Here’s the second episode of my Tai Chi course on mindful Tai Chi movements. This week we take a look at where you power you movements from in the body. Enjoy!
My FREE 8-week Tai Chi Notebook course has launched!
Good news! I’ve started filming a short 8-week Tai Chi Notebook course, and you can get it here, for free.
As usual things come together by chance (or maybe a it’s fate) but either way, a friend asked me to show them how to do “this internal stuff“, so I was about to shoot them a simple video on the basics, then I realised that there’s too much to cover in just one video, so I planned out 8. Then I started to get creative and made it look a little bit professional, and the end result is what you’ve got here – a short YouTube course called Pulling earth, pushing heaven.
In week 1 of the course we cover the concept of “maintain and extend”. Each week will focus on a different aspect until we get to the point where you’ve got the basic idea of “Tai Chi movement”. Of course, this is just ‘foot in the door’ stuff, but I’d like to think that after following along for 8 weeks, and doing it every day, you’d at least have the correct foot inside the correct door. Look out for part 2 next week.
The most perfect BJJ match ever?
In terms of the matra of: takedown, pass guard, submit, Jeff Lawson’s performance at Polaris 6 is possibly the most perfect BJJ match ever. Completely flawless and so quick! We were drilling this exact Seoi Nage (shoulder throw) this week. Great to see it used exactly as we drilled it in competition against a resisting opponent.
Forrest Chang’s “Stupid Jin Tricks” video
This is a great video from Forrest Chang showing what Jin is in Chinese Martial Arts and how it can be used.
As he explains in the video, he calls these “stupid jin tricks” because they’re the sort of thing a teacher would look at you like you’re stupid if you asked him to do them. Somebody trained in internal martial arts should just be able to do these.
There is another thing that’s worth pointing out that he doesn’t explicitly state, but which should be obvious – there’s one jin.
All the early books on Tai Chi that came out in the 80s started listing all these different Jins, and I think that’s lead to a lot of misunderstanding that they are all separate things – when in reality there is one Jin in Chinese martial arts, and lots of ways of using it.
Once you’ve got a handle on what he’s doing it’s worth watching videos of famous teachers of Chinese Martial Arts and trying to analyse what they’re doing from a Jin perspective. I find their own explanations are often not very clear, so it’s better just to watch what they’re actually doing:
Chu Shong Tun (Wing Chun)
Sam Chin (Zhong Xu I LIq Chuan)
Adam Mizner (Tai Chi)
Henan Village Chang family Xiao Luohan
I was reading through this excellent interview with Matthew Polly, author of American Shaolin, (a book which has somehow has escaped my bookshelf – a situation I should rectify promptly), when I came across this video of a man performing Chang family Xiao Luohan in a rural village in Henan.
It’s a great little video for a number of reasons. The first is that this is something old and precious that is in danger of dying out as people lose interest in WuShu in modern life. The second is the authenticity of the presentation – it really does look like a rural villiage where he has lived all his life. The third is – it’s a really good performance!
These are the sorts of “old school” martial arts skills that are in danger of dying out in China. To quote from the Matthew Polly interview above:
“As I mentioned in American Shaolin, the idea of chī kǔ (吃苦 ), eating bitterness, is central to the Chinese understanding of learning martial arts, and the value of suffering. And the way in which that contrasts with the western idea of trying to avoid pain in any way. We have an entire society built around the idea of alleviation of pain. We have an opioid crisis because we’re trying to avoid all sorts of pain. I admire progress and evolution in the way mixed martial artists do, but I have a nostalgia and sentimentality for tradition and the way that old man practised the same form for 60 years. There’s something beautiful about that and a sadness in seeing that wiped away as MMA goes like a bulldozer through the traditional kung fu and karate world.”
Chang family boxing is one of the precursors to Taijiquan, at least in terms of martial arts theory, although there are several similar postures to Chen Taijiquan found in its boxing sets, so the connection may be more literal than just in terms of theory.
I think research into Chang family boxing would reveal more about the origins of Taijiquan than wondering if it was Taoist. Luckily this research has already been done by Marnix Wells in his book ‘Scholar Boxer: Cháng Nâizhou’s Theory of Internal Martial Arts and the Evolution of Taijiquan‘. Again, another shocking omission from my bookshelf, but by all accounts, this is a very deep piece of research. According to Jess O’Brian (author of Nei Jia Quan: Internal Martial Arts) – “For those interested in the theory, history and practice of the internal martial arts, this book is going to blow your mind.”
Is Taijiquan Taoist?
I wrote a blog post the other day in which I mentioned that the Taoist origins of Tai Chi are historically unproven, yet the similarity in ideas is obviously there.
I got an interesting comment back on Facebook from somebody linking to a book I wasn’t aware of:
“Roel Jansen: Your information on the origins of Tai Chi is outdated. Please read ‘Tai Chi – the true history & principles’ by Lars Bo Christiansen to get up to date with the latest findings on the daoist origins of Tai Chi.”
So I looked the book up and it exists – it’s on Amazon.
You can read a lot of the book on Amazon’s “look inside” feature. It’s about the newly found Li family manuscripts from which the author draws some pretty wild conclusions, one of which is that the Taoist link to Tai Chi has now been proved beyond doubt.
The book author has a website too, which contains his main arguments in the QnA:
I thought something seemed a bit ‘off’ with the whole thing, so I looked around and found the eminent Douglas Wile, who wrote two books on the Tai Chi Classics that are very good, and that classic essay on Chan Sang Feng, had written a massive article on these Li manuscripts, (and Lars’ book) which is here:
https://mas.cardiffuniversitypress.org/ … /download/
It’s a mammoth read, but looks at the whole thing from a more balanced perspective, including all the political leanings.
