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John Minford, #SunTzu 5:22 "These are all matters of potential energy."
Here in chapter 5, Master Sun has gently, relentlessly walked us through the idea of potential energy. Our translator teaches us it may well be the most important concept in the entirety of Master Sun's work. On any measure, pretty important stuff.
The simple physics bear reviewing. Go outside and find a stone. Bend down and pick it up. Raising the stone to hip level in your hand, you have created potential energy. On the ground, there was none. It was stable. In your hand, you may drop it. Its fall is kinetic energy.
Raise a stone higher, to should level, you have doubled the potential energy. It will hit the ground with twice the impact. Now, pull a stone back behind your shoulder, winding all your arm's and body's torsion into the stone and throw it as high and far as you can.
You have now added all the potential energy to the stone your body is capable of giving. Given just your body as a source, the stone has achieved maximum potential at the moment of your throw's release. Potential energy converts to kinetic energy. Energy realized in motion.
In Longsword we do exactly the same thing. Simply hefting our sword up to high right, it naturally wants to strike down to low left. If you execute a simple step forward, you add your body's weight to the potential energy released in the strike.
A point of technique. If you wish to maximize strike impact, focus on the moment your sword's descent passes the line between you and your enemy. Stepping forward, lift you right foot a little as you strike down. The moment sword crosses the line, step down with your right foot.
I've mentioned the difference between Master Sun and the Italian Renaissance tradition. He doesn't speak about many of our dearest values. He doesn't speak about honor. He doesn't speak about satisfaction. Evidently, it's part of my job to add those wonderful concepts in.
If you get your step and your strike just so, strike crossing the line, step instantly following with perfect maximization of potential energy converted into kinetic impact, the satisfaction is so sweet it can't be described. It's worth the 1000's of practice strikes required.
Why do Calvary swords swoop? Think of the power and mass of a mighty war horse. Add your own weight and the swoop of your sword downward from above, behind, and back up again as you decimate an infantryman. What are the vectors converting potential into kinetic energy?
When I practice my strikes, my favorite mode is massively slow motion. I lift my right foot, sword held high. I slowly swing sword down, pausing at just passed the line. I then allow sword to continue falling as I STOMP my right foot down, as loud as I can. I state, die enemy.
Let's conclude today's study with the following mediation. If you've followed the idea of potential energy so far, a wonderful assignment would be to go back and re-read chapter 5 with this new clarity in mind. Every verse will offer new depths if you do.
The same method works in moving forward. We're about to enter into the phenomenal land of chapter 6. It's going to push us in ways we've never been pushed before. One initial attack is this. Try to read each of the coming chapter's verses with potential energy in mind.
I attempted to do so, myself, and failed. Well, I have high standards. I was unable to do so on about 4 - 8 or so of the 44 verses. I am good at focus, but this is a high-order challenge, let me tell you. I will succeed at it by or before tomorrow morning, I promise.
Do you remember the images of bamboo strips bound on strings, or of them loose on a table, playing mix and match? The editors of our great book must have played, again and again, with the possible order in which to place the wisdom. They succeeded.
If you take the one, key idea of chapter 5, and apply to each of the 44 verses of the coming chapter, you will be blown away by the depth to which your mind's comprehension descends. It is, however, okay if you don't follow my suggestion, and here's why.
Master Sun and his editors though the centuries have created at text that so powerfully builds upon itself as it rolls forward, that if you simply let them lead you, you'll benefit more than can be described. Me? I'm ambitious. I want to get ALL of it.
But I say to you, just keep up and you'll be fine. You can be as, or maybe even more ambitious than me if that's your way. Honor to you. I love you. But, if your mode is simply to take it all in, that's fine too. There's plenty of potential energy in that.
Time for a confession. I've been lax in getting the bitly links posted over at @WarForAmerica21. I will get them all caught up soon. In the meantime, you can do a Twitter search for any verse like so: #SunTzu 1: 1, or any other such verse, up to today's #SunTzu 5:21.
