January 1982

Miss Li addressed lots of comments to my letter having mentioned experiences of Qi Gong. She was outlining her own attitude to Daoism and Qi. In an English-language book she had read, the author had said there were three aspects of Daoism: religious, superstitious and philosophical. But she thought there was another one: medical. And Tai Ji could be seen as a major aspect of medical Daoism.

In reading old texts on Daoism and related matters it is important to remember several things. In the first place, many people from those cultures were illiterate or did not have the command of language to express their experience. Thus many martial artists may have had marvellous experiences but never written them down. And she included herself more or less explicitly among these, as a "doer" rather than a "writer". She never had the time to write out her thoughts and experiences. Then again, some people who did write about them wrote in strange or inadequate ways, so it is hard to understand what they were talking about.

So it is important in pursuing these issues to start from experience: once you have had a certain kind of experience, then you can go and see what other people have said about similar experiences of theirs. Then you may be able to understand things which were previously very obscure. Without experience you can collect texts and appear very knowledgeable while actually knowing nothing at all.

What Miss Li works on with us is simply the physical side of Qi, she claims no expertise on the mental side. The main methods used are simply movement and breathing in/out to mobilise energy, and also keeping the shoulders down to focus the Qi in the belly. It is also important that the movement be quite precise: she especially stressed the arms/armpits and the matter of opening/closing, kai/he. Normally the movements alternate between one shoulder open/one closed, as in Sideways Stepping; or going from both open/arms extended to both closed/arms contracted. This is also what enables one to always move from the centre.

On the one hand, she was rather sceptical about so much talk of Qi and meridians, not experiencing things in this way so much herself. On the other hand, she was keen on one particular Chinese doctor who had great knowledge of Western medicine and also much experience of Qi Gong, having been brought up as a boy in a Daoist medical family. She has some Chinese pamphlets of his which someone might one day want to translate. She was interested in the idea of more research into Daoist medical practices, and for herself Tai Ji was the most important avenue of approach. But this was not everything, and she claimed no teaching expertise on mental matters.