The TL;DR version is: It’s complicated. The verdict is still out 
Here’s a pertinent quote:
The question of whether taijiquan is the product of Daoism creating a martial art or a martial art absorbing Daoism is a critical issue in Chinese martial arts historiography. If anything, Daoism is an even more slippery term than taijiquan itself, but the issue has become highly politicized, which is understandable in the context of Chinese history and culture. However, for a Western scholar to stumble into this minefield bespeaks a certain naiveté. The assertion of Daoist origins has become associated with cultural nationalism and the search for Chinese identity, often called ‘Chineseness’. Chinese scholars have built entire careers out of championing either Zhang Sanfeng or Chen Wangting, but it is very unseemly for Western scholars to insert themselves in this politicized process of roots-seeking and competing attempts to identify origin, creator, or birthplace as ‘transient points of stabilization’
[Laclau 2000: 53].
I think there are other questions that need to be asked about the whole question of “Is Tai Chi Taoist?”
For instance how many of the concepts we associate with Taoism, like the Tai Chi symbol, the I-Ching, Wu Xing and Bagua are actually Taoist in origin? Chinese Folk Religion, is actually the largest religion in China, and makes use of many things that we in the West think are “Taoist”.
As HotSoup on the RSF forum posted recently:
“There is an opinion that asking a CIMA practitioner from the beginning of the nineteenth century whether his art was “Buddhist” or “Taoist” would make as much sense, as asking a medieval fence teacher whether his fencing was “Catholic” or, say, “Juwish”.
White belt vs Black belt in BJJ
We had BJJ world champion Victor Estima at our BJJ school recently for a seminar. There was a guy there who I think is trying to make a life for himself as a YouTube Vlogger (although he only appears to have 1 video on YouTube!)
Anyway, he made this video about the event and it’s very funny because he challenges Victor to a match. He’s just a white belt. Hilarity ensues…
Cobra Kai – No mercy!
You can watch the first two episodes of Cobra Kai online for free. It’s awesome!
Byron Jacobs: incovenient truths in “Da Dao Taiji” documentary
My Facebook friend Byron Jacobs is the Technical & Events Manager and Technical Committee Member at International Wushu Federation in China. That’s a pretty high up in Chinese Martial Arts for a guy from South Africa 🙂
This is a YouTube video about him:
As you can see from the video, he’s fluent in Chinese and lives in China. He trains Xingyiquan under his Sifu, Di Guoyong.
Recently Byron appeared in an episode of the Chinese TV documentary “Da Dao Taiji” in which he was interviewed about traditional Chinese martial arts, its utility in the modern age and the problems it is facing both in the mentality of practitioners and their methods today. I don’t think they were quite expecting such a frank interview!
Unsurprisingly, it was edited quite heavily, and they only kept some of these “inconvenient truths” in the documentary.
The good news is that here on Tai Chi Notebook you can view his whole interview, complete with subtitles. It may have been too hot for Chinese TV, but nothing is too hot for you, my dear readers!
(As an interesting sidenote, the new laws in China were passed last year prohibiting people with tattoos from being shown on TV, so they had to smudge out his tattoo for the aired version of this!)
Enjoy the inconvenient truths video:
And here is the entire episode 2, as it appeared on Chinese TV:
Wu Wei – the art of doing without doing
The connections between Tai Chi and Taoism are at once obvious (the Tai Chi symbol is used extensively in Taoism) and also sketchy at best (there is no historical lineage connection).
You see a lot of Taoist priests (or at least Chinese people wearing Taoist priest robes) on Wudang mountain, which has traditionally been associated with Taoism, teaching people Tai Chi, Xing Yi and Bagua (the internal arts) in the lineage of Chang San Feng, the mythical Taoist who is traditionally associated with the origins of Tai Chi Chuan, but whose historical existence seems difficult to prove.
However, how long these modern days Taoists have been there teaching people martial arts I’m not sure. The fact that their ‘ancient’ martial arts look remarkably similar to the modern “wu shu” versions created in Beijing makes them seem highly suspect to me…
But while a direct connection between Taoism and Tai Chi may be difficult to prove, they clearly employ the similar ideas. Take for instance the idea of Wu Wei – the ever elusive “doing without doing” of Taoism.
If you take a look at the Tai Chi Classics you see that while they don’t mention the phrase “Wu Wei” itself the strategy of the art described fits it like a glove. Take the following quotes from the Treatise on Tai Chi Chuan:
It is not excessive or deficient;
it follows a bending, adheres to an extension.When the opponent is hard and I am soft,
it is called tsou [yielding].When I follow the opponent and he becomes backed up,
it is called nian [sticking].If the opponent’s movement is quick,
then quickly respond;
if his movement is slow,
then follow slowly.
It seems Taoism is having something of a resurgence, as this article reveals, as a philosophy for dealing with the anxiety-inducing modern world. Even the rock star intellectual de jour, Jordan Peterson, is getting in on the act.
From Alan Watts back in the ’60s to Jordan Peterson in the modern age, the Western intellectual has had a recurring fascination with Taoist thought. Particularly with the concepts of Wu Wei and the Tao Te Ching. In fact, the book that first got me interested in Tai Chi years ago was The Tao of Pooh by Benjamin Hoff.
I think all this interest in Taoism again is generally a good thing. Let’s see where it leads.
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