What is there to say about intent? When I was younger I used to say, “Intent is the most powerful force in the universe!” Now that I’m older, I’ve realized somewhat cynically that the most powerful force in the universe is actually habit or inertia. Still, there is something to be said about intent.
Let me begin by paraphrasing Chogyal Namkhai Norbu’s saying, with regard to his students, that, “If you take 10 people, you will have 10 different capacities.” Capacity means the natural ability to do something, whatever it may be, and also the limits of that ability. In our age of social equality this has become almost a taboo idea, that different people have different levels of natural ability.
Modern practices of Chinese “internal martial arts” and qigong, and their unending and quixotic search for “chi power,” all assume that students begin at the same basic level, and so all students begin by learning the same basic skills. But what if a person already has functional access to chi power, and has for their entire life? Where would such a person begin practice? Or would they even seek instruction at all?
What is intent?
Many people think intent in martial arts is something like, “I’m going to kill you,” or even, “Fuck you! Die, motherfucker!” It is that, to be sure, especially in street fights. Recently I had the misfortune of clicking on a YouTube link that showed CCTV footage of an altercation in the Bronx, New York. Two men were shouting at each other. The one closest to the camera, young and thin-looking, was being held back by his friend. The man breaks free and you finally see the second man, older, bigger and stronger, but slower. They decide to fight.
The older, bigger man immediately goes for a lazy double-leg takedown; the younger man punches him once in the ribs with “Fuck you! Die, motherfucker!” intent. You can see it in his motion — one looping punch to the ribs and he confidently walks away, sure of his victory. The older man staggers, backs up, touches his side. He is bleeding heavily. He keeps backing up, his lifeblood spattering onto the sidewalk and forming puddles. He holds on to a parked car, falls to his knees. He is trying to understand what is happening.
The other man’s friend tries to help him up. The bleeding man stands up but falls flat onto his back. The friend keeps trying to help him to his feet. Obviously neither man is thinking clearly or knows what to do in this situation. If the stab victim is very quickly bleeding out, standing up and walking might be the last thing he should be doing.
He manages to stand up one last time, slips in what is by now a pool of his own blood, falls backward, hits his head on the pavement and loses consciousness forever. From when he was stabbed, he was dead in about one minute. The saddest thing is, he never even had time to realize it was the last minute of his life. In the footage you never even see the knife, which means it couldn’t have been very large. One hit, one stab, and a man is dead a minute later. It’s an example of the order of magnitude intent can add to the power of any attack. All in all, the videoclip was a very sobering reminder of the fragility of individual life.
That was a stabbing in a street fight. Always assume the other guy has a knife — and friends nearby.
In martial arts, intent is something a bit different: it’s facing your opponent head on, accepting the fight, reconciling yourself to the dangers, and in consequence focusing intensely on your opponent. As you focus your eyes, your mind, your attention on every relevant detail, you can feel your consciousness penetrating deeper and deeper and revealing more and more. I would say intent in the martial arts is intense focus —almost a psychic power of “getting inside your opponent’s head,” but it’s more like getting inside their body psychically.
Empty force
The Chinese concept of kong jing — “empty force” — has always been controversial, with the main reason being that many people can’t believe in anything they don’t see with their eyes — which at the same time is not a concept they weren’t raised with. In fact, people can believe all sorts of nonsense if inculcated before a certain age.1 Concepts they were raised with — “Jesus,” “God,” “Buddha,” the “afterlife” and so on — if introduced before the child had any say and accepted automatically before the age of consent, not only remain unquestioned into adulthood but can be almost impossible to reject consciously. Concepts introduced in early childhood are part of an individual’s conditioning for life; the older he gets, and the looser his grip on life becomes, the more he reverts to the familiar concepts of childhood — his solace, his truest friends.
Back to empty force (kong jing). As I mentioned in the beginning about capacity, some people are born with the ability of empty force. First and foremost, arguing about its existence is utterly irrelevant and of no interest to these gifted individuals. Let the masses believe what they will. To these people, advice such as this doesn’t really apply: “This can only be accomplished with a background of training in meditation, chi concentration, and with a knowledge of how to unite the body into a single, powerful unit.”
Empty force is transmitted by the eyes, not the hands. In the intense focus I described above, it is the eyes that focus, first and foremost. The eyes sharpen everything else — first the mind, which follows the eyes; then the chi, which follows the mind; then the yi — intent, making a decision — which comes from the heart. Once there is intent, something flows from the eyes into the opponent. That is a tangible physical fact, but why put a name on it? “Is it chi power?” Probably not — but who cares.
I’ll give you three examples from personal experience. That way other people can continue to deny its existence as they please, and I will continue to trust my own experience. This is an immutable modern truth, that each person lives in their own reality and believes whatever they want. No one escapes it. Still, here are my examples.
