Tai Chi Chuan

Alan Watts / audio 7:00 ~5 MB opus 111 kb/s

This short talk uses music and dance as a lens for understanding Tai Chi Chuan and the broader Taoist attitude toward life. Alan Watts observes that no one judges a piece of music by how quickly it reaches its final chord, nor does a dancer aim for a particular spot on the floor; the value lies entirely in the unfolding of the sound or the movement, not in arriving somewhere. He contrasts this with the Western habit of picturing life as a journey or pilgrimage, a serious undertaking whose whole worth depends on reaching a destination such as success or an afterlife. That framing, he argues, is where people miss the point, because life was never a journey to be completed but a piece of music meant to be sung and danced while it plays. The talk is brief but distills a core theme of Watts's teaching on Tai Chi Chuan: that its slow, continuous movements are not exercises aimed at a goal but an embodiment of being fully present within the motion itself. Attachments include the original audio file and a machine transcript.

transcriptmachine-transcribed, unedited

In music, though, one doesn't make the end of a composition the point of the composition.

If that were so, the best conductors would be those who played fastest.

And there would be composers who wrote only finales.

People go to a concert just to hear one crashing chord, because that's the end.

Same way in dancing. You don't aim at a particular spot in the room.

That's where you should arrive. The whole point of the dancing is the dance.

Now, but we don't see that as something brought by our education into our everyday conduct.

We thought of life by analogy with a journey, with a pilgrimage, which had a serious purpose at the end.

And the thing was to get to that end, success or whatever it is, or maybe heaven after your death.

But we missed the point the whole way along.

It was a musical thing, and you were supposed to sing or to dance while the music was being played.

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