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If I had to chose one section of one book that Bruce has written to represent the whole system of Bagua, I would select Liu Hung Chieh’s perspective in Bagua and Tai Chi: Exploring the Potential of Chi, Martial Arts, Meditation and the I Ching. This is an amazing overview of the entire system.
I would further summarize the steps this way:
1) Get everything from your finger tips to your toes and everything in between to become integrated into one unified entity.
2) Open the three tan tiens, yin/yang, left/right, central, and all of the smaller channels.
3) Create a stable mind.
4) For martial purposes, understand and embody how every square inch of your body can rotate like a sphere.
5) Find the one change.
6) For spirituality, learn about the chi of spirit and emptiness so you can eventually understand the chi that enables you to know who you are.
7) Eventually understand the nature of the universe.
Everything we practice, all of the silly hand waving, all of the reindeer games are about these steps. 99.999% of Bruce’s practices are about working through #1. It took Bruce 12 years of serious full-time study to complete #1 and it took me over two decades. 1,2 and 3 are about health. 1-5 are about high level martial arts. 6 and 7 differentiate health and martial arts from spirituality.
Thanks James.
Recently I’ve discovered the “sphere.”
Amazingly, Bruce’s practices do “materialize.”I had to re-read 5) Find the one change
to understand it.
I have found it (kinda) but it has yet to jump out of me as a fighting application.
I have no idea if I have found the one change or not, but here is one of the possible interpretations I’ve come up with…
Basically, every point inside and outside of our bodies is capable of expanding in every direction. I can’t tell if it is always expanding or whether it just has the potential for expansion. The one change uses this for power. You either are making it happen or your consciousness is just “grabbing” onto the expansion.
You can do this in a single linear line expanding from a point in one direction. Or, you can expand outward from a point in a line in two opposite directions. Or, you can expand from a point outside the body toward your core or from any point outward. Or, you can expand spherically.
This is the “energy” or “one change” that the Heaven palm change is intended to teach you. Everything else is built from this. IMHO, this is the basis of every Taoist energy practice.
This post is the first concrete understanding of yang and yin before I really understood how it created the space in the middle of the Bagua symbol.
From here I started to piece together the next phase: stillness movement, movement stillness.
I’ve recently gotten a deeper understanding of the one change that Liu refers to. It is just the switch from yang to yin and yin to yang that comes from the tai chi space. It is so simple and makes so much sense.
Tai Chi is aptly named. It basically uses this change over and over in different ways. It is literally based on the the philosophical idea of Tai Chi and manifests it to create all of its 13 postures. Peng is the first and arguably the most fundamental expression of the one change. All of the remaining expressions (gi, lu, an, tsai, etc.) are just variations on the same theme.
Bagua includes all of these but goes further. It is more complete.
What baffles me is why no one has written a single book that tries to tell you what it really is and how to do it. I’ve been skimming through a bunch of Bagua books and I can’t find a single one that comes close. The masters that know aren’t telling, and the vast majority that don’t know, don’t even know that they don’t know.
Kowtows, history and forms aren’t the art. What a profound waste.
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