When I was a young student of physics I learnt a few things, the most important of which was the meaning of energy. I learnt that energy and mass are in reality the same thing , everything is energy. I also learnt that energy is a measurable quantity, and that there are tried and tested scientific methods of reproducing these measurements so that everybody who performs these experiments attains results within certain specified margins of error. Energy is measured by its effects. Thus heat energy is measured by the temperature, electrical energy by its voltage.
When I began reading the literature of T'ai Chi Ch'uan (Taijiquan) I was introduced to a totally alien concept of the term energy. It was no longer measurable by scientific method, it had qualities that defied scientific interpretation, it had behaviours that could be described in terms of force and not energy. Somehow the body had properties that could produce effects such as action at a distance, produce a force without muscular action, allow breath to circulate around the body instead of just residing in the lungs.
People claim that science cannot answer all the questions that may be asked, and I do not deny this. Science answers the how, not the why. Yet what cannot be denied is the huge success of science in understanding the nature of reality as we percieve it, the ability to utilise this understanding to create things that would be considered magic to an earlier age. All these advances have only been made possible by the scientific understanding of energy.
The misuse of the word Energy to describe the Taijiquan Martial Arts system has had no such positive benefit. Indeed it has been retrograde. Instead of enabling people to understand the nature of what they have been practising they have been led astray into a mystical belief system that hides woolly and unclear thinking in the guise of esoteric knowledge.
Nobody knows what energy actually is. It is important to realize that even in physics today, we have no knowledge of what energy is. What we do know is that there is a certain quantity, which we call energy, that does not change in the manifold changes which nature undergoes. This means that there is a numerical quantity which does not change when something happens
Thus we end up with pseudo-definitions of Energy
1. A non - matter property that is capable of changing matter
2. energy is the ability to do work.
All we really know about energy is that it has dimensions of mass x (speed of light) squared, and that the energy of a closed system is constant in time.. A change in one form of energy in one part of a system must be compensated for in another part of the system such that the total remains constant. This means that if there is a decrease in the amount of one form of energy there must be a compensating increase, by the exact same amount, in another form of energy. This means that energy cannot be created out of nothing.
Energy is the potential to do work. For work to be done a force must be applied. The force requires energy. Without the intention to do work, the force will not be applied and the energy will remain impotent. To speak of energy as the actor displays a complete misunderstanding of the interrelation of energy and force. Energy is a scalar quantity, it has magnitude but is directionless. Force is a vector quantity , it has magnitude and direction and because of this directional element it can cause movement along the line of its action.
Martial Arts is expressed physically, all action must occur through physical means. This requires the use of the body and hence must obey the laws of Physics.
Most Tai Chi books refer to the term energy when they are really referring to force. Unfortunately they have got themselves caught up in an apparent paradox because of the two Chinese words Li and Qi (Ch'i). Li is often translated as muscular strength, Qi as breath enegery, life energy, intrinsic energy or some other esoteric energy. The key here that it is some sort of mysterious energy that is superior to muscular force. Experience has demonstrated to me that there are indeed two ways of applying force but both require the use of muscles albeit in different ways.
The way of Li is to compress and tense the muscles, thus bigger and stronger muscles generate more force than smaller weaker ones, this way is stiff and disconnected. The way of Qi is to use all of the muscles of the body together in harmony. This requires that there is smooth continuity between the action of one muscle and the next, so there can be no stiffness or tensing of the muscles which will prevent this. The muscles must be trained to have elastic qualities for absorbing and allowing power to be propagated from the feet through the legs via the waist to be issued through the hands. The Internal arts do contain muscular training but of a different quality to the External Arts, and this training is no less arduous.