n the world can overmatch the strongest things in the world. Nothing in the world can be compared to water for its weak and yielding nature; yet in attacking the hard and the strong nothing is better.
—Lao-tzu, Tao Te Ching
New York City in January is never really a good thing—too cold, sheathed in black ice, silent and dark and gleaming. It was a far cry from Rio, but the doctors are the best in the world, I was told. I went to see a specialist for my shoulder, and he looked at the MRI and said it was an “umbral tear” (to part of the rotator cuff) and that I should just keep resting it, doing what I was doing, rehabbing it on my own. “Listen to your shoulder,” he told me. For this ten-minute pep talk I paid $325.
For a while now, ever since Thailand, I’d been scheming to go to Myanmar, where the bare-fisted tradition is alive and well and they still allowed head butts. Brazil was inspiring, but I was a striker at heart; I wanted to stand and punch. If I was going to even think about fighting bare-fisted in Burma, however, I needed to be healthy and sharp as a tack. I couldn’t throw myself to the wolves again like I had in Rio, just go in and hope for the best. I knew what I wanted: Virgil Hunter, Andre Ward’s boxing trainer—his eye, his attention. I had spoken to him about the idea from Brazil, and he was willing to take me on for a while. But I had to get my shoulder healthy first.
It was while I was stuck in New York, doing the rehab, that I thought I would look at the internal side of martial arts, something I had never done in earnest. The internal arts had a strong historical precedent; they formed the bedrock of martial arts philosophy. I had always been intrigued but hadn’t had the time. Now I had an excuse.
The martial arts are usually divided into two categories, for simplicity: hard and soft, or external and internal. The hard, or external, arts are the explosive ones, the punching, the kicking, karate, tae kwon do, boxing, jiu-jitsu—everything you’ve probably heard of. They rely on strength and training of muscle memory; they’re about hitting and controlling with force or technique—force on force. Soft arts are more about redirecting the opponent’s energy, flowing with him, and the focus is on the mental, on meditation, breathing, building up and controlling energy—called chi—internally. Tai chi is the main example, but arts such as aikido, pa-kua, iai-jutsu (sword drawing), and even jiu-jitsu could be considered “softer” than many hard arts (but the jiu-jitsu the Brazilians do has no real mental component, except what they add from yoga). These distinctions are just cheap, easy ways to differentiate the two; in reality, there is usually not a sharp line; this is the yin and the yang. As you get deeper into any hard art, you may move into the more mental stages and it becomes more about the soft. Even boxing.
One of the many myths about the division between hard and soft martial arts claims that in the birthplace of martial arts, the Shaolin temple in China, the monks all trained in a total program that took ten years to produce a perfect warrior. The teachings balanced the hard with the soft, the yin with the yang. With the attrition of wars and the need for new fighters, however, the training regime was shortened to two years and involved just the hard arts, which were quicker to learn and more immediately practicable.
When you start to read about and get into internal arts, you can’t help but encounter a lot of mythology, a popular mysticism that was latched onto by the Western world for the last hundred years—Taoism, the magical healing abilities of tai chi, the archetype of the ancient Asian man who can perform miracles and is a fountain of Confucian, Taoist wisdom. The legends abound: Tai chi masters who can move people without touching them, or who can “root” into the ground and not be budged by seven men pushing on them with all their combined strength (kind of like yogis who levitate). Everyone is familiar with the ancient master who trains the young warrior in the kung-fu flick, a pervasive icon from The Karate Kid to Kill Bill.
I was willing to entertain these ideas—why not? It’s kind of the fun side of martial arts, delving into mysteries. After all, most martial artists and MMA guys love kung-fu films; we all embraced spectacular martial arts heroism at an early age. And who wouldn’t want to be invulnerable, or know the tao of the one-inch punch? The secret of dim mok, the death touch?
