Tai Chi history

More thoughts on elbows and the classics of Tai Chi and Xing Yi

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From  http://chentaijiquanworld.blogspot.com/ we find this nice quote about Chen Taijiquan:

“The, at first sight, seemingly humorous Chenjiagou saying to “always keep an egg under your armpit” reflects the importance of not allowing the upper arms to become stuck to the side of the body.

This idea of always keeping a space under the armpit is something I’ve heard said in other styles of Tai Chi as well, and it fits in very well with the idea of “Peng all over the body” that you’re aiming for in Taijiquan, that kind of “inflated like a balloon, but also soft, springy and heavy” feeling. 

Taijiquan, with armpit gaps. Photo by Stephen on Pexels.com

But how does that relate to the question I was looking at recently about the issue of where the elbows should be in Xing Yi? “The elbows never leave the ribs” is a line from the Xing Yi classics* (more of that later) that has caused a lot of arguments between practitioners on its interpretation and meaning. 

And when you compare it to the previous saying about the armpit from Chen Village, it’s basically the complete opposite advice! And yet, both Taijiquan and Xingyiquan are said to be internal arts, and part of the same family. So, is the advice about the elbow a crucial element, as fundamental as, say, aligning the Bai Hui point (the crown) with the spine? Or is this more of a piece of strategic advice to do with the fighting style of Xingyiquan, and not anything to do with its fundamental body method?

Let me throw in a curve ball here and switch arts to BJJ. “Glue your elbows to your ribs” is something I say to my students in BJJ all the time when they are on the bottom defending a position like side control, knee on belly or mount.

Knee on Belly in BJJ. Photo by RDNE Stock project on Pexels.com

If you let your opponent separate your elbows from your ribs in that position then only bad things can happen, so it’s great advice. Normally after I submit somebody new in BJJ I stop to explain to them how I did it, so we can turn it into a learning moment. 9 times out of 10 my explanation starts with “it started when you let me into the space under your armpit”. However, it would be ludicrous to make it into a hard and fast rule, to suggest that you should never let the ribs leave the armpit at any moment in BJJ. There are plenty of other times in BJJ where you need to pull with your arm, and you can’t do that fully without separating your elbow from your ribs.

* And let’s also decide on what constitutes a “classic” in Xing Yi. My own teacher only considered the 10 Thesis of Yue Fei  to be the classic writings in Xing Yi. Most of what people call the Xing Yi classics today are, in fact, writings created in the early 20th century when there was a publishing boom in martial arts manuals (See Chinese Martial Arts Training Manuals: A Historical Survey by Kennedy and Gau), and are based on the original Yue Fei writings anyway. For Xing Yi it started with Sun Lu Tang’s 1915 A Study of Xing Yi Boxing.

In the preface to his manual Sun says (Translation by Brennan), “While once at Bai Xiyuan’s home in Beijing, I got to see one of the Yue Fei manuals, not an original copy of course, but a handwritten copy made by someone in a later generation. It was not very detailed and unfortunately contained no explanations of its terminology, only the barest of text from beginning to end. I was suddenly inspired by this, immediately wishing to provide more complete information, even though I was fully aware that my level of learning and skill was superficial, and without being tempted to make anything up [in order to fill information gaps]. I secretly made my own copy and then deeply studied it, going through it posture by posture until bit by bit I had built up the material to make this book. There is no decorative language in it at all, for in my studies I have not dared to hold on to even the slightest exaggerations. Wherever flaws are found within my work, I hope my comrades will correct me, for which I would be very appreciative.

