BROWN BELT: The Snake (She) (San-I Chi)

Element: Rock-Roots-Earth.

Suddenly crushing coils and poison fangs erupt from the Rocks and Roots of the Brown Earth in the temple garden as the Snake's Ch'i flows from coil and fang, entering the victim, and then returns to the earth and back into the Snake, completing a circuit of flowing energy. Brown is the color of concealment and rooted power. What is vital energy to the Snake, Ch'i is deadly poison to his opponent, to be effective the Ch'i must flow into controlling coil or disabling fang techniques; without sensed Ch'i flow the Snake is helpless. The Snake fights from fear and seeks to quickly inflict whatever damage is necessary to avoid being hurt. If possible, a Snake will always attempt to "bluff" his opponent in order to prevent a confrontation in which the Snake might be hurt. Snakes do not play with their opponents, they immediately disable or kill them.

Image

A flicker in the Brown Earth undergrowth, a brief cry, then silence as the Snake again disappears.

Stance

The Snake fights from soft-cat stance with a stacked mantis-like forearm cover. Both hands are softly curled into a Snake hand form in which the index and middle finger, the fangs, of each hand protrude while the other fingers and thumb loosely touch at their tips (this hand-form is sometimes known as Twin-Dragons Search For Pearl). Hand movements are characteristically sinuous and oscillate from side to side.

Commentary

The Snake is the fifth animal form in the Kenpo system and its three degrees represent progress into an expert level of technique and awareness. A Snake stylist has both constrictor and viper elements, each of which pre-suppose the presence of Ch'i. Ch'i, Ki in Japanese, literally means "Breath," however, for the martial artist the word 'breath' has both this literal meaning and, analogously, but more importantly, a metaphorical meaning. Ch'i represents the energy and commitment given to an action. Ch'i is often mysteriously equated with a psychic or spiritual flow of occult force. Such statements have the advantage of disclosing the extraordinary feeling accompanying a good Ch'i flow, but they do nothing to assist one in learning how to develop such a sensation.

Simply put, Ch'i flow stems from the harmonization of a smooth, relaxed physical action with imaginatively focused mental attentiveness. This goes somewhat contrary to the Dragon's Do What You Are Doing While You Are Doing It philosophy in that the role of the imagination is stressed. In order to clarify that cryptic definition, try the following "Unbendable-Arm" demonstration: Stand erect with your right arm extended to the right , parallel to the floor. Then have a cooperative friend attempt to bend your arm at the elbow and wrist, respectively. He should try to bend by pulling up on your wrist while pushing down on your elbow so that your arm is not stressed against the joint.

You should tighten your arm to keep it from bending. Usually even a person weaker than yourself can bend your arm with relative ease. But, now couple your physically stiff arm with an imagined component. Visualize as best you can that a current of water is flowing up from the ground through your heels, up your torso, out your shoulder and down your arm to rush out of your loosely extended finger to splash at some imagined target on a level with your shoulders. You will find that the better you can really "see" this imagined flow, the more easily you will be able to keep your arm unbent, even with several people attempting to bend your arm at the same time. Without an ability to imaginatively "see" what is apparently not there, there is no Ch'i. (Please do not confuse the preceding demonstration as anything more than a simple demonstration of the effects of Ch'i flow. Ch'i cultivation and use is an immense subject well beyond the scope of this presentation.) Tangible elements other than bluffing include the Snake's completely different choice of soft targets.

All of the previous animals have, at best, chosen broadly defined and therefore "hard" target areas: face-mask, neck, chest, floating ribs, kidneys, groin, and knees. The Snake stylist must be much more precise in his choice of target and much more accurate in the delivery of his strike. Soft tissue targets are typically much smaller in area and so much more difficult to accurately target. Examples of such targets would be: eyes, filtrum, lips, hyoid bone, larynx, frenic nerves, armpit gland, diaphragm, and stomach, groin and inner thighs, etc. In order to effectively target such areas, the Snake must not only be extremely accurate and fast, but must augment the energy of the strike with a real Ch'i flow, the Snake's poison. What is life energy for the Snake, can be poison for his enemies.

The Snake does not have opponents, but enemies. This more emotively charged term discloses the kill-or-be-killed attitude which is most peculiar to the Snake stylist. Weapons training constitutes the last major tangible aspect of the Snake stylist in our system. The object of the weapons training first encountered in Brown belt work is not so much to teach one how to fight with cane, sword, staff, etc., as it is to force the student to enlarge his dynamic sphere. Prior to the Snake each animal's sphere of influence has limited the physical reach of the stylist. For the Snake, however, handling weapons forces the stylist to extend his awareness further into his environment.

First, simple coordination and dexterity are stressed to new limits until the stylist begins to feel the weapon to be an extension of himself and unconsciously avoids his initial clumsiness. Second, a transition from physical dexterity to a correspondingly enlarged mental awareness is attempted. At that point the tangible slides into the intangible elements of the Snake's style. These intangibles are the feeling of Ch'i and Wu Hsin, or No Mind. Enlarging the Snake stylist awareness through weapons training compels the stylist to spread his ego-identity so thinly that ideally, distinction between self and other, him and would no longer make sense. Weapons tend to get longer and more flexible as training progresses; this lengthening and flexibility extrapolate into an ever more comprehensive level of a fluid awareness.

To further complicate things, rigid weapons are made to appear as if they were flexible, while the flexible weapons should appear rigid. Harmonizing opposites and physically and mentally enlarging our perceptual domain further undermines feelings of separateness from the world. The ego begins to disappear by becoming ever more tenuous and more and more identified with a whole which encompasses the old concepts of self and other. The goal is to be with rather than apart from the world, at home rather than alienated. No-mind means precisely this unconscious blend.