MMA, of course, has been the ultimate proving ground for all those guys who claimed to have techniques that were so deadly they could never even practice them—and they nearly always get stomped. Kung fu, with its strict stylization and emphasis on forms, is the biggest offender in this category. Team MFS has a T-shirt that says, “Team Miletich: Your kung fu is no good here.”
And yet, there must be something to the myths, I reasoned. Tai chi and the soft arts come from medieval times in China, when life was cheap and dangerous and the monks were fighting all the time, for their lives, against robbers and bandits and invaders. There is no way that everything they did was horseshit; there had to be something to it. It is only in modern times that man has become so divorced from actual fighting that bogus systems can survive and flourish. I decided to try tai chi—I was injured and couldn’t train hard, anyway—to see if there was anything in it I could learn, or take into my own study.
Robert Smith, who lived for years in the East and trained extensively in martial arts, what he called “Chinese boxing,” transcribed the following, from Huang Li-chou’s Nanlei Anthology. It is an inscription on a great tai chi teacher’s tomb:
The boxing prowess of the Shao-lin school is widely known throughout the world. Since it is essentially an offensive system, however, it is possible to counter its methods. There has arisen a certain school, the so-called Inner School, which controls the enemy’s action by calmness. The founder of the Inner School was Chang San-feng…a Taoist living on Mount Wutang. Emperor Hui Chung summoned him but he could not go because of bandits. One night he dreamed of being taught a special kind of boxing by Emperor Hsuan Wu the Great. The next morning Chang killed over one hundred bandits by himself.
I didn’t plan on killing a hundred men—but having that ability couldn’t hurt.
I found the closest tai chi place to me, on Twenty-third Street, run by a practitioner named William C. C. Chen. (I always pick the closest spot for training, because otherwise I won’t go.) He was exorbitantly expensive, around $230 for a month of classes, four classes a week. It is Manhattan, so I grudgingly paid him. I asked about private lessons, but that would’ve run $180 for a fifty-minute session.
Tai chi, as most people know it, is that “slow-motion, weird stuff” that old people do in parks. As they practice it, it doesn’t even remotely resemble a fighting art. Or does it? Watching someone go through a tai chi form, you start to see fighting postures in there, but everything is so slow, calm, and balletic. They move gently from one pose to another, stepping and sliding, turning and kicking, all at a snail’s pace.
Tai chi is based directly on the philosophy of Taoism, put forth by Lao-tzu. It is a mystical, natural way of thinking, and the tao is simply “the way.” The world is in a constant state of flux, and the soft and yielding win out over the strong and hard. Tai chi is based on those ideas and the concept of yin and yang—that famous symbol is actually the symbol for tai chi, as well. The use and control of chi, which is energy or life force, is the primary focus of tai chi. In China, practitioners often do not study tai chi until they have had ten years of experience in other arts, but the “short form” (the shorter sequence of movements) has been shown to cause significant health benefits and has become probably the most popular martial art in the world because of this. The People’s Republic of China did studies and found that tai chi was a very cheap form of health care, and they developed their own short form. I knew that I wouldn’t have enough time to really get into it—that would take years of study—but I thought perhaps I could take something away.
In William C. C. Chen’s studio there was an older crowd, nonathletes, maybe six or seven people. It could have been a dance studio, with its hardwood floors and wall of mirrors. Master Chen (it felt funny to call someone “Master,” as in MMA you never hear that traditionalist stuff) came out and started teaching without much fanfare. He was a small, slender man, older and clean-cut in a WCCCTCC sweatshirt (William C. C. Chen Tai Chi Chuan—how’s that for an acronym?). He looked to be in his sixties but was in fact a well-preserved seventy.
We began to move through the short form, and Master Chen was a pleasure to watch move. The form was a set of movements, fifty-some steps in all (there are many variations; some short forms are thirty or forty steps). There was a palpable tension about his body, an elegance of movement born of unimaginable repetition and study. He had been practicing tai chi for more than fifty years; how many hundreds of thousands of times had he been through this form, one that he himself designed?
That