Wang Xiangzhai describes the highest state of standing not in concepts but in four images: the body as if cast, as if filled with lead, the muscles as one, the hair like halberds. Only someone who feels all four at once can, in Wang’s words, “speak of the fist” at all.
Si Ru Jing Jie is the third and highest of the three levels of Zhan Zhuang. Wang Xiangzhai describes it in his late essay on standing and the four forms. He defines the state not by a posture but by what one feels in it: four criteria of perception, each put as a likeness.
The number of likenesses.
The word of comparison. Each of the four images is a “ru”: the body like something.
From jing (boundary, situation) and jie (domain, realm): a state attained, a level.
“Only when standing reaches the state in which the whole body is as if cast, the body as if filled with lead, the muscles as one and the hair like halberds can one speak of the fist.”
— Wang Xiangzhai, “On standing and the four forms”, in: Wang Yufang, Yiquan QuanxueEach image takes hold of a different side of the same body. Tap a likeness.
The four likenesses look like a list, but they are not one. They include one another, overlap in part and hold at the same time. In practice one is meant to feel them more and more, not to tick them off in turn.
First become heavy, then cast, then networked, then awake — four ticks, one after another. That way the state falls apart into pieces again, and each image goes wrong on its own: lead without lightness is sagging, casting without liveliness is mechanism.
Four sides of a single state. The heaviness stays light and alive, the casting stays mobile, the network carries the heaviness, the alertness sits in all of it. Wang always names the four in one breath, never as a sequence.
Wang describes every level twice over: what happens in the mind and what happens in the body. The likenesses announce themselves long before. The feeling of lead already turns up at the first level, the hair rising at the second. Only at the third does everything come together.
After about a hundred days, the first sensation. After three or four years the limbs swell, hands and feet grow hot, and the feeling of being filled with lead appears — more easily and sooner on the yin sides of the limbs than on the yang sides.
Only when both sides have it can one begin to learn gongfu.
After five or six years the ears swell, something drums inside the bridge of the nose, the neck straightens as if held by six ropes. The scalp tightens, beard and hair rise, as though a great stone were pressing on the head.
But the force still comes mechanically from the extremities, not from the loins and spine.
After about ten years the loins and spine swell. The body is as if cast, as if filled with lead, the muscles as one. Walking is like wading through mud, the back as firm as an ox’s.
The force sent out is now even and whole: “The groundwork for fighting is ready.”
“The years given here all rest on my own experience. For the student they may be somewhat longer or somewhat shorter, depending on talent and effort.”
— Wang Xiangzhai, ibid. He adds the saying: “Success is three parts talent, seven parts diligence.”The fourth likeness, the hair like halberds, does not appear in the description of the third level. Wang names it only in the following chapter on the four forms, there together with the other three. The threefold division itself he borrows from the scholar Wang Guowei; he assigns Wang Guowei’s first two guiding lines (“gazing down the road to the horizon”, “no regret”) in reverse order.
Si Ru Jing Jie is not an end point but a threshold. In this state the inner force is present. What is missing is the way out, and the four forms supply it.
Three levels of standing, around ten years by Wang’s own account. Standing should take two thirds of practice time, Shili one third.
“The inner force is present.” In this state the whole-body contending force arises, Hunyuan Zheng Li (→ Zheng Li, Hun Yuan Li).
Beating the waves, swimming dragon, white crane, startled snake: the forms that set the inner force free as outer force. They must never lose the state while doing so.
“Force is nourished inside the body and bursts out through the frame.”
— Wang Xiangzhai, ibid.“Whoever has not reached the state of the four likenesses can hardly bring forth the image of the dance. And if he dances anyway, is it then anything more than swinging the limbs?”
— ibid., on Jian Wu, the dance of the four formsDrawn from Wang’s essay “On standing and the four forms” (primary text in Wang Yufang, Yiquan Quanxue). The elaboration of lead and casting (flowing downward, condensing inward, steam locomotive, clockwork) comes from the curator’s teaching notes. The sources say little about the third likeness.
Not four goals, but one body described in four ways.