  – sincerely written by Sun Fuquan [Lutang] of Wan County, Baoding, 1915, 1st month, 15th day”

In his manual Sun has a chapter called “The Essentials of Practice” in which we find the advice about elbows and ribs. (Translation by Brennan)

“ESSENTIALS OF PRACTICE
The essentials of practice in Xingyi Boxing: 1. Sink your waist. 2. Shrink your shoulders. 3. Hollow your chest. 4. Press. 5. Lift. 6. Horizontal and vertical should be clearly understood. 7. Lifting, drilling, dropping, and overturning should be clearly distinguished.
  …
  Your head presses up during drilling, then shrinks back during overturning. Your hands lift during drilling, then drop during overturning. Your foot lifts during drilling, then drops during overturning. Your waist lifts during drilling, then drops during overturning. [from the Xingyi Boxing Classics:] “In lifting there is a horizontal aspect, but it is invisible [because it appears to be only upward]. In dropping there is a vertical aspect, but it is invisible [because it appears to be only forward].”
  Lifting is going out and dropping is striking, but when lifting is also striking, dropping is still striking. Strike with lifting and dropping, like the overturning waves of water, which are lifting and dropping. Regardless of lifting and dropping, drilling and overturning, going and coming, it should always be that your elbow does not leave your ribs and your hand does not veer off from your centerline.
  These are considered to be the essentials in Xingyi Boxing. Knowing these, the right path in the art will be obtained.“

But you can see that even in this passage, Sun is quoting the older “Xing Yi Boxing Classics”. So, you have to start to wonder, how old is the advice that the elbows do not leave the ribs, really? I know some styles maintain that their “quan pu”, ancient collection of classic handwritten writings their family possesses has this advice in. At least with Sun’s work we have a published date we can be sure of. 

Photo by George Sharvashidze on Pexels.com

But this also brings up the question of how much we dedicate ourselves to following the literal words of “the classics” to the letter. How much freedom are we allowed in our martial art? Were the classics intended to be a kind of set in stone, unwavering, set of rules to be followed on pain of death? The ancient writings of the founders always tend to take on this weight that gets heavier over time. If they’d been written a year ago, would we treat them with the same reverence? There are hard line Christians who treat every word of the Bible as the word of God, never to be questioned, and there are more modern progressive Christians who interpret the words in the Bible into a modern context, or see them as simply stories designed to teach an idea, and not to be taken literally.

So, the question still lingers, like a bad smell. 

Where do you put your elbows in Xing Yi? 

I think the best answer I’ve found so far is…..

“in between your shoulders and your wrists”.

What came first in Tai Chi – the philosophy or the techniques?

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It’s no secret that Tai Chi is a series of circles. The body opening and closing using circulation motions, like a yin/yang symbol in action. But when you look at a Tai Chi form, you’ve got to wonder, what came first, the techniques or the philosophy? Was Tai Chi created in a moment of philosophical purity and clarity, or was the philosophy simply bolted on to existing military or self-defence techniques (or popular movements from theatrical or religious rituals) that were already as old as the hills?

What I’m wondering is, was there at some point a founder of the art who decided, as a starting point, that he was going to purposely create a martial art based entirely on a philosophy based on the Tai Chi symbol, which would be both the overarching principle and the raw material, out of which martial applications would be fashioned?

Or did the idea of doing things in circles come later, and get added to existing martial techniques, and in so doing, alter them forever?

Well, let’s look at what we know as fact.

Fact 1: Tai Chi does indeed contain nothing but circular movements. I’m sure somebody somewhere can point out a movement in a form that looks linear, but it’s quite possible that the movement is actually being created in a circular way, or it has degraded over time into something else. All we can do here is talk in broad brush strokes. If you look at a Karate form, or a Tae Kwan Do form you see lots of examples of linear movements, that are usually lacking from Tai Chi forms. From this we can conclude that some sort of philosophical idea must have been involved in its creation.

Fact 2: The techniques in Tai Chi forms look a lot like other techniques in other Chinese martial arts forms, so are not in any way unique. If you look at a lot of forms from the Shaolin Temple, or village styles from all over China, you see postures and movements that are very similar to the techniques found in Tai Chi. In a way, there is nothing new under the sun.

When solving a murder, detectives look for two things first – opportunity and motive.

When Tai Chi first appeared in Beijing in the late 19th century it was promoted along with the idea that it had a founder, an immortal Taoist called Chan Sang Feng who had created the art based on his observation (or a dream) of a fight between a crane (or possibly stork) and a snake. And while certain groups (see my last interview with George Thompson) on Wudang mountain still take this story very seriously, and possibly literally, modern scholarship has tended towards the idea that it was a fighting art from the rural countryside (Chen village being the most popular choice for origin) that found its way to Beijing via a young Yang LuChan, who taught it to those at the highest level of influence inside the Forbidden City.

