Obvious Energy — Ming Jing, the Hard Power of Xingyi

Ming Jing (míng jìng, 明勁) is the first training stage of Xingyi in the account Sun Lutang printed in 1924. He calls it obvious energy, and he also calls it the art’s hard power.

The source of describing Ming Jing

The book is Sun Lutang’s Quan Yi Shu Zhen (拳意述真), Authentic Explanations of Martial Arts Concepts, published in March 1924. In chapter 4, “Xingyi Boxing,” Sun writes a long section under the heading “Guo Yunshen said.” That is where the three stages appear: obvious energy, hidden energy, and neutral energy.

Sun presents the words as Guo’s. In Guo’s biography in the same book, Sun says Guo wrote Explaining the Xingyi Boxing Classics, gave him the manuscript, and that it was later stolen and never printed. So this is Sun’s published record of his teacher, not a book that survives in Guo’s own hand.

The Chinese text is Sun’s. The English wording below follows Paul Brennan’s 2013 translation of the same chapter.

• Sun Lutang, Quan Yi Shu Zhen, March 1924. Chinese text.
• Paul Brennan, trans., Authentic Explanations of Martial Arts Concepts, 2013. English translation.

What Guo’s stage asks for

Sun lists three methods of training. The first is Ming Jing. Brennan translates the short definition like this: when training, go by an unchanging standard; the body should be smooth and must not be awkward; the hands and feet should lift and drop in order and must not be confused. Sun ties that to a line from the boxing classics: squareness is alignment with your centre.

Later in the same section Sun is plainer about the name. Obvious energy is the boxing art’s hard energy. A technique at this stage has shape and can be seen. In the footwork, this stage makes a sound when the foot lands. The next stage, hidden energy, uses the same step and makes none.

Sun also calls obvious energy the “lesser learning,” because the postures still pause as you advance, retreat, lift, drop, and turn. That is not a dismissal. He treats it as the first work. Hidden energy is what comes after the shape no longer has to stop and start.

Hard power and “changing the bones”

Sun pairs Ming Jing with changing the bones (yì gǔ, 易骨) and with the old formula “train the essence and transform it into energy” (liàn jīng huà qì, 練精化氣). The practical picture he gives is structural, not a separate exercise.

Scattered strength is gathered to the centre. You train by the rules already set for the art — Sun points to his “nine requirements” — until the body reaches what the classics call a connected state: above and below coordinate, the hands and feet look after each other, and inside and outside are as one. At that point, he says, the work of obvious energy is finished, and so is the work of changing the bones.

The form does not get replaced. When Sun describes the third stage, neutral energy, he says the postural standard of the first two stages stays. What changes is how the power is used, not the shape you were taught.

Oliver recounts his conversations with his teacher, Master Luo Dexiu

The three jings came up between me and Luo Laoshi a few years back. We were leaving Chiang Kai-shek Memorial Hall and taking the same train. He kept repeating how important they are: Ming Jing, Hua Jing, and An Jing. He said this is the only important thing. There are too many techniques and too many forms. We just need to follow these principles.

Sun Lutang’s explanation of obvious power, Ming Jing, fits that. In the way the internal arts develop, you start with Xingyi, and this talk of the jings belongs to Xingyiquan.

My impression, listening to Luo on obvious power, was that it was progressive. The written explanation does read that way: obvious power, then subtle power, then mysterious power or hidden power.

Years later I was still discussing it with him, offering ideas about how to use it in a fight, or even in controlled application. I think he tended to miss what I was getting at. What he is getting at is that these jings are in your body. Sun Lutang’s picture is very close to that. He talks about the centre, the body square and directed by the centre, upper and lower coming together, feet and hands working together, rising and falling. The process is very difficult to put into words.

I tried to show it by taking a Post-Heaven form and applying the three jings to it. I took obvious energy, the hard power, as the first entry into the application: the hard, forceful strike of that first contact with an opponent. I put that to him recently and he dismissed it. He said it is not that. It is in your body. He did not use this word, but it is in your centre. The way the body is presented is the obvious strength. He gives you an idea, a few words, then a demonstration of how his body is moving, and you begin to understand it better.

His English is good enough for that. You have the words, the demonstration, and the feeling of how he is moving. He does not take it into a more detailed place. Follow these rules, do the work, and you should start to understand how it works. There is nothing mystical about it.

I have spent years asking him questions that might seem obvious, even simple. I like doing that, because it pushes him to explain things he does not always spell out. I also like that he does not fill the gap with a lot of talk about what is happening inside the body and how to move power around it. He will not go there. The more I talk that way, the simpler he gets. You need a strong body. You need to be coordinated, swift, and fierce. You need a high level of skill: accurate, working the structure, and working where your opponent is, until it looks as if some extra energy is involved. People will say that is internal energy coming out. I am not going down that path here.

On obvious power itself: once that power is in the training, and the strength of the structure is obvious and clear, it matters less what the arms do on their own. If the structure in your centre is clear, that is the obvious power, the hard power of the whole body, and it comes out on its own. An arm snatching, or palming someone’s arm into the other hand, or grabbing and redirecting into a strike, all of that depends on whole-body power. That is the obvious part.

Luo is uncompromising about this, and he has become more so. He rejects the mystical version, and he will call a lot of what gets said about it bullshit. He does not name anyone. If I say I heard an idea, and I tell him the idea, he has started, this year, to say it is bullshit. Do not go down that path. Stay in the real world. You need a strong body, you need to raise your skill, you need to be fast and powerful, and you need to know what works and what does not. That is as simple as it gets.

We learn 64 Post-Heaven palms for fighting application. We learn eight openings to get in and start that application. We learn the Pre-Heaven to begin to throw. You can say a bit more about the progression through the jings, but it is in the body. If somebody resists that obvious power, you move to the next jing, the hidden power. You cannot answer a person who has smashed into you by adding more forward force. That only works if you are physically stronger. So you change the application. You may be stuck, then you redirect that strength so it comes out another way, and you move them by taking some of that obvious power away. Then another strike can be issued differently.

Luo would have me in a bear hug. I hold on, resist, and protect the body against a strike. He loosens, or makes a gap by drawing his shoulder back, and his arm shoots down and he strikes hard with the shoulder. It comes from the smallest gap, but it is a circle, and it smashes back into the body. He says, this is the next one. This is how we do it.

Where that becomes hidden power, then redirected power, then the last jing, is harder to mark. I would call the last one the point where someone has lost their structure, and a strike from there is bigger than it looks. You are left thinking you cannot understand how the hit was so hard. It was the timing, the movement, and the position. It did not look powerful, and it was. That is where I want to take it. It is frustrating that so little of this was written down in a concrete way.

It has to stay realistic. This is not fantasy, and it is not generating qi and moving qi around the body. It is a physical force. You decide how to move, when to move, and how precise to be. That is the technique.