Chinese Thought: Taoism and the Martial Arts

Chinese thought: Taoism and the martial arts

If you train in a Japanese martial art long enough, you'll keep running into ideas that didn't start in Japan at all. Yin and yang, the Tao, the "way" in karate-do: all of them come out of classical Chinese philosophy. This page summarizes how the physicist Fritjof Capra explains that philosophy in his book The Tao of Physics. The ideas below are his; the wording is ours.

Two sides of one philosophy

Capra describes a culture that was already more than two thousand years old when Buddhism reached China, around the first century AD. Its philosophy had peaked in the late Chou period (about 500 to 221 BC), and from the start it had two complementary sides.

One side was practical and social: how to live together, how to govern, what moral values to hold. That became Confucianism, a philosophy of social order, education and common sense. The other side was mystical. It said the highest aim was to rise above everyday life and reach a higher level of awareness. That became Taoism.

The Chinese ideal, Capra explains, was the sage who holds both sides at once: intuitive wisdom and practical knowledge, contemplation and action. He quotes Chuang Tzu on fully realized people:

"By their stillness become sages, by their movement kings."

Anyone who has stood motionless in a kata and then exploded into a technique will recognize the idea.

The Tao: a way, not a thing

Tao originally meant "the way." For the Taoists it was the process of the universe itself, the order of nature, something that can't really be defined. Later the Confucianists used the word in a moral sense, the right way for people to live.

What makes the Chinese view different, according to Capra, is that it's dynamic. The world is a constant flow of change, and that change follows patterns. The sage notices those patterns and acts in step with them, which is what "being one with the Tao" means.

The main pattern is the cycle. Lao Tzu puts it in four words, "Returning is the motion of the Tao." Whatever reaches an extreme turns back toward its opposite. Capra points out that this belief gave the Chinese patience in hard times and caution in good ones, and it led both Taoists and Confucianists to value the middle way and avoid excess.

Yin and yang

The two poles of that cycle are yin and yang. Capra notes that the words first meant the shady and the sunny side of a mountain, which tells you a lot: they're relative, not absolute. Over time they came to stand for dark and light, yielding and firm, rest and movement, intuitive and rational.

The familiar yin-yang diagram, the T'ai-chi T'u or "diagram of the supreme ultimate," shows this as rotation rather than a static balance. The small dot inside each half says that when one force reaches its peak, it already carries the seed of the other. Capra traces the same idea through Chinese food, seasons and traditional medicine, where health is a balance of yin and yang kept by the flow of ch'i, vital energy.

Why this matters on a karate site

Capra wasn't writing about karate. But if you've heard a sensei talk about tension and relaxation, about hard techniques that come from a soft body, or about ki, you've heard echoes of these ideas. Master Funakoshi himself is often quoted on the balance between tension and relaxation, and Shotokai's emphasis on non-contraction makes more sense once you see the philosophy behind it.

Capra goes on to discuss language, the I Ching (Book of Changes) and much more. If this summary catches your interest, the book is well worth reading in full. It was this book that ultimately made me start my karate-do training.

Sources

• Fritjof Capra, The Tao of Physics: An Exploration of the Parallels between Modern Physics and Eastern Mysticism, Shambhala, 1975. Chapter on Chinese thought. Short quotations above are from Capra's text and the classical authors he cites (Chuang Tzu, Lao Tzu).