Of course, the shadowy figure of Yang LuChan is never adequately explained, and since he was an uneducated nobody – a rural rube – nobody really made a record of his existence. The story everybody, including all the heads of the various Tai Chi families, follows, (because it’s the story the Chinese government approves of), is that he learned the art in Chen village. But I always wonder about that time in the 1860s when Yang and the very well educated and important Wu brothers were in Beijing, as being a time when Tai Chi could have been invented. The Wu brothers would have known the philosophy on which to hang it, and Yang would have had the martial skills to make it work and turn it into something that could bring the fractured court of the late Ching Dynasty together, bonding over something that was essentially Chinese in the face of constant threat from foreign powers. Yang and the Wu brothers together had both opportunity and motive, and regardless of whether you accept that interpretation of history or not, Tai Chi has been used as a political football ever since, especially by the current government to whom Tai Chi (the world’s most practiced marital art!) represents the ultimate form of soft power, spreading Chinese culture and influence the world over.

T’ai Chi magazine, AI and punching bags

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Sometime back in the early 2000s I had an article published in what was, at the time, the premier Tai Chi magazine, T’ai Chi Magazine. It was American, but you could find it in the UK in newsagents like WHSmiths and in martial arts shops. I was reminded of it recently and dug it out of my archive. Here it is! I looked a lot younger back then…

I remember being really excited that I got this article published. It’s hard to imagine now, but beyond your instructor or random seminar big wig in your town, T’ai Chi Magazine was one of the only ways to get information about Tai Chi before the Internet took over everything. It was run by its Editor, Marvin Smalheiser, who sadly passed away in 2016.

Whenever you dig out something from the past it’s a good opportunity to reflect on how things have changed. T’ai Chi Magazine was run to a pretty high standard, the images it published were always good, and many of them were in colour. The articles were generally of the interview type and provided a little glimpse into the T’ai Chi world for fanatic followers, who would look at the articles for hours, trying to work out what a particular pose could be for, or how the featured practitioner was doing something. Then VHS video came along and made still images irrelevant, since you could actually see the applications being done (a lot of the pages in T’ai Chi Magazine were dedicated to advertising VHS videos of forms and styles, mainly from China). And later online video sites like YouTube came along and made VHS look antiquated.

Considering the latest developments in AI it looks like our future will consist of an AI-generated person teaching us Tai Chi forms with no credit to the sources it stole it from, and probably teaching the moves wrong anyway. I’m not sure that technology is always moving us forward. You can imagine the fear that the first Tai Chi instructors had that if they put images of their form in a book it could be stolen from them. These days, it’s not only going to be stolen by AI, but it’s going to be manipulated into something else entirely!

You can imagine the prompts now:

“Alexa, teach me a Tai Chi form that lasts for 10 minutes and exercises all my major muscle groups”.

“Sure, here you go Graham.”

A video (or hologram?) of Alexa will then start teaching you some ‘follow along’ series of Tai Chi movements it’s magicked up out of thin air, with no credit to where it got them from, and slightly wrong.

And the worst thing will be, it’s probably exactly what people want.

Ep 24: George Thompson on Tai Chi and Taoism from Wudang mountain

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George Thompson is a film maker and Tai Chi teacher who studied on Wudang Mountain in China under Master Gu.

His videos at https://www.youtube.com/@George-Thompson have been watched by over 15 million people and has over 200K subscribers. He runs the Wayfinder Academy at https://www.wayfinder.academy through which he teaches online courses for balanced living.

In this episode I ask George what it is like to live and train Tai Chi on Wudang Mountain, what Wudang Tai Chi is like and what lessons he’s learned from Taoism.

You too can learn from George’s teacher, Master Gu, 15th generation of Wudang Sanfeng Pai of Wudang mountain via his online learning site at https://www.taoistwellness.online/

Click on the 7 day trial option, then use the coupon code TAICHINOTEBOOK when you sign up and you’ll get a lifetime 8% discount. That’s equivalent to one free month a year!