First example
Sometime in the 2000s, while driving at night on a six-lane divided highway (plus turning lanes), I knocked down a drunk for his own safety. He had probably just gotten off the commuter train above the road, maybe after a nap, and was staggering like a wild animal, rocking back and forth, across this 55 mph road. I was concerned for him, so I stared at him as hard as I could, never taking my eyes off him. “If someone’s go’n kill this sumbitch, it ain’t go’n be me!” In all seriousness though, I was genuinely concerned for him.
I never let him out of my sight because I didn’t want to hit him with my car (focus). He was heading over the divider from the oncoming three lanes into my three lanes, and I wanted him to stop (intent). So I stared at him hard (transmission). Well, he took one step onto the highway going my direction, staggered backwards and sat down safely on the divider, just before I passed him. Thank Christ! I was very relieved, but it also occurred to me how I had gotten my way completely.
Second example
Something similar happened in 2012, except this time I was walking around the business district of Midtown Manhattan, coming back from a lunch break. About two blocks south of Radio City Music Hall, while navigating the landscaping around 1221 Avenue of the Americas, I got into a little race with a woman dragging a piece of luggage (focus). On the last turn around the tree and flower planters, she managed to edge me out. I cursed (intent). I stared at her stupid luggage (transmission), and … one of the wheels fell off. I instantly felt bad; now she was going to have to carry her rolling suitcase to whatever train or bus station she was headed to, like in the old days. We stopped and talked to each other for a few seconds.
Third example
Finally, only a few years ago, when my son was about 2 years old, one evening he was jumping on the living room couch. Concerned he would fall but also annoyed, I asked him to stop several times. I may have been sitting on one end of the couch while he was jumping on the other. At one point I shot him an annoyed look. I saw his face change from joy to surprise — he flew backwards off the couch and landed on his back onto a small toy. It hurt like hell, he started crying furiously in pain, but after a few minutes I was able to comfort him. He had gotten scared, but he also hurt his back. It amounted to a swollen bruise with a scrape on top, but I was worried about his vertebrae. Being a child of two, there was no damage to his vertebral column, and by the next morning he had forgotten all about it.
It wasn’t until much later that it occurred to me that I might have had something to do with his falling backwards off the couch. I was concerned for him and watching him intently (focus). I was also annoyed and wanted him to stop (intent). What occurred to me later was that I had been facing him directly as he was jumping. “Theophilos, stop it!” He looked at me and laughed (transmission): “Hahaha! Oh, God!” he must’ve thought as he started sailing backwards. Did I push him? Who knows. Maybe I just intimidated him, which is often a big part of it. But did I also intimidate the drunk who never saw me, or the little wheel on the luggage? I’m not so sure I intimidated them.
A few words on contributing factors
As you can see from these three rather different examples, empty force is very much a physical phenomenon. In the first case, driving in the car at night, the drunken man was vulnerable because he was extremely shaky and unsteady — “didn’t have his feet under him,” as it were. Moreover, to my stare was added the momentum of a car going about 60 mph. The momentum of the car speeding toward him certainly added to the effect, I felt that at the time.
In my son’s case, two things contributed: he was a small and lightweight child, and he also didn’t have his feet under him as he was bouncing in the air. Again, these were contributing factors that amplified the effect. As for the wheel on the rolling luggage, that was actually a very common occurrence I’ve witnessed countless times: inert matter is susceptible to breakage, and it will break at its weakest point. That wheel must’ve been on the point of falling off already, but when I looked at it, it finally did.
The problem with intent is that it works
The major issue with intent that I have discovered from experience is that much of the time, you — or I, or anyone — are not aware of what your heart is thinking until after the fact, until it’s too late. This has happened many times as well. You realize what your intent was only after you see its effects, and then you think, “Oh, God! Had I been wishing that? In a way, I had been wishing that!” But by then it’s too late.
Bodhidharma often talked about the “three poisons” — greed (or lust, the desire to acquire), hatred (or love, to push away or pull toward), and delusion (ignorance, confusion, dishonesty) — which correspond to the three major centers in the body — the lower abdomen, the heart, and the head. These three poisons are poisons only in the unaware individual, in the “mortal” or ordinary person Pu Ti often refers to, and they can be transformed by awareness. The point is, love and hate are the special domain of the heart. So it behooves someone wielding empty force to be aware of what their heart is thinking at all times, but especially while interacting with others, when it is easiest to lose awareness of yourself.
I once saw a documentary or a reality show where a family living in the mountains demonstrated their proficiency at axe-throwing. I’ll never forget the advice the man gave toward the end, after his demonstration: “You must aim with your heart. Then you’ll never miss.” That is the definition of intent: aiming with the heart. The mind, the eyes, will often miss where the heart won’t. That’s also true for archery or shooting, throwing a tomahawk or a spear, or any activity that involves aiming and delivering a projectile at a distance. How does a Zen monk hit the target with an arrow with his eyes closed? How does a sniper make a kill at 2,430 meters, at 3,540 meters, even at 3,800 meters? They get their calculations right, to be sure, but there must also be intent. In that final split-second, they forget everything else and make the kill. Boom. Done deal.
