Hence Tai Chi invokes very different relationships between routine and consciousness, and between routine and structure, than in the case of Western critical theory. The Tai Chi form is itself a technique, and its repetitive performance should inculcate an immersion that is in fact acutely and persistently conscious. It’s a tricky dialectic: there can be no mastery without routine repetition; but each repetition is a unique event. The experience of Tai Chi over time is of an increasingly microscopic attention to the finest differences in movement. Each of the zillion repetitions is different, and awareness of that uniqueness, that now-ness, is integral to knowing that you are doing Tai Chi.
Discourses on Tai Chi rather pride themselves on being unable to express very much – ‘Don’t ask me about the Chi, just make sure your knee is positioned directly over your toes.’ Western Buddhism, by contrast, is vociferous. As taught by the UK-based FWBO (Friends of the Western Buddhist Order), meditation starts with the learning of two routines that are to be repeated every day, forever: mindfulness of breathing and the metta bhavana (loving-kindness meditation). Mindfulness of breathing is just that: sit and focus on the flow of your breath, aided by a few techniques (count the in-breaths, then the out-breaths, then focus on the breath entering and leaving the tip of your nose). The central skill – as in Tai Chi – is staying alert, awake and interested throughout what is ostensibly extraordinarily, crushingly boring: following your breath for 30–45 minutes a day. There is constant joking about falling asleep during meditation, and snoring in the meditation room. Training conventionally starts by asking students to walk around the room and find something, anything, to be interested in, then to cultivate that interest – the corner of that cushion is blue with frayed tassels; is the material warm or cool?; who made it? Meditation normally starts with a body scan: focus on your toes, then legs, bottom, etc., in each case developing an interest and awareness in any aspect of your experience of those body parts – the feeling of gravity and weight, of temperature, the feel of your clothing, any discomfort, and so on. The point of this is to inculcate a clear and alert concentration on whatever counts as experience in the present moment. The body scan prepares you for the state of mind you are to bring to your breathing: an active interest in whatever is within the current fold of experience. This interest is ideally non-judgemental: its intention is not to do things better or criticize what you are doing or experiencing, but simply to monitor experience in order to be inside its flow, to be here, now. Similarly, in the constant discussion of how to bring meditation into one’s everyday life, the ethical stance to be cultivated is one of disinterested interest: as you wash the dishes, think to yourself, ‘I am washing the dishes’, and bring this same ethically neutral, observational reflexivity to every move you make.
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• Don Slater