You can get a similar discount from George’s website https://www.wayfinder.academy/ using the same discount code TAICHINOTEBOOK when you sign up.

Podcast.

Happy World Tai Chi and Qigong day (for yesterday)!

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Yesterday was World Tai Chi and Qigong day (note the crazy mix of Wade-Giles and Pinying Romanisation going on there!)

So, I hope you celebrated the day by doing some sort of practice somewhere. I saw a couple of posts in my feed showing groups practicing Tai Chi in the park. Here’s one taken by Donald Kerr of Spinning Dragon Tao. Check out his YouTube channel.

Just a group of people getting together and peacefully practicing Tai Chi. Given the state of the world today, that’s no small thing.

On violence.

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A deep dive into Matt Thornton, Sam Harris and Mr Inbetween

One of the most interesting things I listened to this week was Matt Thornton’s interview with Sam Harris on his Making Sense podcast. Matt Thornton is the founder of the Straight Blast MMA gym network and an early advocate of Jeet June Do, and cross-training in multiple martial arts. He moved quite strongly into practicing Brazilian Jiujitsu after encountering the genius of Rickson Gracie. He was an early advocate of the concept of ‘aliveness’ in training, as well as his uncompromising attitude to martial arts, which is probably what he’s most famous for.

He’s got a new book out called The Gift of Violence, and is promoting it via the Sam Harris podcast. It’s an hour long podcast that you can listen to for free. It goes on longer, but that requires a subscription to the Making Sense podcast. (To be honest, Thornton has done lots of other interviews before, which can be found on YouTube, so you can probably get the info from the bits we are missing by listening to a selection of those.)

Here’s the book cover:

(That’s a terrible, terrible cover, design btw. Using “Full Justify” on text on a cover is a true crime against humanity, not to mention design. Plus, the gorilla looks like it’s yawning, and is badly cut out. However, since Matt’s picture on the BJJ Heroes website is of him in non-matching blue Gi top and white Gi pants, I don’t think fashion sense, design or style is really on his radar, and that has its own attraction)

Check out the podcast on YouTube:

Thornton is quite blunt about stating his belief that most martial arts simply don’t work and are therefore silly or a waste of time. I noticed that his comments seemed to annoy quite a few of the more serious Chinese marital arts practitioners that I follow online.

I’m somehow stuck in the middle on this. I find Thornton’s views on practicality quite compelling – the martial arts are full of stuff that is hardly what I’d call best practice for actually protecting yourself, and if I was being less generous, downright bad advice, however I can’t get onboard with his eagerness to throw every martial art that isn’t 100% dedicated to practical, alive, self defence training 100% of the time, under the bus.

As I’ve talked about before, I believe Chinese martial arts were never ‘just’ marital arts. They are part of a complex web that linked all sorts of aspect of life in ancient China together – religion, ritual, festival, theatre, healing, medicine and of course, self defence. And while several attempts were made throughout history to isolate just the self defence aspect of Chinese marital arts and separate is out from the rest (particularly after the disastrous Boxer Rebellion in 1900, and then again much later by the Communists in the 70s and their attempts to stamp out individuality and ‘rotten old traditions’ ) much of the previous branches remain – their roots go deep. But is that really a bad thing? People are multifaceted beings too. We don’t only do martial arts for one thing either. I know in my own training for instance, I don’t only train just for self-defence. I train because I enjoy it and it is good for me! I enjoy the puzzle-solving challenge that is Brazilian Jiujitsu, I enjoy the workout of forms in Chinese marital arts and the sense of mental balance and peace it gives me. I enjoy the ritual of having a little morning routine that I practice by myself and the quiet time it gives me. I enjoy the friends I make doing martial arts and the discussions we have, etc.

But I think Thornton’s opinions on martial arts are a side issue here to the most valuable insights you can get from him. What I’m most interested in from Thornton are his insights into violence. I haven’t read his book yet, but I’m going to. The book blurb makes some great points about violence

“In today’s modern world, we are largely isolated from the kind of savagery our ancestors faced on a daily basis. Although violence was as natural to our evolutionary development as sex and food, it has become foreign to most of us: at once demonized and glamorized, but almost always deeply misunderstood.”

