Now for something completely different: Western Buddhist meditation and Tai Chi (which might themselves be treated, unkindly, as hobbies) methodically treat routine as the very ground of consciousness and as a technical means to maintain an alert and reflexive orientation to the world. Tai Chi is literally a routine. Students will take several years to learn a sequence of movements – a ‘form’ – that may comprise anything from 24 to over 100 individual moves. The practice of Tai Chi is simply the daily repetition of this routine over many years, and – more than this – constant and alert attention to the most microscopic nuances of each movement on each repetition. The essentials of progress are consistent and banal: you start by learning mechanical movements – this arm goes there, shift your weight onto the left leg, twist to the north now, and so on. Repeat several times a day with unwavering attention to the slightest shifts in breath, centre of gravity, balance, weight, intentionality. Over time and repetition, the movements are said to become increasingly ‘internal’ – you no longer move bits of your body; rather you move your waist (specifically your Dan Tien, a point just below the navel) and the rest of you will follow correctly and flowingly.
Daily repetition of Tai Chi is akin to an actor doing seven evening performances plus two matinees a week of the same show, or a musician rehearsing the same few pieces: how to infuse routine with life, how to treat each performance in an endless sequence as if it were the only one; and, of course, how to remain alert and alive doing what should, by rights, be numbingly boring. Tai Chi must be performed – over and over again – with total concentration (when it lapses, you might actually fall over). Moreover it is simultaneously a ‘moving meditation’ (accomplishment is partly defined by consistent clarity of focus on an object, as in any meditation); a mode of relaxation (but not rest – it can be very strenuous across the form, but each move must be performed without apparent effort); and a martial art (it must be performed as if your life depended on the proper focusing of energy in each repetitive move).
At the same time there is something wonderfully banal about Tai Chi. As I was informed in one class: when the master says, ‘put your arm there’, he simply means, ‘put your arm there’ – don’t look for any deeper meaning. This gives an inkling of the deep seriousness of routine in Tai Chi: one does not think about routine, one enters into it entirely, so that one literally flows through the movements, and the movements (of your balance, centre of gravity, Dan Tien) move you. This is akin to the Western reception of Zen and the art of archery, motorcycle maintenance, guitar, flower arranging, calligraphy, whatever – any flow of events can serve as the vehicle for the same kind of immersion, the point being the merging of self (body and mind) into the flow. One is often told that you can do Tai Chi standing still, without moving, as long as you stand there in ‘a Tai Chi way’. Routine is a way into what phenomenologists might call (here literally) a flow mentality; it stabilizes the very idea of movement into a structured form so that one can foreground and experience the notion of flow in itself.
The Ethics of Routine
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