Ancient Greeks held that "healthy spirit is in
the healthy body". They admire "fitness" and "sinews".
The earliest 776 ancient Greek Summer
Olympics stressed not the spirit of "participation"
but more resounding and simple slogan contrary to the modern Olympic games:
"Champion or Life". Title winners did not only go down in history
but also had their pictures painted on vases or made into sculptures and their
performances were eulogized in songs and poems.
Just the opposite is true with the values of traditional
Chinese sports. Here are two contrasting pictures. One is the running on the
ancient Olympics and the other is the picture on how to preserve life in ancient
China, which succinctly tell the differences between the Chinese sports culture
and that of the Western World.
Ancient China was a big agricultural country. A truth
gradually dawned on the Chinese people: man and nature must live in harmony.
Only by harmonizing with the nature, is it possible to preserve life and maintain
health and prolong life. They therefore created a series of sports that emulated
animals. The creation of Tai Ji Quan at the turn of the Ming and Qing dynasties
epitomized the philosophic thinking of harmony between man and nature.
Whereas, the ancient Greeks living along the shores
of the Mediterranean had a deep understanding of the mysteries and big size
of nature in their fight against the vast seas. They interpreted all natural
phenomena and processes according to the principle of mechanics. They even
looked at people as machines. In the spirit of using physics and geometrical
concepts to study astronomy and geography and movements of the human body
and the limit of human body to resist nature, they created races, long jump
and javelin throw and other competitive sports. Either in the Homer period
or in modern Olympics, all these events exhibited speed, height, distance
and weight and other materials features.
Traditional Chinese sports such a Qi Gong
and Tai Qi Quan, however, stressed the communications between mind and body
by concentrating the mind on the parts of the body to regulate the Qi accompanied
by the movements of the limbs and body. They maintained the orderly movements
of the body in the external environment by utilizing the information and energy
flows in the internal systems of the body so as to regulate the metabolism
and preserve life. The exercising process stressed basic skills in combination
with the whole set of exercises, embodying the way of thinking featuring the
pursuit of balance with nature. The traditional Greek sports such as racing
and throwing standardized the movements of the human body according to the
theories of human body dissection, mechanics and physiology. They used the
movements of the limbs to stimulate the organic body and enable the single
movement under a given condition to reach the maximum development through
the adaptable reaction generated by excessive restoration. The training process
usually adopted special competence training and special skill training or
by the combination of both. It required the movements to be precise and standard,
stressing intensity and density of training, embodying the imaginary thinking
featuring the pursuit of individual liberalization and challenge against physiological
limits.