Matt Thornton

That sounds exactly right to me – our approach to violence in the modern world have become very unnatural. We glamorise it in almost every TV show we watch, yet we’ve lost connection to it in daily life.

One TV show I’ve been rewatching recently (for the third time I think!) makes very much the same points about violence and its role in society is the the award-wining Australian series, Mr Inbetween created by the brilliant Scott Ryan. I don’t think any other show since The Sopranos has really tried to peel the lid on violence quite so effectively.

Scott Ryan as Ray Shoesmith. A man who knows a thing or two about violence.

As it says in this interview, Ryan’s character represents consequences. The show also deals with another factor that the modern day martial arts are often called in to deal with – bullying. Whether its children or adults being bullied, this is perhaps the one area of modern life that we as a society struggle to deal with the most, and it’s perhaps one area where violence really is the answer. Or is it?

In the UK, Mr Inbetween is on Disney+. I’d recommend it.

New podcast featuring… me! The Tai Chi Classics: Part 1.

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In the latest episode of the Tai Chi Notebook podcast host Graham is left all on his own without a guest, so he’s decided to pick up a book and read it to you! He’s gone for The Tai Chi Classic, one of the core works which make up a collection known as The Tai Chi Classics. Graham goes through the text a paragraph at a time and gives his interpretation of what the classic is saying. We hope you enjoy!

The Tai Chi Classic

In motion, the whole body should be light and agile,

with all parts linked as if threaded together.

The chi should be activated,

The mind should be internally gathered.

The postures should be rounded and without defect,

without deviations from the proper alignment;

in motion, your form should be continuous, without stops and starts.

The jin should be

rooted in the feet,

generated from the legs,

controlled by the waist, and

expressed through the fingers.

The feet, legs, and waist should act together

as an integrated whole,

so that while advancing or withdrawing

one can take the opportunity for favorable timing

and good position.

If correct timing and position are not achieved,

the body will become disordered

and will not move as an integrated whole;

the correction for this defect

must be sought in the legs and waist.

The principle of adjusting the legs and waist

applies for moving in all directions;

upward or downward,

advancing or withdrawing,

left or right.

All movements are motivated by Yi,

not external form.

If there is up, there is down;

when advancing, have regard for withdrawing;

when striking left, pay attention to the right.

If the yi wants to move upward,

it must simultaneously have intent downward.

Alternating the force of pulling and pushing

severs an opponent’s root

so that he can be defeated

quickly and certainly.

Full and empty

should be clearly differentiated.

At any place where there is emptiness,

there must be fullness;

Every place has both emptiness and fullness.

The whole body should be threaded together through every joint

without the slightest break.

Long Boxing is like a great river

rolling on unceasingly.

Peng, Lu, Ji, An,

Tsai, Lieh, Zhou, and Kao

are equated to the Eight Trigrams.

The first four are the cardinal directions;

South; Heaven, North; Earth, West; Water, and East; Fire.

The second four are the four corners:

Southwest; Wind, Northeast; Thunder,

Southeast; Lake, and Northwest; Mountain.

Advance, Withdraw,

Look Left, Look Right, and

Central Equilibrium

are equated to the five elements:

Metal,

Wood,

Water,

Fire, and

Earth

Taken together, these are termed the Thirteen Postures

Feet-together postures in Taiji (Tai Chi) and Xing Yi

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I’ve always been curious about the postures in martial arts forms where both feet are together, because these postures don’t look very martial at all. In fact, it’s hard to imagine why you would want to use a stance like that in a fight, and yet we find them in a lot of Tai Chi forms:

From: Sun Lu Tang, A Study of Taiji boxing, 1921

From: Long ZiXiang, A study of Taiji boxing 1952

Here’s an example of the posture in application in Taiji performed by my teacher Sifu Raymond Rand:

Sifu Rang, Brush Knee, Twist Step.

It seems to be mainly Taiji lineages that have some influence from Sun Lu Tang that do this the most. A lot of people attribute the distinctive ‘feet together’ postures he used to his prior training in Xing Yi, and there could be some truth to this. Xing Yi does have ‘feet together’ postures quite a lot.

