Intention and attention as apologetics for incorrect understandings of the internal arts.

Intention and attention as apologetics for incorrect understandings of the internal arts.

A discussion that has been around for a while now (that maybe I even contributed to a little) is the idea of reformulating the old idea of intention being the correct use of the term 意 yi in internal martial arts and maybe even Daoist practice.

The idea emerges from an older interpretation that the term 意 yi means intention, thus (as an example) making the style 形意拳 Xing Yi Quan become Shape of Intention Boxing, or 意到则气到 Yi Dao Ze Qi Dao/Where the Intention arrives the Qi arrives.

This idea is technically wrong, since Yi actually means mind in Chinese while intention can be considered a subset of Yi, but is often accompanied by another character such as 意向 Yi Xiang/Intention/Purpose, or in some cases intention may be described without using the term Yi in character combinations such as 念头 Niantou/Point of focus (lit: thought head).

Internal Arts vocabulary isn't particularly easy to learn and there have been problems in translation on both the Western and Chinese sides, since a meeting of minds is difficult when both parties are operating outside of their native language and also because Chinese cultural ideas are often dumbed down for non-Chinese people because many teachers are of the opinion that their students are not sophisticated enough to understand them (which incidentally is pretty much the only reason why I can be successful writing these articles, since if the information was already good I wouldn't be needed).

Even though some Chinese masters think of their students as not very sophisticated, I can tell you for sure that most practitioners and students in the west are highly intelligent and often come to understand that there is something not quite perfect in their understanding.

In the old days Yi was intention and that was enough, but intention as an idea is a very constrictive notion and after a certain point it just doesn't make sense that everything is to be intended on in martial arts practice, and certainly in meditation practice where it is important to let go of intention at various points in order to perceive one's essential nature.

This has led to the rise of what I call a form of apologetics to help us rationalize a mistake we don't fully understand and then have new tools to move past it.

I won't bore you too much with the meaning of apologetics, but in brief, they are amendments or defenses of religious ideas based on rigorous argumentation.

An example of Christian apologetics would be the addition of the statement “I baptize you for atonement, but one comes after me who's sandles I am not worthy to untie and he will baptize you with the holy spirit and fire,” attributed to John the Baptizer. In the earliest versions of the Gospel of Mark, Jesus Christ is baptized by John, but in gospels written chronologically later, John is placed at least as an inferior to Jesus, rather than as his teacher. This form of apologetics is required in order to give Jesus Christ primacy over all other Jewish spiritual leaders of his time.

When I use the term apologetics to describe further contributions of English language theory to the Internal Arts and Daoism, it is somewhat of a tongue in cheek statement, but at the same time it fits the core theme of why these forms of amendment are used in defense of a position.

However, one thing that is true of apologetics whether religious or martial is that they are usually not based on factual truth, but rather in some kind of representative truth the enhances a paradigm within a currently existing system that for some reason was found lacking.

These days I try to resign myself from my previous role as an agent of chaos in the community, but I feel like this is a pretty valuable icon to tear down since it can genuinely benefit people and get their minds out of paradigms of primacy of western ideas about Chinese arts.

We previously covered other words for intention in Chinese (Yi can be used for that too, it is just an overly narrow definition to apply to our arts) so let's talk about attention, since the paradigm under consideration is the balance of intention and attention in practice.

Just as a biographical note, I engaged with a small group of friends a number of years ago to try to develop a more culturally accessible approach to Qigong and Daoist meditation in which one of our core ideas was intention v.s. Attention and at the time I thought the idea was my own unique creation, but we never went public with that project and I've been seeing it around more and more recently, so my suspicion is that many of us think alike.

I make that note as an admission of my own monkey mind looking to redefine things in the arts which I do not completely understand and so that this article will not be viewed as an attack on any individual, since many people use this idea and it is not the creation of one person alone.

In Chinese the word “attention” is 注意力 Zhu Yi Li/Power of Attention, or 关注 Guanzhu/pay attention to something. There are other ways to say it too, but those are the best ones.

You can definitely use those terms in martial arts, Qigong or meditation practice, but they are not commonly used to describe a form of stable attention different from mental focus (which is how intention is presented).

So how do Chinese arts describe Yi/mind in practice?

Let's do this in point form to make it easy and clear:

1: Yi means mind: mind does not mean either intention or attention, it is way more complex than that since it refers to every aspect of our experienced cognitive apparatus.

2: The meaning of Yi can be found in its composition: Yi 意 is a combination of Yin 音 which means sound and Xin 心 which means heart. Etymologists take two stances about this term, one is that Yin is used to denote pronunciation of the character while Xin denotes inner thoughts. The other is that Yin refers to the sound of speech, so Yi is the sound of speaking your mind. Even though we definitely should not judge modern words through the most ancient etymology, Chinese is a pictographic language and that is an important consideration when taking meanings into account, especially because Chinese writers in past times were usually highly educated in the meanings of characters.

