"Yang Family Forty Chapters"
Yang Banhou?
Chapter 3: Clarification on the Innate Abilities
When a person is born, her eyes can see, ears can hear, nose can smell and mouth can taste. Sight, sound, smell and taste enter awareness because of her innate abilities of perception. Arms waving, feet dancing and all other abilities of your limbs are made possible by your innate abilities for movement.
Think about this, who was not born with these capabilities?
All of man’s natural capabilities are the same in the beginning, but living conditions and experiences make them very different later on, and then the innate abilities can be enhanced or lost. If you want to regain these natural abilities, you have to use martial arts practice to seek the foundation of movement, and intellectual exercise to find the source of perception.
This is how movement can lead to awareness.
Mobilize (yun) and you will become aware (zhi),
move (dong) and you will feel (jue).
Without mobilization, there is no awareness,
without movement, there is no feeling.
Mobilization in the end results in movement,
awareness in the end becomes feeling.
Getting a feeling because of actual movement is easy,
becoming aware when your body is still in the stage of mobilization is difficult.
First, try to have movement (yundong) based on perception (zhijue) in yourself, then naturally you will become aware of the same thing in your opponent.
If you try to know your opponent first, you may lose self-awareness in the process. You cannot be ignorant of this principle.
Understand this and then you have dongjin - an understanding of the use of force.
'Lost T'ai-chi classics from the late Ch'ing Dynasty', Douglas Wile (State University of New York, 1996)