Erasing Myself
before My Opponent
“I cannot understand why my opponent defeats me so easily.”
“Because you do not see the moon but only the finger that points
to it.”
When
you practice Taekwondo correctly your opponent cannot succeed in attacking you,
even when your guard is down. This is because each part of you maintains its
own position, and always in its proper place. In other words, you follow the
right principle, i.e. the way of Haneul (Heaven). Likewise, your opponent
cannot trouble your mind, even though you may be making no effort to
concentrate. This is because you have attached yourself to nothing, and thus
your mind is empty and unrestricted. Since your mind is empty there is no
thought to trouble you. Nor can your opponent confuse your life, though you may
neither try to keep your life in order nor take special care against danger.
This is because your life is in firm harmony with everything around you. All
types of danger that threaten your safety, mind, and life from outside of this
harmony will be demolished by themselves. The right principles of Taekwondo are
the same as those of life.
Then,
how is it possible to put everything of you in its own proper place according
to the way of Haneul (Heaven)? Have oneness of your emptiness and fullness and
both erase and picture yourself at the same time. In this way you can keep
everything of yours in its proper position. Then how is it possible to have
oneness of emptiness and fullness? Fundamentally emptiness means the capacity to
accept some external other, while fullness is something produced from within.
If something is full it is full only of what fills it and of what can be
produced but not of the other, i.e. though it is full it is also empty of the
other. On the contrary, if something is empty it is empty only of the other
that it does not contain, so it is possible that it is full of something else.
When a bowl, for example, is full of water it is full only of water, because it
can accept no more water, while at the same time it is empty, for instance, of
gems or salt. For a bowl filled with water can produce no gem while it can
accept some salt. Thus, emptiness or fullness is always relative to the object.
So,
possessing oneness of emptiness and fullness refers in the former case to
putting yourself in the very place that makes your opponent unable to do what
he wants against you, while the latter case refers to putting yourself in the
very place that makes you able to do what you want. If you can keep the
emptiness of TAEKWONDO ‘there would be no will of yours’ to go against some
motion of your opponent, which makes him feel in vain, thus it is termed
“emptiness”. If you can attain the fullness of TAEKWONDO ‘there would be your
will’, full of the spirit of subduing your opponent, which produces your
motions of beating down the opponent’s will and of subduing his activities. So
this is called “fullness”. In this unity of emptiness and fullness you think
with all of yourself and your consciousness is awakened but not operated to think,
i.e. Mu-Nyom-Mu-Sang (“freedom from all ideas and thoughts”)[1].
This leads to the way of Haneul that everything of yours moves in its proper
position. When you, a Taekwondo-Een, think with all of yourself then you will
‘have just yourself’ as a mere harmonized whole beyond yourself. Everything is
both empty on one hand and full on the other hand, so full and empty ones fill
and empty one another repeatedly into endless changes of the world and of
themselves. It is you who put them in order and it is Mu-a (“Non-self”)[2]
who completes the harmonious order. Since already erased, you are to be
pictured perfectly.
Then,
what is it to erase yourself? It is to delete every distinction between you and
others. And it is also to liberate yourself to everything open beyond the
horizon of your subjectivity and dogmatism. What is it to picture yourself? It
is to realize your own wishes firmly in the open beings. Also, it is to
determine the world with freedom at will. Everything closed belongs to
everything open, so it is to erase yourself that you maintain yourself in an
empty mind with no desire unrestrictedly free from your subjective. And then,
you can set yourself free from everything, such as formal restrictions, morals,
passions, humanities and the like. When you erase yourself you become the all
and your opponent is within it, so his motion is within your motion. Then does
your motion determine his one and the world. Therefore, when you erase yourself
perfectly you also picture yourself perfectly.
Erasing
yourself includes not only forgetting everything of yourself but also obtaining
a non-existence of self. When you simply forget everything of yourself you may
be able to focus complete attention on something, achieving unity of your
entirety. However, you may still not overcome your opposition to the world. It
may be possible that you are still opposed to the world despite your
self-absorption in the unity of yourself. This opposition can be deleted only
when you, forgetting yourself, go even further to erase your existence. Only
then will the distinction between you and what is not you finally be overcome.
You establish yourself as a part of the world over the opposition to the world,
and further, you include the whole of the world within you, and thus you expand
upward to become the world itself. I ask you, where then will your opponent be
able to find you? Your body cannot simply be yourself, and neither your
physical presence nor your motion is your true figure. Each of them has
illusions and faults mixed within them. Therefore, when you as a Taekwondo-Een
erase yourself the opponent cannot find you, and yet you still remain opposed
to the whole world. In this way, you can still spar with your opponent,
accomplishing the perfection constituted of all necessary elements with even
your faults and blind points, and then you can achieve your desires.
As
stated above, having oneness of fullness and emptiness while both picturing and
erasing yourself at once, leads you to the way of Haneul. So even though you,
in your Taekwondo, move at a slower tempo relative to your opponent’s haste he
cannot follow your change of motions because you always follow the true way
making only the necessary motions.
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