3: Yi can mean both intention and attention, but it can also mean awareness: the mind is considered to be an extension of the perceptual spirit, so any information the perceptual spirit sends or receives is filtered through the mind and the mind plays a productive role in the formation of awareness and interpretation of sensory information and thought.

4: Yi is not universally applied across all arts: there are hundreds of ways to use the term Yi in Chinese which have no relationship to intention, for instance 如意 Ru Yi is a common wish you make someone during an important event in their life or at Chinese New Year. It means “I wish you to have everything go the way you want it,” and has no relationship at all to focusing on a single point or paying attention to something, it is more like saying “I hope all your dreams come true.” In Chinese arts and culture Yi can be used in many ways and the interpretation of Yi in internal alchemy has nothing to do with its interpretation in the martial arts and neither have anything to do with how it is used in Qigong. You have to be able to differentiate between these things, otherwise you will become very confused and it will lead to the need to develop apologetics when you would be better suited to just learning the terminology the right way.

Now let's talk about particular usage:

1: Martial Arts:

Yi can mean to direct intention or focus on something and can be conjoined with other characters to create broader meanings that apply in specific circumstances. As an example in the art Xingyi Quan the term Yi is used to describe the generation of a mind state that lets you adopt the spirit of a particular animal during martial practice. That animal spirit becomes manifest in physical posture in movement, thus 形 Xing/Shape/Body takes the form of 意 Yi/Mind/What is being imagined. That is one use of Yi, but another use is the previously mentioned “Where the Yi arrives the Qi arrives,” which means that Qi will travel to an area you put your focus on. Another way to use Yi is your teacher might say to you 注意 Zhu Yi/pay attention (to something) in order to instruct you about something you need to remember in your practice.

2: Qigong:

modern Qigong is partly based on martial arts and partly based on Daoism, but the use of the term Yi is more similar to martial arts, at least in how the term is used in practice. “Where the mind arrives the Qi arrives,” is a frequently used saying in Qigong, but so is 意守 Yi Shou/Guarding the Mind (in a physical location). Yi can be used in a similar way to meditation, but you will see in a moment that Daoism has a very specific interpretation of the term which is completely unique to internal alchemy.

3: Meditation:

not all meditation schools use the term Yi, but internal alchemy uses it together with 真 Zhen/True to form 真意 Zhen Yi/True Mind. Zhen Yi refers to the relationship created by the five elements of water, wood, fire, earth and metal as transitional phases between the post heaven and pre heaven states. This is way too complex to describe here, but I am in the middle of teaching a course about it, I'll put a link at the bottom of this article if you are interested in knowing more.

In the Neidan text Xing Ming Gui Zhi it specifically uses the phrase “where the mind arrives the Qi arrives” in a negative way to imply that people lose life energy through the overuse of the mind, so there is definitely no direct correlation between the use of Yi in Neidan, Martial arts and Qigong.

Problems and solution:

I think a synthesis should be offered at the end of this article in order to avoid making it overly aggressive or unfair, so I'll say that the ideas of intention and attention are pretty good and describe something important, especially in meditation where we need to sometimes make mental focus stronger and sometimes need to let it go, but it only describes part of what the term Yi actually means and cannot be used universally to explain mental phenomena even in one art, let alone three.

Here is my synthesis:

Someday we will need to define Chinese internal practices with western words and begin to make them part of our culture(s), but that day is not today.

If you had a strong reaction to the idea of making something from another country culturally our own, I just want to recommend that you have a pizza sometime in a second or third tier Chinese city (tier is a technical term applied by the Chinese government to refer to the progress of development of an urban area, not my own qualitative assessment since in my opinion third tier cities are usually the best). I think you will find that Chinese pizza, even at an American chain like Pizza Hut bears no resemblance to the pie you are used to eating back home (every Italian is fuming over this by the way).

Arts and Culture aren't something that belong in a museum, they are supposed to be applied within our own experience so we can make our lives more beautiful.

However, in my cosmology, I personally like to think that we might try to be a little tasteful and tactful by fully learning the meaning of terms in the arts we study before applying our own ideas to them.

I could bore you to death with all the reasons why misapplication of ideas can fuck you up, but I'm sure you've already heard many of these things before and some outcomes of incorrect ideas can lead to serious problems.

Attention and intention isn't a bad idea at all, but if we want to really understand the original meaning of terms that describe the practices we love so much, we ought to go a bit deeper.

By the way, here's the link to that course about the mind in internal alchemy if you're interested:

https://immortalitystudy.gumroad.com/l/truemind