T'ai Chi (group)

T'ai Chi was a Pune One meditation group led by Mallika. It was offered in two modes, a one-hour-per-day drop-in and a three-hours-per-day intensive.

Maneesha writes about it in the Darshan Diary Get Out of Your Own Way!, 14 Apr 1976:

The T'ai Chi group, consisting of fourteen sannyasins, was at darshan tonight.

Mallika, who studied T’ai Chi in London for three years prior to coming to Poona, describes T'ai Chi: "T'ai Chi Ch'uan means the great ultimate fistic art. It is an ancient Chinese method of meditation, self-defence and healing therapy. It is based on the principles of yin and yang, on polarity, balance and harmony. It develops inner awareness with outer alertness".

After they had finished the demonstration, the group returned to Bhagwan. Bhagwan asked Mallika, the teacher, how many classes she was taking.

Mallika: "This is the intensive group, which meets for three hours each day -- two hours in the morning and one hour in the evening. Then I've been doing a group in the afternoon for people to just come any time they want and try it.

"We meet every day except during the camp".

[Osho:] "Very good ... that will be very helpful for meditation".

Mallika says that now that she is doing T'ai Chi most of the time her energy oscillates between being really chaotic and open, and feeling blank and dull. Osho explains:

It is something that is very complicated... and the complication is that T'ai Chi, or methods like that, are Taoist. And the whole Tao attitude is that the mind has to be dropped. One has to become as mindless as an idiot. So dullness in fact is not bad on the path of Tao. The problem is arising because the very word dull is condemnatory in the western mind.

In Tao, to be dull is perfectly good! Lao Tzu says that everybody is so intelligent; he is so muddle-headed. "Everybody seems to be so clever and I am just a stupid man".

I could see that you have the capacity ... you can become as dull as Lao Tzu (chuckling). But your western upbringing is contrary. To be clever is a talent in the West. To be clever on the path of Tao is foolishness. To be intelligent, bright, sharp, is a sacred value in the western world.

Lao Tzu will laugh. He says, "Just be like an idiot!" The values are so different that when a western mind starts doing T'ai Chi or things like that, this trouble arises.

Whenever your energy is flowing, a certain dullness is bound to come; the sharpness is bound to be lost. You will look idiotic, but your upbringing comes into it. You are tom apart between two things.

So drop the western mind completely. Be dull, and be happily dull. The whole effort is to drop the mind so completely that you exist like trees, like clouds, like rocks, and you have no mind of your own; that's the whole effort. That's why the movements are so slow, because the mind is in such a hurry. These movements are against the mind. The mind wants speed. That's why the western world has invented more and more speedy vehicles. All these movements are so slow that the mind cannot cope with them. By and by it gets fed up and drops -- "This is foolish. I cannot work with [you]!"

You are going so slowly and the mind says, "Be in a hurry! Run fast!" If a Taoist competition is to be made, the one who can walk the slowest will be the first. That's what Jesus means when he says, "In my kingdom of God the last will be first, and the first will be last". The idiots will be the geniuses and the talented will prove dull.

But the mind is speed, because the mind is afraid of death -- and the fear of death creates speed. The mind says, "Time is short and you have to do so many things -- do them fast! Run! Death is coming!"

Mallika above calls her practice "T'ai Chi Ch'uan". In the mainstream culture, "T'ai Chi" is understood to be a shorthand of this longer form. On several occasions elsewhere, Osho makes a distinction between what he calls "T'ai Chi" and "T'ai Chi Ch'uan", calling only the latter a martial art -- "fistic" and "self-defence" in Mallika's words -- and "T'ai Chi" the gentle meditative movement / centering exercise which can be observed in the streets and parks of Chinese cities.

Maneesha writes at length about the T'ai Chi group's darshan demonstration in Dance Your Way to God:

As bhagwan finished talking, the group -- the five men and women, plus mallika, the instructor -- rose from their places and made their way towards the centre of the outdoor auditorium, now ablaze with coloured lights. Mallika took her place in the circle they had formed, spoke a brief and quiet few words, and then closed her eyes, standing with the rest of the group, absolutely still and silent for a few moments.

After a moment or two, one or two people began very very slowly to move -- to bend slowly down to the ground, to stretch out their arms, others to roll their head, or take a step forward -- all with infinite care and grace, as if they were just awakening from a hundred-year-long sleep, or were rosebuds opening to welcome the sun. One by one, the group began to unfold and then slowly slowly to move away from each other in sedate and flowing motions.

It was rather like watching a film in slow motion, or somnambulists feeling their way into each gesture, each movement loaded with significance -- both a sense of total awareness preceding each movement and, simultaneously, a sense of deep relaxation and let-go. Watching the figures move, one could almost imagine that they were people, spirits from another dimension, their eyes unblinking, unseeing, glazed, as if in trance. Even to watch was a meditation. One began to fall into one’s own depth, to contact a level of silence and stillness similar to that which the participants were experiencing. One felt soothed, serene, quieted.

