252. Genchitaofu Baguazhang’s Jingong Soul - 艮氣道福八卦掌の勁功魂

The hardest parts to grasp regarding jingong 勁功 is: 1. It is for most martial artists uncharted waters. While it appears to be the external side of the internal workings of qigong, it is not the same thing as training in a hard or externally focused martial art. And; 2. Depending on your style of martial art, your path towards understanding jingong 勁功 will be completely different to somebody schooled in another style. I do baguazhang, so that means my comprehension of it will be through baguazhang. My role as a “Living Tao” (活道) is to give enough insights, so that if you come across this podcast or one of my books, you will get a sense of where you are headed. Your own experience of it is vital if you want to master it. So don’t dismiss or discount your own personal martial history because your naysayers don’t want the same thing. Actually, it’s not even that. What is really happening is reality is catching up with them, when it comes to you, and suddenly they are getting that nagging feeling that they are being left behind. For you see, while a person is doing qigong or an internally focused martial art, it is easy to dismiss it all as just fooling around, no matter how serious the practitioner may be. It’s like they can only see the toddler in the sandbox playing with his Matchbox cars, even though the toddler is a teenager surfing around on the beach. That so called toddler has moved up and is about to leave the beach for the desert. And his toy car is now a real Toyota Landcruiser. Jingong 勁功 is a massive scaling up from qigong. It has to be. Because in a strange and weird sort of way, it’s no longer just about the self. It is about the self in context to its surroundings. In other words: Fengshui. A person with jingong 勁功 can move to an alien environment and within a very short period of time, that environment will start changing to reflect them in subtle ways. Even if the whole process can be denied, if their jingong 勁功 is strong enough, the people around them will start to notice the changes. And they will usually have people around them comment like this, “How come, or why is it, that whenever you go somewhere, XYZ starts appearing around you?” Or, “Where’d all these XYZ people come from? We never had them, but now you are here and they’re everywhere — it’s like you bought your whole damn tribe with you?” If something like this has ever happened to you then, firstly, congratulations. You got strong jingong 勁功. And, secondly, that so-called tribe isn’t your family as in blood relations. No. They reflect the ancestral lineage of the martial art you have been marinating in. At the same time this is going on, things that are not aligned with your qi start disappearing from your life. I know some of you will want to nervously laugh and mock, because it is touching on one’s self identity. But this is the meaning behind Pak Tai 北帝, the Dark Warrior washing his guts clean in the river (before ascending Wudang Mountain 武當山). For those of you, who need a monotheistic explanation: Qigong is the process by which the martial artist uses the body to burn off the sins polluting their soul. While baptism and holy water works for some people on an external level, the process of qigong is internal and goes much deeper. It acknowledges before God that this process of cleaning one’s soul is the same as walking and breathing. Nobody can do it for you. You have to do it by yourself. Amen.