A Journey Through the Jins

Every profession has its jargon, words that make you feel like everyone but you is in on some mysterious secret that newcomers are not supposed to know yet. If those words happen to be in a different language, your problems can seem insurmountable. Going back to your very first lesson in a martial arts class, you might recall how that felt.

Once you realised that the unfamiliar words you were hearing were not just your fellow students showing off, you may have come to appreciate that some of them refer to concepts for which there are no equivalent English words to replace them. As well as offering due respect to the country of origin of your chosen art and the great masters who created and developed it, you will have realised that taking time to understand these words and concepts will be essential if you intend to reach a decent level of skill in these disciplines.

In the Chinese Internal Arts, you will no doubt have had to take on board the concept of Qi (pronounced “chi”), whatever art or style you practice, and your teacher will have gradually explained to you the importance of relaxation, posture, sinking and rooting, thereby allowing you to experience the quality of song, (pronounced “sung”), which is basically what you have to be like for everything else to work properly. As you progressed through various levels of learning, you will have come to think of your lower abdomen as your lower dantian or tan tian, (pronounced “dantien”, so that’s what we’ll call it here, to avoid confusion) and discovered how this can be used in circulating your Qi for various health or martial arts purposes.

Even having got your head around these complex ideas, there may still be hints of deeper mysteries to explore. If someone ever knocked you over in a push hands bout and explained that they “punged you”, you will undoubtedly have had reason to make enquiries into the nature of a thing called “Peng Jin” (sometimes called “Peng Jing”), and thus a whole new depth of enquiry will have opened up to perplex you. What do people even mean by ‘Jin’? How many types of Jin are there? How do I use them? Mystery upon mystery!

Of all the seeming secrets of the internal arts, the Jins (or Jings) can seem to be the most impenetrable, so that’s what this series is about. We will look at some of the various types of Jin, why they are important and how they can be used, starting with the most well-known and progressing to more subtle ones, so that you can collect them, if you wish, into a fairly useful resource to support your own studies of whatever internal martial art you practice. Each of these arts, and the styles and weapons within each, may rely primarily on different types of Jin, though there is considerable overlap, and many dozens of these have been identified. To complicate matters further, the words used can be translated from Chinese into English in different ways, depending on the region they are from, and the system used in the translation. In the end, learning what these energies are, by exploring, using and feeling them for yourself, is perhaps more important than how you pronounce or spell the words.

Jins are all about the forces at play when working with a (potentially hostile) opponent, so it’s all going to be about self-protection skills from here on in, though many of the considerable health benefits of these arts depend on the basic principles underlying them, so if you really understand how to feel Peng Jin, for example, in your Tai Chi forms, you are likely to find it helpful.

What are Jins?

So, what do we mean by Jin? One frequently used definition of it is as a kind of relaxed, fluid, internal energy or power that does not rely on muscular ‘brute strength’. Instead, it is a quality that is “rooted in the feet, generated from the legs, powered by the dantien, controlled by the waist and expressed through the arms hands and fingers”, as described in the Tai Chi Classics.

However, while this is a good overall summary of some of the essential principles of Tai Chi and other internal martial arts, there are many different types of Jin.

So, let’s start with a kind of structure to help us to organise them in our minds and train our skills in a fairly logical manner. We’ll begin with the Jins that relate to the main eight postures found in any Tai Chi sequence, namely:

• Warding-off (Peng - pronounced ‘pung’)
• Rolling-back (Lu)
• Pressing (Ji)
• Pushing (An)
• Pulling or ‘Plucking’ (Cai)
• Splitting (Lie)
• Elbowing (Zhou)
• Shouldering (Kao)

As you may have noticed, these familiar terms are listed here as processes or actions rather than as postures or moves to be performed, though of course you need to be familiar with the underlying structure of each in order to be able to actually do any of these things. All eight of them can be seen as potential responses to a physical attack, though peng Jin is a fundamental quality that can perhaps be seen to underly them all.

Beyond these eight skills, however, there are lots of subtle energies, forces and qualities at play in any physical encounter with an opponent, and these can be best explored when working with a cooperative partner. As your knowledge and experience of these various Jins increases during your progress through your forms, training drills and partner work, you may gradually find yourself able to use them to your advantage, whether in a push hands competition or even in a less than friendly encounter on the street.

The Jins we are talking about in such situations include everything that can happen from first contact with the partner or opponent, right through to your response, which may be almost instantaneous but, when you slow it right down, you can discover that there is a sequence of physical stages taking place, even in the simplest and fastest encounter, and each involves a different type of Jin.

A good way to remember some of the basic types of Jin is to imagine an encounter with an opponent, beginning with the moment you make contact with them and, if you sense that their intentions are less than friendly, you might think about how you might deal with their incoming  limb, for example by dodging out of the way, diverting it with a hand, or becoming like a rubber ball that can spin it off to the side or bounce it away from you.  If you are feeling that way out, you might even decide to attempt to entice or provoke the opponent into ‘showing you what they’ve got’.

The permutations are endless but by engaging in such flights of fancy, you will have started to explore some of the main types of Jin at play in Chinese internal martial arts! Whatever ideas you dream up about how to deal with that imaginary attacker, you can bet that other martial artists have not only thought of them but have also practiced and trained them before you were even born and have passed them on through generations in order to help you on your own journey.

So in this series, we will also be looking at, for example:

• Intercepting or borrowing (Jie)
• Enticing (Yin)
• Adhering/Sticking (Zhan/Nian)
• Listening (Ting)
• Interpreting (Dong)
• Following (Tzo)
• Receiving (Zou)
• Deflecting (Boh)
• Neutralising (Hua)
• Seizing (Na)
• Issuing (Fa)

The latter, Fa Jin, a kind of explosive release of power, is probably the most spectacular type of Jin displayed in forms and applications, but all the other types of Jin are equally important and most of them happen in a logical sequence that allows you to respond in an appropriate manner to whatever comes your way.

In many ways, this is a very exciting and rewarding field of study that has been explored for decades, if not centuries, by the masters of old, so we hope you enjoy this journey through the Jins. Rather than just reading about them, making lists of them and taking our word for it that they are a thing, we hope that you will experience the joys of feeling them for yourself as you play with these subtle laws of physics and how they work, in relation to your own body, various training partners and your ever-evolving skills in martial arts.