Sun Lu Tang showing a selection of postures from , A Study of Xing Yi Boxing, 1915

Of course, the root of Xing Yi is spear fighting, but the modern interpretation of the art is heavily biased towards bare hand training, and this creates a misleading impression. Think about it – if you were at at least one spear length away from your opponent the risk of being tackled to the ground because your feet are together would be greatly reduced. You’re now free to use the power generation advantages that can be gained by letting both feet come together, which is handy when you are holding a heavy object, like a spear.

If you watch this excellent video of Xing Yi spear technique by Byron Jacobs you’ll see that he doesn’t hang out with his feet together all the time, but occasionally he uses the feet together moments for power generation (and of course, also standing on one leg for range advantage and manoeuvrability in a way that makes sense with weapons).

Video:

Example feet together transitional posture:

Byron Jacobs of Mushin Martial Culture

In Xing Yi the most famous example of the ‘feet together’ posture is the Half-Step Beng Quan. Here the back foot stepping up to meet the front foot in place creates a powerful closing action of the body, kind of like a door slamming.

From: Selected subtleties of the Xing Yi Boxing art, by Liu Dianchen [1921]

So, is this the origin of ‘feet together’ postures in Taiji forms? Quite possibly. However, there is one more thing to consider. After first learning Xing Yi, Sun Lu Tang learned his Taiji from Hao Weizhen 1849–1920, who learned from Li Yiyu 1832–1892, who learned from one of the Wu brothers, Wu Yuxiang 1812–1880 who had learned directly from Yang Luchan 1799–1872 and also sought out Chen Qingping 1795–1868 who he learned from in Zhaoboa village.

It’s often thought that the distinctive stepping seen in Sun style Taiji, where the back foot is often lifted and brought up close to the front foot, is a consequence of Sun’s prior Xing Yi training. This makes sense as part of the narrative created as part of the Sun Style Taiji brand, which is that he incorporated his earlier Xing Yi and Bagua training into his Taiji style. However, if you look at the Wu (Hou) style he learned, it already had this distinctive stepping in it.

For example:

From: Wu Yuxiang style Taiji Boxing by Hao Shaoru

While the feet don’t go completely together as much, if at all, in Wu(Hao) style, they are very close together for a lot of the time. Watch this video for an example of the form in action:

One theory about why this is is that Wu Yuxiang was a member of the Imperial Court at the end of the Ching Dynasty, and was therefore expected to wear traditional court dress, which restricted the stepping.

I think you can see that influence extending into Sun Lu Tang’s Taiji, which makes sense since he learned from this lineage.

Finally, I should note that thought this post I don’t want to create the impression that all the steps in either Xing Yi or Taiji performed by Sun Lu Tang are small or restricted. He also had plenty of wider postures in his arts too, for example.

Xing Yi:

Taiji:

However, compare it to postures found in other styles of Taiji whose practitioners didn’t have to wear court dress:

Chen Ziming for example:

From: The inherited Chen family boxing art, Chen Ziming

Thoughts on Chen Taijiquan Illustrated #1 – Yang style vs Chen style

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The newest addition to my collection!

My copy of Chen Taijiquan Illustrated arrived, and I’ve almost finished it. It’s an easy read since the word count isn’t very high – it’s essentially a series of high quality training notes, illustrated, which I think really helps to convey the message in a way that text alone cannot. I’m not going to do a full review for a while, I’m going to let the book sink in first, but I might do a series of posts on ideas it has sparked in me.

Here’s the first one.

The thing I wanted to talk about today was how similar Chen style (as described in this book) is to Yang style. I think a Yang stylist would get almost as much out of this book as a Chen stylist. While the content and methods described in the book all clearly derive from Chen style, as do the illustrations, I’d say 90% (or more) of what’s described here is exactly the same as Yang style.

So what’s different? Bits and bobs on silk reeling, some stepping methods and stance details and the bits on fajin. But even then, they’re not something alien to a Yang stylist, and would be easily within reach of anybody who wanted to take their practice in that direction.

