Zen and The Martial Arts - Formlessness

I Liq Chuan is called "The Martial Art of Awareness" for good reason. Zen philosophy is inextricably interwoven into it's training approach. It's simultaneously the most difficult and most rewarding part of practice.

Recently in one of my local Tempe, Arizona classes at Falling Leaves Kung Fu, we were discussing I Liq Chuan's "Three Mental Factors" of present formless and neutral, with an emphasis on "formlessness", and how that formlessness applies to martial art.

The formlessness here is a mental quality of formless. In a recent conversation with my Sifu about the subject he explained "it's more about not locking (mentally) onto things".

Basically, when one's concentration is not strong enough, there is a mental type of "squinting" which takes place in order for the mind to process some piece of information. Scientists call this phenomenon "attentional blink".

Attentional Blink Video

The Zen masters of old wrote about it exhaustively. In fact, the Zen masterpiece, The Unfettered Mind (不動智神妙録, fudōchi shinmyōroku), written by Takuan Soho to a martial artist of his day, deals almost exclusively with this concept of attentional blink and it's application to martial arts.

Take the following passage;

"Glancing at something and not stopping the mind is call immovable. This is because when the mind stops at something, as the breast is filled with various judgments, there are various movements within it. When it's movements cease, the stopping mind moves, but does not move at all.

If ten men, each with a sword come at you with swords slashing, if you parry each sword without stopping the mind at each action, and go from one to the next, you will not be lacking in a proper action for every one of the ten.

Although the mind acts ten times against ten men, if it does not halt at even one of them and you react to one after another, will proper action be lacking?

But if the mind stops before one of the men, though you parry his striking sword, when the man comes, the right action will have slipped away.

Considering that the The Thousand-Armed Kannon has one thousand arms on it's one body, if the mind stops at the one holding the bow, the other nine hundred and ninety-nine will be useless. It's because the mind is not detained at one place that all the arms are useful."

-Takuan Soho

Although the author refers specifically to the sword, his advice applies to all martial arts, indeed, every and any activity.

Attach the mind to no object, and it is free to move from one moment to the next without hindrance. When concentration is sharpened, the mind won't be occupied with form (this is this. that is that, or possibly worse, what is is this? what is that?)

As my Sifu often says "If you think, you don't know, if you know, you don't think."