YouKnowWho just give up. There’s none so deaf as those who don’t want to hear and Hendrik doesn’t want anybody interfering in his fantasy world where anybody who does things even one iota differently from him is wrong.
He is a lost cause. He isn’t a fighter, he isn’t even a larper. He’s just a pedant who tried too hard to conflate his martial practice with his spiritual beliefs and ended up with a confused jumble of self-contradictions.
“Qi isn’t magic but it isn’t rooted in body mechanics either. Instead it is something you can only know through immediate experience.”
Followed by “If you disagree with me you are wrong, you clearly have not had that experience but it transcends words so I can only describe it by couching it in the metaphor of the ‘ancients.’”
Considering Xingyi can only be reliably traced back to Dai Longbang (Who died in 1801), unless you buy into the Yue Fei myth - for which we have only third-hand accounts - the style is really only about 250 years old, hardly ancient.
As for Yiquan it is less than a century old.
Ultimately Hendrik’s argument is a ham-fisted attempt to shoe-horn martial arts into Ch’an. I say ham-fisted because he’s so attached to the underlying premise - that the way IMA generates power is fundamentally different from the way other martial arts generate power and fundamentally superior - that he can’t realize that immediate experience, in this case, involves people like you and I training with wrestlers, training with Xingyi sifus, training with other people in general, experiencing how power is generated, how balance works, how a body roots and is unrooted.
You buy the myth that IMA gives you roots that can never be pulled up and then you fear to test it ever because, underneath the attachment you feel to that myth you suspect it is an illusion.
Hendrik is approaching this discussion from a religious position even if that isn’t his intent. Arguing with him is as futile as arguing with any other religious zealot.
