Experience-insight In The Pursuit Of Traditional Martial Arts

Traditional Wushu and modern sports events are rooted in different cultures, therefore the research of their differences should begin with the cultural psychology and thinking modes of their participants. Through the inspection of exercise forms and the traditional culture that it is deeply rooted in, the writer holds that experience-insight is the typical thinking mode distinguishing traditional Wushu from modern sports.Experience-insight is a comprehensive thinking way joining body and mind together without reasoning and logical analysis. Before the cognitive activity, the cognitive subject does not hold any personal concepts or ideas, which can ensure that the subject can acquire a comprehensive and whole knowledge of the object. As an advantageous thinking mode of traditional Chinese people and a typical feature of Chinese culture, it is quite reasonable that experience-insight is represented in various aspects of Chinese culture, of course including Wushu. This typical thinking pattern is shown in the process of production, acquisition, training and application of Wushu. This essay discourses upon experience-insight in the self-cultivation of martial artists and comes to the conclusion that the process of self-cultivation is a process of experience-insight for a martial artist.As a way of thinking, it is vital to make clear of the operating mechanism in order to seize the cultural features of Wushu and provide references for today’s Wushu teaching and training. According to the difference of objects in levels and directions, the thinking mode of experience-insight in this essay is divided into two parts:the introversive one and the extroversive one. The extroversive experience-insight means the comprehensive perception of the outside objects including the natural phenomenon, life experience, the Wushu content as well as various physical feelings of the Wushu practitioners. The introversive experience-insight means the perception of the Wushu practitioner’s real self. One’s real self is the real state of existence of human, which is also referred to as human’s primordial state in Daoism. Only by means of getting rid of one’s body and cognition can the Wushu practitioner make use of the experience-insight method to prove the existence of real self instead of being limited by the fake self.The extroversive experience-insight is discussed from three aspects:its precondition, process and condition, and it is pointed out that the inner peace is the precondition to produce experience-insight, that the continuous exercise is the process; that some media and chance are special conditions for the occurrence of experience-insight, such as natural phenomenon, life experience, guidance from Shifu, written and spoken language.There exists two forms in the introversive experience-insight, one is the realization of the real-self in the training process of Wushu movements, and the other is the one achieved through Zhanzhuang and medication, which can in turn serve the self-cultivation and real Wushu battle. This part is related to the Internal Elixir and the mind-and-soul theories in Daoism, which is beyond the author’s academic ability. For that reason, this part is not adequately stated and left for later study.Experience-insight thinking way has already been given a lot concern in literature, arts, philosophy and religion fields and so on, while less in Wushu culture. This study reveals the features of traditional Wushu training and inheriting in terms of its thinking mode, which is beneficial for the comparative study of traditional Wushu and modern sports. Moreover, if the inner rules of Wushu were mastered from thinking level, it would be rewarding to Wushu teaching, training and inheriting, as well as its theoretical and practical study.