Neither blocking nor fleeing. Receiving the attacker’s force like a river — drifting with it and, in the same breath, turning the current back against him.
Shun Li Ni Xing is a paradoxical logic: you yield and take the lead in the same moment. Three aspects make it up.
Receiving the attack instead of blocking it — like water that gives way to a thrust and flows around it. No resistance for the opponent to lean on. The precondition is Fang Song (relaxation): only someone who is not cramped can feel the opponent’s force at all, and follow it.
In the same instant your own intent goes upstream — back into the opponent. His momentum and his reaction are used to destabilise him. Going along is never giving up: it is the preparation of the reversal.
The trick is simultaneity. Not evade first and then counter — the two are a single movement. This is why the delay of tense-first-then-act shrinks — according to Yao Zongxun roughly 0.2 seconds even in the best athlete — because the counter-force is already pre-tensioned. It cannot vanish entirely.
Force against force is a contest the weaker party loses. Going along and redirecting avoids the contest altogether.
In “Quan Dao Zhong Shu” Wang Xiangzhai describes the same logic at the level of attack: a small turn makes the frontal diagonal — and the diagonal frontal again. Tap through the three steps.
“Frontal position will become diagonal after slight turn. You absorb attack diagonally and attack frontally.” — Wang Xiangzhai, “Quan Dao Zhong Shu”
Shun Li Ni Xing is not merely a fighting technique — it is laid down already in the standing posture and ripens through partner work into free fighting.
Feeling out the six-sided counter-force is already a permanent going-along-and-acting-against. Here the principle is laid into the body, long before any opponent is there.
In Tuishou it becomes palpable: keeping your own centre and at the same time taking the opponent’s — receiving and taking over in one.
Applied freely: receive on the diagonal, answer head-on, without thinking. The solid point is attacked, the attack reversed — effortlessly, because relaxed.
Flow with the force, travel against the current — receiving and reversing are a single movement.