Ayushi Agrawal

“The empty-mindedness of chi sao applies to all activities we may perform, such as dancing. If the dancer has any idea at all of displaying his art well, he ceases to be a good dancer, for his mind stops with every movement he goes through. In all things, it is important to forget your mind and become one with the work at hand. When the mind is tied up, it feels inhibited in every move it makes and nothing will be accomplished with any sense of spontaneity. The wheel revolves when it is not too tightly attached to the axle. When it is too tight, it will never move on. As the Zen saying goes: “Into a soul absolutely free from thoughts and emotion, even the tiger finds no room to insert its fierce claws.” In chi sao the mind is devoid of all fear, inferiority complexes, viscous feeling, etc., and is free from all forms of attachment, and it is master of itself, it knows no hindrances, no inhibitions, no stoppages, no clogging, no stickiness. It then follows its own course like water; it is like the wind that blows where it lists.”
― Bruce Lee, Bruce Lee The Tao of Gung Fu: Commentaries on the Chinese Martial Arts

“The following week I stayed home. After spending many hours of meditation and practice, I gave up and went sailing alone in a junk. On the sea I thought of all my past training and got mad at myself and punched the water! Right then—at that moment—a thought suddenly struck me; was not this water the very essence of gung fu? Hadn’t this water just now illustrated to me the principle of gung fu? I struck it but it did not suffer hurt. Again I struck it with all of my might—yet it was not wounded! I then tried to grasp a handful of it but this proved impossible. This water, the softest substance in the world and what could be contained in the smallest jar, only seemed weak. In reality, it could penetrate the hardest substance in the world. That was it! I wanted to be like the nature of water. Suddenly a bird flew by and cast it’s reflection on the water. Right then as I was absorbing myself with the lesson of the water, another mystic sense of hidden meaning revealed itself to me; should not the thoughts and emotions I had when in front of an opponent pass like the reflection of the bird flying over the water? This was exactly what Professor Yip meant by being detached—not being without emotion or feeling, but being one in whom feeling was not sticky or blocked. Therefore in order to control myself I must first accept myself by going with and not against my nature. I lay on the boat and felt that I had united with Tao; I had become one with nature. I just laid there and let the boat drift freely according to its own will. For at that moment I had achieved a state of inner feeling in which opposition had become mutually cooperative instead of mutually exclusive, in which there was no longer any conflict in my mind. The whole world to me was as one.”
― Bruce Lee, Bruce Lee The Tao of Gung Fu: Commentaries on the Chinese Martial Arts

“Once a country is habituated to liars, it takes generations to get the truth back.”
― Gore Vidal

“You are so vulnerably haunting; Your eeriness is terrifyingly irresistible.”
― Franz Kafka, Letters to Milena