Method · Stage 2

Mo Jin 摸劲

mō jìn

Barely visibly, the body moves in the stance and feels the resistance of an imagined tree — in five stages, up to every direction at once.

🎨 Interactive demo: This term also has a concept analogy in which you feel the imagined tree in all six directions — Mo Jin as an artefact. This page is the text to go with it.

Feeling, not gripping

Mo Jin (摸劲) literally means feeling for force. 摸 is groping in the dark: carefully, attentively, without knowing what you will find. What you feel for is no object but your own proprioception and the resistance between the body and an imagined surrounding. 劲 here does not mean raw muscular strength but the elastic contending force (Zheng Li) that the whole body builds at once.

The exercise itself is plain. You stand in Hunyuan Zhuang, embrace an imagined tree, and move so little that it can hardly be seen from outside: pulling, pushing, opening, closing, lifting, sinking. Every direction meets the tree's resistance. Feeling that resistance is the whole task. Andrzej Kalisz calls the same exercise Mo Li (摸力) and describes it as feeling with your eyes closed.

Whoever tenses the muscles while doing it is no longer feeling but gripping. The resistance is then gone, because your own force drowns it out.

Between standing and movement

Mo Jin is the transition between Zhan Zhuang and Shili. Kalisz puts the difference in an image: in Mo Jin the movement is a single point taken from the whole path; in Shili it goes on point by point. Mo Jin therefore tests whether the force built in the stance survives even the smallest movement. Shili then tests it over the whole way.

It is not practised only in the fighting stances. In the Zongxun lineage it belongs to the health stances too, there simply very relaxed and with the image of water rather than an opponent.

Five stages

The exercise is built up in five stages:

1 · Forward and back — pulling the tree towards you, pushing it away.
2 · Opening and closing — pulling the tree apart, pressing it together.
3 · Lifting and sinking — pulling the tree out of the earth, pressing it deeper in.
4 · Mixed (Da Luan Cheng Xu) — switching directions freely, with no fixed order. Introduced after roughly ten months of basic practice.
5 · All at once (Liu Mian Li Tong Shi) — holding all six directions simultaneously, without switching between them any more.

Yao Chengguang grounds the fourth stage in fighting: “In fighting, changes of force are extremely fast. If you practise Mo Jin only in a fixed order, you will hardly be able to adapt to changing conditions.” Whoever always practises the directions in the same order trains the order along with them. Only free switching separates the ability from the routine. The fifth stage goes one step further: switching takes a moment, and in contact that moment is the gap.

How small the movement is

Kalisz gives measurements. The centre of gravity shifts only between about 55/45 and 45/55, some two centimetres. Force and pace stay the same over that whole path. At the stop the forces vanish, then new ones appear.

Beginners usually move a good deal more. Even so, the path should not be shortened too early: whoever starts below two centimetres will later no longer feel the secondary directions that join the main one. The order in the mind is always the same: first the idea, then the feeling, only last the movement. “I am not moving — an outside force moves me.”

Wang Xiangzhai ranks the sizes of movement in a formula: large movement is worse than small, small worse than the creeping micro-movement (蠕动). The widespread version “…worse than no movement” he himself rejects as a mishearing: “How is one supposed to hit anyone without moving?” Standing is therefore never dead standing (→ Bu Dong Zhi Dong).

The pulsing intent

The image is not held fast; it pulses. You think briefly of the resistance, the body answers with a faint impulse, and the intent is withdrawn at once so as to feel the after-echo. When it has almost faded, you let it rise again. According to the lineage's explanation, attention thus stays awake for a long time without tiring.

Wang puts the right dose into an image: you hold a small bird in your hand. With too much force you crush it, with too little it flies away. Hold the image too firmly and too long, and the muscles seize up. Tradition calls this clinging (执着) and warns that you are then training “dead muscles”.

Three levels of feeling

Beside the five stages of direction, the sources describe three levels of what is felt for:

Finding the body. Feeling the force of skin, flesh, tendons and bone. At first pulling, warmth, numbness or swelling appear; that is normal adaptation. Sharp pain in a joint is not part of it; it points to a faulty posture.
Finding the surroundings. Feeling the force of imagined things: the buoyancy and resistance of water, the balloon between the arms.
Finding the Hunyuan. The six-sided contending force all at once, the body like “a tyre full of high-pressure gas that answers every touch” (→ Hun Yuan Li).

A useful illusion

Mo Jin often brings the feeling that an energy is moving the body. Kalisz calls this a deliberately used illusion and compares it to the stationary train that seems to start moving when the train alongside pulls out. The feeling helps to coordinate image and body, as long as you know what it is. Whoever takes it for real energy is easily misled by suggested sensations (demystification).

Where it leads

Into Shili: without the feeling in the stance, Shili becomes hollow gymnastics.
Into Fa Li: the issuing of force rests on the contending force built in the stance through Mo Jin.
Into Tuishou: listening to the opponent's force (Ting Jin) is the same sharpened sense of touch, now applied to a person rather than an imagined tree.

In the fighting stance (Ji Ji Zhuang) the object of the image finally changes: wild animals and strong opponents instead of water and balloon. What you then feel for is a force that answers the instant it is touched.