” confronts force with the paradigmatic strangeness of zero and can at times include methods of “meeting force” and “joining force” but it cannot be reduced to them. It includes them, but also transcends them.
If the principle in hard style is like billiard balls colliding on the felt, and the principle in grappling arts is like a tow truck attaching to a car and hoisting it up to haul it off to the impound yard , then the principle of the soft arts is like planetary bodies moving in concert with each other, past each other, subtly but inescapably all revolving in the dance of gravity.
Past all preferences and into principle I can assert that When it is right you feel nothing and there is nothing you can do about it and whatever you try to do about it just sinks you deeper into the earth. Gravity is inevitable.