tai chi

Yang Lu Chan’s old house and Tai Chi in Yongnian

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The Wu Yu Xiang style Tai Chi

I found this video recently of an old gentleman called Mr Han practicing his Tai Chi form in the courtyard in front of the old house of Yang Lu Chan (the founder of the Yang style, pictured top left) in Yongnian County, Hebei province.

The video says he’s practicing Wu Yu Xiang’s (1818-1880, pictured top right) varient of Tai Chi, but I don’t find his performance particularly typical of that style as it is usually presented with much smaller stances than he’s using. It’s possible of course that this is what an ‘older’ version of the style looked like. It’s more similar to what we know as Yang style today.

The Wikipedia take on Wu Yu Xiang was that he was a “scholar from a wealthy and influential family who became a senior student (along with his two older brothers Wu Chengqing 武澄清 and Wu Ruqing 武汝清) of Yang Luchan. Wu also studied for a brief time with a teacher from the Chen family, Chen Qingping, to whom he was introduced by Yang.”, which I think is accurate.

It’s interesting that he learned from Yang LuChan, but also went back to try and find the teacher that Yang learned from, presumably, to find out details he was missing, or simply out of curiosity. It turned out that Chen Changxing (Yang’s teacher) said he was too sick to teach and instead referred Wu to Chen Qingping who was living in Zhaobao (赵堡) village, just down the road. He studied with him for a few months. The whole thing does sound a bit like a brush off to me.

Also, I think we can assume that Wu financially supported the teachers he learned from, since he was wealthy. Here we can see the birth of the Ching Dynasty idea that a martial artist could earn a living purely from teaching these arts.

Wu, and his brothers, allegedly found the documents we now call the Tai Chi Classics in a salt cellar, however, I’d say it’s much more likely that they are the authors of these documents (which are really just a collection of old martial arts sayings), given that they were wealthy scholars. Especially since they definitely did author some other writings on Tai Chi themselves.

Wu taught his nephew Li Yi-Yu, who in turn taught Hao Weizhen (郝為真; 1842–1920) who was the person who made the style popular, so it is often called Hao Style.

The video above is the sort of Tai Chi form I associate with Wu Yu Xiang’s style today, but if we go back to the video taken outside Yang’s house in Yongnian, the Tai Chi starts at 54 seconds. If you notice Mr Han’s performance looks a lot more like Yang style.

If anything I think this just shows that the further you go away from the source of something, the more it inevitably changes. Tiny little changes, amplified by time, end up with big differences in the end results.

 

Sinking in Taijiquan

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black and white waves close up view circle

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I generally try to avoid telling people to “sink” in Tai Chi for the simple reason that they usually try to physically lower themselves in the postures, inevitably resulting in using too much force and sticking out their butt, or putting their knees at an odd angle.

Sure, you do need to have a lower-than-normal-standing posture, so you can relax the lower back and centre the coccyx, but when people start to get uncomfortably low (usually combined with too much tucking of the hips) that’s when things break down.

I was doing some push hands recently, and I was trying to work on the idea of reacting to being pressured with a push with the action of sinking as your initial response rather than by trying to do something with their push.

Taoist non-action

By sinking I mean internally sinking – letting go of tension and letting it all drop, rather than by physically lowering yourself. In a way – it’s a kind of non-action. You’re taking something away rather than adding it to the situation. If you can do that then the tension that is created between you and your partner – the pressure – when they start to get too close with their push just dissipates, and the right action arises spontaneously by itself. It’s easy to redirect them because you have ‘got underneath them’.

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Sun Lu Tang

It’s a difficult concept to grasp. It reminds me a lot of reading the Tao Te Ching, the Taoist classic of the way and its power. The Tao Te Ching constantly advises us to take the path of no resistance, which initially seems like a passive response to a situation, but when done skillfully, is anything but.

By taking ‘you’ out of the conflict, it can often resolve itself, and usually in your favour.

“Therefore the Master
Acts without doing anything
And teaches without saying anything.
Things arise and she lets them come;
Things disappear and she lets them go.
She has but doesn’t possess,
Acts but doesn’t expect.
When her work is done, she forgets it.
That is why it lasts forever.”

 

Related stories on this blog:

Is Taijiquan Taoist?

Wu Wei – the art of doing without doing

Don’t push the river, listen to it instead

Chen Ziming’s “The inherited Chen family Taiji Boxing art”.

