Fa Jing

[Skeptic 2004]

Fa-jin is supposedly a massive discharge of internal energy. Physically, it's explosive power from little movement. Back when I messed around with pa kua, I was introduced to fa-jin while doing some basic circle walking exercises. While I had trouble most of the time, there was one particular strike where I sort of got the hang of fa-jin.

Having delved deeper into my karate training, based on my experiences and the muscle kinetics at work, I've come to the conclusion that physiologically, fa-jin is the same as kime. Understanding kime, I can do the same pa kua strike much easier, a lot easier than I did when I was concentrating on my "qi."

[ovine king]

well..... kinda.

the words used to refer to the discharge of energy does, strictly speaking, translate to explode/expell/expand energy but you've got to remember that grammatically, in the chinese it is a poetic term that describes the thing and isn't actually the thing itself.

"fa-jing" describes the results gained from correctly using muscle tensions, body structures and timing; in general, it is about the ability to generate strong hits (ignoring terms like power or energy or force) from short bridge distances.

[Gaoguy]

Jin means trained power, not energy.

[ovine king]

i really didn't want to get into a debate about what the original chinese characters translate to and what they mean and what they refer to, which if you read the second part of my previous post, you would've gathered.

i don't think for this discussion, it matters whether you prefer it to mean "trained power" , which i don't think it does (with gung lik being closer to meaning trained power/energy), or energy, which admittedly it doesn't strictly mean either.

for the record, the term is a shortened form of "fa jing lik" with the lik part being omitted because it is inferred by the usage of the term anyway, much like "change down" infers changing down of gears.

now as far as i can think off the top of my head, jing lik is just a type of way of using energy. Other such ways would be san (dissipate), tse(borrow), lao(leak), jong(bash), dan(bounce), sze(guide-ish). In any case, energy and power are pretty much the same terms in the chinese anyway. Well, that is to say I can't think of one word that is used exclusively for one or the other.