Life around Us
A great push hander
One of my teachers said, a good push-hander is someone whom you can’t test his intentions but end up being led away. With a great push-hander, you won’t even realise that he or she has led you away because it looked so effortless that you thought it’s all your fault for losing your own footing!
And what happens when 2 great push-handers meet? they’ll just touch each other (at the wrists of course) and know who’s less competent. Of course, that’s all speculation. It’ll be good to actually witness such a concrete example! Let me know if someone actually managed to arrange such a contest.
Such a contest might be boring to watch if all they did is touch for a few seconds and start congratulating each other’s Gong Fu! Maybe it’s ego at stake and they would like to give/keep their “faces”. We’ll never really know what happened. Only the push-handers themselves will know. That might be the main point though. Push hand is to test the push-handers, not a demonstrative sport. It’s meant to test your own skills, not to show others that you’ve pushed someone 10 feet away.
So I urge you to stay true to learning the art, and don’t succumb to “winning”. By winning others, you have actually lost yourself. The only person you need to win is yourself. Then, only then, you can win others. The success you achieve through this is qualitatively different from landing someone on the floor. Both you and your opponent will know it. Both you and your opponent will respect the outcome (be it grudgingly for some). It’s a win/win situation.
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One comment for “A great push hander”
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A friend of mine-who isn’t really a TJQ-er, hes a Dragon-style Kung Fu-er who dabbles in the IMA- recently had the good fortune to “lock up” with Dr. Yang jwing-ming. He said the good Doctors touch was so light and yielding through everything he did that there was never any advance notice that something horrible was about to happen.
I’d say thats a pretty quality push-hander.