After ten minutes or so, on a few quietly spoken words from mallika, the members of the group began to move slowly towards a partner, men moving towards women, until each was in partnership. Facing each other, slightly distanced from their partner, they began to perform a kind of energy dance -- still in very very slow motion, each regarding the other with an unflickering gaze and moving in accord with the other’s energy. It was like watching some very beautiful psychic courtship. One felt a depth of communication far deeper than that of ordinary dance, as partners moved, wordlessly, looking into and beyond each other’s eyes, as if penetrating each other to the very core.

After ten minutes or so, the group moved into a linear formation and performed the nineteen movements of the particular form that they are learning. While there are several different interpretations of the form, one could allow one’s own imagination to play with each gesture, each subtle turn of head, each fine shade of expression. Each movement, while complete in itself, a work of art in itself, seemed to flow effortlessly and naturally out of the preceding one, seemingly without any forethought on the part of the meditator.

The movements seemed to be flowing from the group as if on their own accord, rather than as a result of their doing. Each person, eyes unmoving, face expressionless, looked somehow possessed by something greater, bigger than himself... as if they were all but instruments through which some god somewhere was singing some strange and moving song or incantation.

And in God Is Not for Sale, Maneesha writes:

In later talking about the T'ai Chi group, Mallika explained the meaning of the words "T'ai Chi", saying that T'ai could be translated as great, and Chi as the ultimate. It is also translated as the "supreme nourishing activity", so it might be regarded as a form of moving that follows the great nourishing way.

The traditional story behind T'ai Chi is that a Taoist master watched a stork and a snake engaged in their daily combat and was inspired to put their movements together into a form. Each movement within the form is a means of self-defence and of counter-attack. Basically it is always yielding first, accepting, and then striking back if one needs to. It is a kind of symbolic dance.

Mallika said that in doing T'ai Chi one comes to feel in harmony with the earth; "When you're dancing T'ai Chi, you’re dancing the dance of the stars and of nature. That's what it feels like when I do T'ai Chi on the roof (of Krishna House) at sunset and sunrise. I forget that I am. . . . It's just as if I am part of what is going on".

Starting with the basic form along with some Chinese meditations, Mallika found that the group she was leading in the ashram began to evolve into something quite unique:

"It started happening that I was using some relaxation techniques I had learned. Gradually, bit by bit, all the different kinds of therapies and some psychic training I had done in the States, some Alpha mind control -- learning to change the brain waves -- and EST and other odd things I'd picked up here and there, all started to come in.

"Bhagwan talks about this place as being a twenty-first century ashram, and everything that goes on here as being accelerated and more intense -- and it's like that for me with T'ai Chi.

"The group happens each month. At the beginning, I did it, and I would continually ask Bhagwan things. I wrote him letter after letter about what it was possible to do with the group, and he’d just send it back, saying, 'Blessings, blessings, blessings . . . ' so I was thrown back onto myself. I know that because of Bhagwan it's a totally different experience to what it was in the West.

"The more I felt aware of Bhagwan being here, the more open I felt to him. I feel it's Bhagwan's group and I'm just there because that's what I happen to be doing with my physical self. The people who come here give me space to do T'ai Chi and to grow with it, and for the people, it is a space of doing something that brings them closer to Bhagwan. It makes us all more open to him . . . available.

"What really astounds me is that the less I plan and the less I think about it, the more I empty and can feel Bhagwan and his energy. Sometimes I'll get these pictures of him doing T'ai Chi. I'll close my eyes in the middle of an exercise when people are mirroring each other, and he'll be there, mirroring me.

"I dare to take a lot more risks here in terms of the way Bhagwan talks about the monotony of the group -- that T'ai Chi is not meant to be an enjoyment, but that people come to do the group to drive their minds crazy. More and more I can drop the 'I've got to make it enjoyable so that people like me', and take it to the limit of what T'ai Chi is and just watch my resistance coming up to doing something over and over again for an hour.

"Sometimes I stop and I think, 'Oh, this has been going on long enough', then I think this is just my mind rationalising because I want to stop. So I shut my eyes and I picture Bhagwan. He might be just sitting there looking away and I think, 'Yes, he’s bored too', so we stop, or he might be sitting there chuckling, so we go on. I guess that's my way of dropping myself. The more I can do that, the more I'm not there, the more exciting it is.

"There's this Chinese image I use a lot with myself of being a hollow bamboo . . . just being hollow and empty and letting the wind move me -- and that wind is Bhagwan".

The T'ai Chi group shows up in The Sound of Running Water's groups chart as starting in Apr 1976 and offered all the way through till Mar 1978. It continued beyond that time, possibly until Jun 1981, when Osho left for the States, but the period after Mar 1978 was not covered by TSORW.

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