劲与物理第七 Jin and Physics
1/22/2019 #7: Jin and Physics - Google Docs 劲与物理第七 Jin and Physics Treatise Seven of Zhengzi’s Thirteen Treatises On Taijiquan By Zheng Manqing (Cheng Man-ching) Translation by Lee Fife, 2018 and 2019 With thanks to David Gatten, for support during the work of translation, In memory of his father Robert Edward Gatten, Jr. Translation copyright (c) 2019, Lee Fife. You can reuse this content as long as you attribute me and the resultant work is also reusable. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/ . https://docs.google.com/document/d/1cA5fOy2Rv9UGINxZSChuBfJaoOcATvMRDKfYQmvAZV8/edit# 1/64 1/22/2019 #7: Jin and Physics - Google Docs Introduction I’ve spent years puzzling over this chapter in Zheng’s 13 Treatises . As someone with formal education and degrees in physics, I was excited by the promise that Zheng would explain the physics and mechanics behind the mysterious powers of taijiquan. Of course, this is not at all what Zheng intends or does in this chapter. Instead, he uses the chapter to do two things: first, to make a political and cultural statement by providing a theoretical framework for taijiquan, positioning it as an empirically provable bodymind technology comparable to Western technology and able to withstand scrutiny and validation from a modern scientific point of view; and second, to describe visualizations, with a mechanistic flavor, that practitioners can use when interacting with a partner or opponent. Zheng, together with many of his contemporaries, attempted to address the challenge of modernizing China1: finding ways that Chinese culture, philosophy, and practice could not only withstand scrutiny according to Western standards of rigor but would be shown to be at least the equal of and ideally superior to Western culture, philosophy, and practice.
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