An answer to our question
To return to the question at the beginning of this post, what does a person do who has natural kong jing ability to cultivate that skill? My first advice is to work on developing emotional maturity instead, and this is done not in a martial arts studio but in “real life” — at home, at work, with friends, with family, in facing challenges honestly. First know your own heart, and then you might not care about the rest of it. In my opinion, intent is the beginning and the end of it.
My second advice would be to never use intent in a fight. I’ve only been in one fight in my adult life, and my intent was to down the individual and walk away. I had no idea what I was going to do. Aside from a general knowledge that comes from thinking and reading about combat, I am not expertly trained in martial arts; I’ve never spent more than 3 months in a dojo or school, at different times in my life — flirtations with karate and Muay Thai during college, with wing chun, judo and aikido in my thirties and forties, and acquiring a few tai chi, xingyi and qigong forms on my own — so I never learned all that much.
In my only fight, I ended up doing a cross-collar choke (before I had studied judo), since it was cold and dark out and the aggressor was wearing a wool overcoat. Ideally, this choke puts pressure on the jugular veins and carotid arteries, leading to a drop in blood pressure — but should not attack the windpipe. I’m not sure I did it all correctly (he reported having a very sore throat the next day, unable to swallow), but after a few seconds I was able to down the other man, who was bigger, by using my intent. There was no leg sweep, just an arm motion to the side without letting go. The trick is to pull in one direction first, then quickly go the other way, pulling with the bottom hand and pushing with the top one to make a circle.2 In my case the other individual was drunk, so he wouldn’t accept defeat. So I let him go, ran off, and called the police.
My second advice is, never attack a person with intent to maim or kill, unless you intend to maim or kill them. As the saying goes, “Never point a gun at anything you don’t want to kill.” If you’ve read this far, take that advice. Otherwise you may come to regret it — and there’s nothing you can do about regret.
Lessons from Bobby Gunn
Recently I read a sample of Bobby Gunn’s biography, which was released last month. American Gunn — 71 inches tall, weighing 235 pounds, and who has been fighting grown men since the age of 10 — is a former IBA cruiserweight world champion and the only-ever undisputed world champion of underground bare-knuckle boxing, with an undefeated record of 73–0.
In the book sample, Gunn’s opponent is an ex-Marine — 75 inches tall and weighing 200 pounds — who saw action as a corporal with a light armored recon battalion in two tours of Iraq, and was later diagnosed with severe PTSD as a result. Gunn is “worried” about the fight (his words) because his opponent has a habit of dropping his head to block punches, which will break a hand, but mostly because soldiers are “wildcards” who “think with their heart” — making them the most “dangerous” opponents.
About two minutes into the fight, the former soldier gets knocked down by a four-punch combo: “a left hook to the stomach, a right hook to the kidney, and a devastating deep left hook straight to the heart” — then “a final jab to the chin” for the knockdown. After the fight, the downed man describes the finishing blow as “pretty equivalent” to taking “a sledgehammer to the face.” But if a man of Gunn’s experience and ability can deliver a “devastating” punch “straight to the heart” without causing any real damage, he couldn’t have had the intent to kill or permanently injure his opponent, which could mean a stretch in prison.
On one hand, maybe Gunn has an exquisite mastery of jing (force) — which is entirely possible given his lifelong experience — and can apply just enough to get the job done, and a little extra to be sure, just like any other craftsman plying his trade. On the other hand, maybe he is all physical force: “built like a wall,” with “mallet-sized hands” and a “tree-stump neck,” still pounding tires at age 42. As for me, I would never punch someone in the heart, because to me intent is the beginning and the end of it.
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1 Cf. “We know from our own experience that what has been handed down to us as very ancient, and what as children we have been taught to consider sacred, retains throughout life a fascination which is difficult to shake off. Every attempt to discover reason in what is unreasonable is accepted as legitimate so long as it enables us to keep what we are unwilling to part with.” —Max Müller in his Three Lectures on the Vedanta Philosophy, Delivered at the Royal Institution in March, 1894 ; “People are fatally attached to the first thing they made sense of, even if it was wrong.” —Cyril Glassé, in a personal email dated Sep 13, 2023.
2 Throwing in the Japanese grappling arts of judo and aikido is based on unbalancing the opponent first, a jujutsu skill called kuzushi. In this 20-second clip, Kyuzo Mifune (1883-1965), a 10-dan judoka nicknamed the “God of Judo,” demonstrates a throw he himself created, sumi otoshi, which doesn’t use the feet to throw. In the slow-motion reply, you can clearly see his split-second fake to the right before he applies the throw to his left side.