What’s the same? The emphasis on posture is really good here – how to round the back, contain the chest, round the kua, the eight energies, the 5 steps, push hands strategy and training methods, quotes from the classics, being centred and upright, rooting, the dantien, martial applications, etc.

What was I surprised not to find more of? Opening and closing using the 5 bows, and empty and solid. Perhaps more on using the force from the ground… There are mentions of these things throughout, but the book never really goes deeply into them. Perhaps it was too complex for the illustrated book-based approach? There’s only so much you can fit in one book, and there’s plenty of content here.

However, the emphasis on the body requirements of Tai Chi, and explanation of why these things are done, is excellent and transfers effortlessly across Tai Chi styles. It’s reminded me a lot how similar Yang style and Chen style are ‘under the hood’, so to speak. I wrote a post recently where I talked about them being similar but different. I still kind of think that. My view is that at some point Chen style incorporated the ideas contained in “Taijiquan” wholesale from Yang Luchan’s lucrative teaching business in Beijing into its larger, pre-existing, village style (which was more militia fighting and weapons-based) – it absorbed it whole – a bit like a whale swallowing a smaller fish. It was easy because all Chinese styles are similar to some extent. But of course, this means that the Yang style is still there inside Chen, and it’s impossible not to see how ‘almost the same’ they are when reading this book. (I think the spiraling and silk reeling stuff was from the pre-existing Chen style). Your opinion may be different. Food for thought!

New book alert! Chen Taijiquan Illustrated

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Thanks to Ken Gullette at Internal Fighting Arts I just caught wind of this new book that’s just come out called Chen Taijiquan Illustrated. I had a quick look on Amazon using the “Look Inside” feature and the illustrations look fantastic. It looks like it’s designed to be halfway between an instruction manual and a comic. It’s a very cool style that’s quite unlike any Tai Chi book I’ve seen before.

Chen Taijiquan Illustrated – available now!

I think that often Tai Chi books, with pages after pages of printed text, can be a bit off putting for people who are learning an art that is all about feel, movement and “doing it”, not “reading about it”. And when they do have photographs in them they are often black and white and a bit dull and lifeless. So, for the visual learners out there, I think the colourful and imaginative approach found in Chen Taijiquan Illustrated will work very well.

Here’s an example:

An extract from Chen Taijiquan Illustrated by David Gaffney and Davidine Siaw-Voon Sim

Here’s another thing: Looking at the contents page, this is the first Tai Chi book I’ve seen that mentions the concept of Man, which translates as Slowness, apart from the book written by my Tai Chi teacher. Man is a concept my teacher talks about a lot, and it’s nice to see it mentioned in another Tai Chi book – I was starting to think that it was a concept that was unknown to the rest of the Tai Chi world!

Tai Chi Chuan a comprehensive training manual by Raymond Rand

Obviously everybody and their dog knows that Tai Chi is done slowly, but Man is more of a mental quality than a reference to the speed of the form. It can be thought of as “not rushing”. The speed you are moving at is irrelevant to the concept of Man, but if you want to acquire the ability of Man then the best way is by slowing the form down and focusing on keeping your mind on what you are doing. Whenever you find your mind wandering off you just stop the form (no matter how far through it you are) and start again. After a few weeks or months you’ll find you are much better at staying focused on your form than you were before. By adopting the qualities of “not rushing” you open up the headspace required to be aware of other things going on, things that you would simply miss otherwise. I’ve written about not rushing before.

At £16 Chen Taijiquan Illustrated is not particularly expensive for a colour book either. And I’d love it if there was a book on Brazilian Jiutjisu that was written and illustrated in the same manner because I think it would also benefit from this approach. Incidentally, there was a good book written about Brazilian Jiujitsu recently, that has colour photos (and very nice ones too) that I still dip into now and again called Nonstop Jiujitsu, by Stephan Kesting and Brandon Mullins. I reviewed it on my blog recently, so check out my review.

Nonstop Jiujitsu by Brandon Mullins and Stephan Kesting

I’ve ordered my copy of Chen Taijiquan Illustrated so will review it at some point in the future.