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Master Liu Hung Chieh was to have been more skilled and talented than Wang Shu Jin or Hung I Hsiang. Why was this? Is it because he just practiced more, or had a natural talent? Is it because he started training at an earlier age, whereas the other two masters started later?
Having never met him in person, I can’t speak directly about him.
However, I’ll say that some people are just suited to some things. I knew people who, even in first and second grade, were amazing artists. They got right into it, and went on to study at university level and went on to make great pieces.
Conversely, I tried my hand at art, and even with large amounts of practice I barely managed to make even adequate pieces.
Is it just practice? Chance? Natural talent? Karma? Hard to say for certain about another person.
But I think the great thing about the Daoist meditative arts, and also the daoist internal arts, is that their focus on going inside and feeling you helps you to uncover what your own tendencies and personality are. Where does your energy tend to flow? Follow it, and you may be led to discover a talent that you never knew you had, and would never discover without that introspective process.
That’s not to discount the value of hard work, however. Even if Master Liu Hung Chieh was the most talented person in the world, without dedication and practice, he most likely would not have turned out to be the person that he was.
There is a life coach that my wife was reading about. His big idea is that it takes 10,000 hours of quality work to become a super star at something. He tracks the efforts of people like Michael Jordan and shows how, even with serious talent, they all started at the beginning and worked hard to get where the got to.
Lets say that you practice for 2 hours a day. That is 13 years of practice before you reach 10,000 hours. The question then becomes, is it worth all the time spent? I would say, yes. It is worth it.
I would ask you, what makes a Michael Jordan or a Bruce Frantzis what they are? I believe that talent = 10,000 hours luck. Jordan practiced several hours every day for years to get to his level. I heard that when Bruce was learning that some called him “Mad Bruce” because he was so dedicated to his practices, working early in the morning to late at night.
The luck (or provenance) comes into it in ways we can’t hope to understand. Choosing to turn left or right on a road brought them to where they had the opportunities that they got.
But, Farhan, all that does not address your question. You could as easily ask why one tree is bigger than another. The Masters are all bigger trees that I expect to become. I am not them and they are not me. I think that I will just get back to practicing.
my take on it is that there were several factors.
1. Liu was more thoroughly schooled in the energetic arts. my personal experience is that, after working with bruce for a while, I saw benefits far beyond what other chi gung students were experiencing. Over time, I have also had numerous people comment on my “natural” or “gifted” hands, which I did NOT have as a young person. Lots of other stuff like that…
Having deeper level training, and having it clearly calibrated and tested, not asssumed, seems critical to the process, and I would guess that Liu had that deeper level of training, compared to Hung and Wang.
2. Liu had deeper goals in his practice. spiritual goals. id say that spiritual power is like super chi power, and that some of what Liu could do that made him such a phenomenal martial artist were the result of his other spiritual practices, not just the chi gung, hsing-i, bagua, etc, that he practiced daily.
3. you can practice a hell of a lot more when your a hermit. that’s probably why people become hermits, cause they want to spend all their time practicing. So he probably got more practicing in, particularly when he was working with chi in sitting meditation practice, in calligraphy practice, as well as martial arts practice; that’s good cross training.
4. In bruce’s account of the 3, Liu has not only a greater skill, but he showed skills that the others did not show at all, such as his healing with a strike, moving bruce purely with chi, etc.
this seems to me that he wasn’t just trying to be a better martial artist, he was trying to be a better person.
and that sort of training seems to develop different skills, ones that can cross back over into fighting…anyway, that’s my take on it.
1. really get what your doing
2. train for life, not just fighting
3. spend your time practicing.
which reminds me…
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