Div.8 Chapter 56

Completing By Cutting Off

“Why is the teaching of Taekwondo so complicated?”

“It is not complicated but simple. It only seems so because you refuse to accept it.”

Mastering Taekwondo is not about attaining something but rather transforming yourself through training. You cannot achieve Taekwondo by adding something to yourself, yet you can find it in what remains after you have cut yourself off from all superfluity. Just as a sculptor chisels away stone to reveal the artwork within, or the way a potter breaks old bowls to make new ones. To practice and master Taekwondo is not about performing a given movement but about becoming the motion itself. This “selfication” – the transformation of the self – is the direction in which all learning advances. Otherwise, there can be no true learning.

This is universally valid for any kind of learning, be it mathematics, foreign languages, history, philosophy or anything else. Learning logical thinking in mathematics we come to master how to abandon various ways of faulty reasoning to be left with the only possible way in calculus. When you study a foreign language it is important to abandon many aspects of your own speech in order to change your habitual way of thinking and adopt the proper way of speaking a foreign language. You can gain little truth if you seek simply to add to your knowledge – memorizing historical facts or quotations, for instance – rather than abandoning something too. Every learning process is the act of being left with only your necessary self following a process of acquiring and discarding.

When you yourself are a motion your entirety naturally adapts to motion so that you can perform it without any unnecessary intentions or any preceding motion. This natural motion is not such a thing as can be controlled by thought. It is rather what jumps forth prior to any thought. Through repetition and mastery you should change yourself to the Taekwondo motion itself. The entire process must be one of both cutting yourself off and breaking yourself until nothing remains. It is the process of eliminating everything that has coagulated within and then maintaining oneself as water, without solidification, free to follow the changes of nature. Only after this process can you become the motion itself. When you can become the motion itself you can also make the unconscious movement, subduing an opponent by erasing yourself. Thus, the most proper distance will be established between you and him and you will cope with everything with an empty mind.

The characteristics of Taekwondo learning are in fact shared by every aspect of life. Something is lost and something gained every moment, but in truth you gain or lose nothing at all. Ultimately you, the subject of that gain and loss, do not exist. Although this fact produces an ill-conceived skepticism concerning the world, there is actually no reason to be skeptical; there is only an emptiness to be accepted.