Tai Sabaki on the Silk Road
Yasser Abdel Hafez
In Egypt, we believe that our civilizationis a melting potof cultures: Greek, Roman, Persian, Arab, Ottoman and, of course, ancient Egyptian. This mix has always been a reassuring source of pride, but when the Arab Spring started, the turbulence undermined it. And in the midst of blood, chants and failed dreams, everyone had to come back to earth all of a sudden. Everyone was forced to rearrange their priorities and perceptions.
For me, taking refuge in books was crucial. I needed them to make use of the theoretical knowledge they provide as always. But this time, I felt it was necessary to make this knowledge a vital part of my life, with a new belief that culture must be an actual practice and not just words and ideas imprisoned in the confines of a book. Only through making culture part of our lives can we, in Egypt, the Arab world and the whole world, bridge our differences and turn global chaos into some sort of order and harmony.
I do believe that our world needs to learn how to breathe, otherwise it could be destroyed. It is not so hard for the world to do what is right; all it takes is one slow deep breath. As my guru told me, “Let it go of all your doubts, your fears and your sense of insecurity.”
This is very useful for mind and body, as I’ve learned lately. It is the first step on the way to taking off; do you know that we have the ability to flow?
In Arabic we have the word sukoun (???? ), it’s a central concept in our culture; we believe it is the state from which life arose. I always thought of that term as though it meant silence, but it does not and I didn’t get its precise meaning until I played my part in cultural exchange, using different methods to communicate with various countries and cultures.
Yoga came first. It taught me a way to control the mind by punishing the body. At the start it was magnificent to discover that the body can be stretched and squeezed to such limits. But while the process went forward something odd happened. It was like letting go of your soul, sinking slowly away from reality.
Luckily today’s world is effectively connected, thanks to globalization and the information revolution. While sitting comfortably at home, you can move virtually around the world. In this way, I walked from the foot of the pyramids to India to meet my first guru and do yoga with him, in front of a river guarded by the twittering of birds which from time to time breaks the silence.
From there I moved onto my second guru: a monk from Shaolin Temple. He too stood by a river somewhere in China. He was as quiet as my Indian mentor but in a different way. They represented two different ways of identifying strength: yoga starts from the tension of nerves with rigid positions, while tai chi starts from a very slow movement in search of cohesion.
Before discussing cultural exchange we have to define culture, and out of hundreds of definitions I pick one of the simplest: culture is the cumulative deposit of knowledge.
This is the definition we need to describe how people have behaved and what they have achieved since their first second on earth. For example, they discovered fire, and on that occasion they painted the walls of caves in ritual festivals, drawings that show how to use it. This was the first message, the first act of cultural exchange, which made life easier for all of us. I would say human history is built on that bridge: “cultural exchange”.
For me, this is very obvious. In a previous phase of my life, I was like those primitive men who walked in darkness, frightened of what besieged them, until they found the cave with paintings showing how to ignite fire.
In the same way, I found my cave. Its walls were painted with sketches of men and women doing tai chi, qigong, the Eight Pieces of Brocade, the Five Animal Frolics and the Five Tibetan Rites, aikido, yoga and Sufi dance.
Each of these methods belongs to a different culture and views the world from a different perspective. I tried to learn and practice each one of them; I savored the similarities between each of them and my own culture.
When you practice tai chi, it will take you some time to reach “the state of nothingness”, to stand like a tree with an empty mind. Of course, that is extremely challenging, especially for someone whose main job is to think, like me. Lifting weights is much easier, trust me.
Through tai chi, with its easy slow moves and the empty mind, I returned to yoga without fear. Now I can let my soul play around as it wants. Somehow tai chi and yoga complement each other, and that gave me the freedom to mix everything up: not just yoga with tai chi but also aikido with dance, and Sufi dhikr with the Five Tibetan Rites.
I was confused at first, but afterwards it became crystal clear that despite the differences marking out cultures, there is, at the heart of all of them, something that connects everything to everything else. We are all connected, just look at recurrent concepts such as the human body as the link between the earth and the sky, how vital it is in every culture to reach a point of inner peace in order to experience true power, yin and yang, light and darkness, comparable to the good and evil that we have in the Abrahamic religions.
I know it was cultural exchange that formed human history when I see a hand shape being used as a symbol somewhere in my country and then read about the healing palm in other cultures, when I come across the same method of circling around the self and the earth’s axis with the final goal of finding the rhythm that allows us to flow like water together with the tune of the universe, and maybe to find answers to the unending questions of why are we here and where we will go.
Nowadays, the belt and the road initiative is making its way forward with the ambition of connecting the world together. I think it can be an opportunity for west and east to rediscover the principles, beliefs and values we should all stand for. I hope it will turn out to be a road not just for goods, but for more than that, for real cultural exchange. And I believe that this will only happen if the intellectuals manage to exit their literary ghettos to be with people offering them true culture.
In my view, all over the world, we are stuck in a mall culture where everything is the same everywhere. We almost act like robots that eat the same food, wear the same clothes and share the same ideas on social media, while we cover the planet with the waste of our consumption. In the era of globalization, while the planet nears its destruction, real cultural exchange is the only way to rescue ourselves from the fatal consequences of greed.
But I really do not mean to put the term of cultural exchange in opposition to business interests. It is important to say that I’ve never understood the idea of conflict between different methods or philosophies.
My question is how to reach harmony in the modern world. You tell me. Who am I to tell the world what to do? That being said, I’ve lately been taking my first steps in tai sabaki. This is a Japanese term used in aikido to refer to body-management: how to be in harmony with our opponent, how to avoid their power and use it against them. By doing so we are not trying to win a competition, but searching for a dialogue between two powers. It is also the basis of dancing: keep the beat, do cultural exchange.