Voiding

一步練錯百步歪。

One stage trained wrongly, a hundred wicked ones.

The more professional and elitist one’s training was, the more attention was paid to details. After all, the rule remains the same nowadays in the real martial world, commando training has nothing to do with regular troops instruction. Therefore, martial artists, in the old days, paid particular attention not to the benefits, but to the defects of their training. Quite the opposite of nowadays leisurely schools with their “if you do it correctly then it’s all good” motto.
For the least, two types of defects were taken into consideration, the inherent defects and the fact that one can hardly walk a straight path.

Not walking a totally straight path could lead the student to either a blind alley or to go astray. To solve such issue, two methods were possible. If one ended up in a dead end, he/she would be advised to train something totally opposite to what led to the stalemate. In a way, it was just balancing the Feminine and Masculine principles. The other issue, going astray, was trickier as one still felt like he/she was making progress. Going astray is actually a vicious circle in which the more one feels like making progress the more astray one goes. To avoid such trap, the teacher would show the student how to totally void all his previous training. Voiding was, then, a way to correct some inherent defects of one’s practice which naturally and little by little would push one to train in the wrong way without even realising it.

In the old days, training was very intense and progress thus fast. It was then, very easy for the teacher to share such a method. Nowadays, training, being scarce, enhances the many a little makes a mickle effect. Hence, it is very hard to realise one has gone astray until it is basically, if not too, quite late. For art that deeply modify one’s body, the first step of the voiding method was actually easy to understand, it was meant to adapt one’s training to his/her new body. A new body, new motion rules. Used to radically change the underlying principles of one’s practice, one could then easily understand what was necessary to do to keep oneself from going too astray.

I. New Realm

The typical example of a deep body transformation is going from straightness to the locks. One’s motion and its related principles will naturally change, going from long to very short,  quite unsettling at the time it happens. In the old days, one’s master would come with a riddle such as “Straightness is the hand that holds the limbs, roundness the one that pull the string” or “Short moves stretch more than long ones”. For those who were able to read a bit, the teacher might draw 犬, dog, and tell them another riddle, “you see, it is two different things, first one trains the obvious, big, to be able to then master the concealed, small”.

Voiding the previous training principles appeared, then, like something quite obvious once one had understood that the new fascia elasticity and connections allowed motions not possible before. It was just adaptation.

From this experience, the student could find out that it was not only possible, but quite natural to drastically change one’s method from time to time.

II. Starting Anew

Training is often compared to climbing mountains. Once you reach a summit, you will have to first go down to start the climb a new one. The down phase represents voiding.

In the old days, training being very intense, 24/7 and constantly supervised, this came very quick and voiding was something quite common once one was used to it.

The idea is that, as it is impossible to walk straight, one has to adjust from time to time, it is also impossible to progress in a straight line, especially when most of the study revolves around self-discovery. Always keeping in mind they could be wrong, voiding was a way to correct things and start anew.

Such method has almost totally disappeared in modern martial arts training. Why? First, because its root, the self-discovery, has also been put aside. Leisurely training dictates precise rules and standardisation, which is actually the opposite of the old methods.  Nowadays, students follow precise principles and, little by little, find their own routine, which they hardly change. It is quite problematic because the voiding method is actually even more useful when training at a leisurely pace.

Giving training examples, like voiding the “sink the shoulders and drop the elbows“ may become too confusing. Voiding the previous explanations of the Lady of Yue seems, then, more appropriate, the next post in the Lady of Yue series.