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Date Posted: 03:12:54 04/05/02 Fri
Author: Goktimus Prime
Subject: Re: Horse Stance Training
In reply to: Nakedswordsman 's message, "Re: Horse Stance Training" on 06:36:05 04/04/02 Thu

>Hsu most likley refering not just to sinking into a
>horse stance, and not a purely metaphorical 'rooting'
>(sorry couldn't resist) Qi can be absorbed from many
>sources, one of which is the earth we stand on. The
>earth is the source of the 'best qi' for strengthening
>a stance - di qi, solid and steadfast. Drawing on
>this qi enhances the stability of the stance and is
>essential to a good foundation. Ma Bu without it is
>comparable to the difference between standing still
>and trying to 'think heavy' (but not getting any
>heavier) and Hung Gar's 'famous thousand pound
>stance', in which an adept is immovable and
>undetatchable from the ground they stand on. Mention
>of practitioners of, and the training of the stance
>can be found in 'Internal and External Kung Fu'
>H.C.Chao, Taiwan 1989. (And yes it is true though i
>have only seen it personally once in Melbourne and was
>(un)fortunate to be one of the foolish skeptics
>involved in unsuccessfully attempting to, individually
>and later as a cooperative, lift the 55kg Hung Gar
>master.)
>And yes, the further away from the earth you are, the
>harder it is to make the connection, i am almost sure
>that vinyl tiles contain absolutely no qi whatsoever
>(joke, even they have inherent qi)but you get the
>point, its more difficult. This one of the basic
>precepts of qi gong training.

Mystical terminology aside, what we're essentially seeing here is that the more 'rooted' (*childish giggle*) your stance is, the more surface area you should be making in contact with the ground that you are standing on.

As Nakedswordsman pointed out, traditional Chinese texts like to colourfully describe this in terms of di qi etc, and when one considers the historical context behind the times that the bulk of Qigong texts were written, not to mention the kind of people who wrote it (being very poetic courtiers), not to mention their ignorance of modern scientific concepts and terminology, it is little surprise. That's not to say that the traditional qigong texts are wrong, per se, rather that they were written in a very poetic light, which is very typical of scholastic Chinese literature.

However, it can serve to somewhat obscure the precise meaning of what is being said. Essentially what is happening when one is "tapping in" to the di qi (di meaning "earth" or "ground") is that you are anchoring yourself to the ground rather than simply standing upon it. This doesn't mean that you're boring your feet into the soil, rather, it means that you are manipulating your mass and centre of gravity in such a manner that it grants your posture better stability.

Considering that the word "qi" can be translated as meaning "energy," we could then equate the term "di qi" as being the potential energy from channelling (distributing) your body weight in such a way that it creates a more stable horse stance (horse... stable -- gettit?! kkkkaaay, better not quit my day job).

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