Don't Open the Door!

開門閉戶，陰衰陽興。

開 to open

門 door(s), outer door(s)

閉 to close

戶 door, inner door

陰 Feminine principle

衰 to decline, to become weak

陽 Masculine principle

興 to prosper, to flourish 

1. "Doors open and close, the Feminine declines and the Masculine prospers."

Here an open door is actually referring to opponents while the closed one* to oneself. Indeed one shall be aware of his/her opponents openings while keeping at all times one's guard. This principle can also go further, a training which consists of closing oneself exactly where one's opponent is opened. In doing so, one will protect oneself as well as point exactly where he/she should thrust, a sort of way to kill the two birds, attack and defence, with one stone, or in Chinese: "There shall be defence in one's attack and attack in one's defence".

The other part of the sentence mainly refers to one's mental attitude which, while fighting, shall be very agressive. In this sense, the Feminine is being shy, welcoming, unsure..., while the Masculine is meant to mainly put pressure on the opponents. Indeed, one of the objectives of training is to develop the "aura of death" or "murderous look" to scare people of. This is, of course, while fighting, the text further on explains the difference in behaviour one shall have when not fighting where the Feminine shall prosper (a perfect application of the theory of the Feminine and Masculine Principles).

2. "Opened outer doors and closed inner one, the Feminine becomes weak and the Masculine flourishes."

Outer doors refers to the body and is feminine as opposed as the inner one which are the vapours and are masculine**.

Outer doors are mainly the mouth, nose, ears and pores while the inner one is the perineum. Hence, "opened" is the obligation to never hold one's breath while "closed" to keep the heat in one's body. Therefore, never breathless, even slightly, and always sweating from the forehead are the two main things to check out when training.

Furthermore, the Feminine becoming weak points to the necessity to train a supple body as opposed to a hard one while the Masculine is one's vitality, which shall flourish. Hence the preference for extended moves and the attention paid to the impact of training on one's organs.

3. "Opened outer doors and closed inner one, the Feminine becomes weak and the Masculine flourishes."

There is an even more internal understanding of such a statement. If in this one the inner door remains the perineum, the outer ones, exactly two, are located just beneath it. 

This enigma is a rather complicated one because it implies to link in a certain way parts of the first and second statements. To make it simple, it contains at least the following points:

• The more the outer doors are opened, the weaker the body gets.
• The more the inner door is closed, the stronger is one's vitality.
• The more one opens the outer doors, the more he/she shall close the inner one.

Moreover, the second part of this statement, even if presented by a woman, also refers to what a male student should look for. Male students have a body which is mainly feminine. They must succeed in reversing this proportion, the masculine must take over, hence the need for the Femine to become weak.
If the last point concerns retention trainings, the three first ones are linked with the capacity to retain as much heat as possible inside one's body. This concerns mainly all the trainings aimed at making the perineum and its surroundings stronger by correcting one's posture and strengthening the connective tissues through proper stretching. The third point implies a special stretching training where, basically, the perineum will move up while the rest down, sometimes referred as "the turtle retracts its neck".

Old practices tend to always have an external and internal interpretation of any statement and, even when missing, it shall be up then to the student to find the other side of the coin. Still, interpreting a text means having the proper exercises to go with. Otherwise, it would be just deciphering a text but certainly not a martial method. In other words, no practical application, no real meaning. 

*戶 means one door as opposed to 門 two, see previous post.

**A possible understanding is that the body is predominantly made of water while vapours mean a heat stronger than water, hence a strong or prosperous Masculine for a weak or declining Feminine is a condition to create vitality. In other words, exercise of any kind creates vitality.