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Paul Brennan has added a new selection of translations to the martial arts manuals contained on his website. This one is Chen Ziming’s “The inherited Chen family Taiji boxing art”.

Sample quote:

My colleague Chen Ziming is a native of the Chen Family Village in Henan and an expert of the Taiji boxing art. After many years of painstaking effort, he has written The Inherited Chen Family Taiji Boxing Art. A month ago, he begged me to proofread it and also to produce a preface. I read it carefully over the course of two weeks and could not help but slap the table in amazement. The Taiji boxing art is truly a means of connecting to the Way, which cannot be said about most other boxing arts. But unless you achieve a high level, you will not be capable of discussing its essentials.
This art as it is taught in modern times can be divided into about three styles: [1 – Chen] Chen Style Taiji is in a direct line of descent from the Chen family in Henan. [2 – Hao] Hao Weizhen taught Sun Lutang what is called “Open & Close Taiji”, but Hao Style was obtained from Wu Yuxiang, who had learned Chen Style. [3 – Yang] The Taiji that Yang Luchan studied was likewise taught to him by a member of the Chen family, Chen Changxing, and then Luchan taught it to his own sons, Banhou and Jianhou, and to this day his version is in fashion everywhere. All three of these versions actually originated from Chen Style. They have each evolved and been improved, and so they each have their differences.

Link.

One stroke of the brush

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Photo by Niketh Vellanki on Unsplash

It says in the Tai Chi classics that the movements of Tai Chi should be continuous, like a rolling river:

“Chang Ch’uan [Long Boxing] is like a great river rolling on unceasingly.”

There are a few interesting things to unpack about this quote, taken from the Tai Chi Classic attributed to Chang San Feng. Firstly, it doesn’t call the martial art “Tai Chi Chuan”, instead it calls it “Long Boxing”, which is yet another indicator that what is known as the “Tai Chi Classics” are in fact, just a collection of common sayings about martial arts of the time that have been bundled together.¹ I tend to regard what we know as “Tai Chi Chuan” today, in all its various forms, as the modern expression and amalgamation of older Chinese martial arts; it is an evolution of ideas and techniques, rather than a ‘new’ martial art which was invented in a moment of divine inspiration by somebody having a dream about a Crane fighting a Snake, which is one of its apocryphal origins myths.

Secondly, the image of water harks back to ideas of Taoism, which uses water imagery frequently in its depictions of worldly affairs. The imagery of a river is a good one. And the implication is clear: no stopping. Continual movement.

Quite often people who think they are doing a Tai Chi form continuously are not. They’re putting in little stops at the end of movements. My teacher called this “posturing”. A good performance of a Tai Chi form will smooth out all these end points so that the form becomes like a single stroke of a calligrapher’s brush on a canvas.

When approached this way, the Tai Chi form stops being composed of numbered moves which are separate elements. As human beings we’re so ingrained in this type of thinking that we even classify Tai Chi forms with numbers on the end. E.g. the “The Tai Chi 24-step form, the Chen style 48 form, the Yang style 108-posture form, etc..” with the number indicating how many different postures there are in the form. When you do the form as ‘one stroke of the brush’ then the whole form becomes one move from beginning to end. Sure, you move from close to open to close to open, and so on, continuously within the movement, but there is still only one movement.

But why? Well, in terms of aesthetic value, it’s definitely more pleasing to the eye to see somebody who moves like this, but that’s not the only reason. In terms of martial technique, the ability to flow smoothly between techniques is key to being able to respond adaptively to whatever the opponent is doing. If you’ve never put the time into practicing movements smoothly you can’t expect to just pull that skill out of the bag when required.

Another reason is that it’s much easier to learn to coordinate your arms and legs if you can move at a constant rate. It gives you the mental space you need to slow down (which is a whole principle in itself) and become more aware of the movements you’re doing, rather than rushing through them, which creates mental blank spots you may miss.

You need to approach continuity as a task that is going to take you a while to complete. As you do the form become aware of where you’re losing awareness and continuity. Has a hand stopped moving here? An arm become immobile there? Did you pause for a fraction after completing Brush Knee Twist Step? (Here’s a hint, you probably did).

If you make continuity the focus of a complete run through of the form then over weeks and months you can get to the stage where your movement becomes very smooth and even. Now you’re ready to look for a deeper meaning. Consider the aforementioned river – it moves continuously, in that it never stops, but different parts of it move at different rates. Where the river narrows rapids form, where it flattens out the pace is more genteel. The form is like this too. There are faster bits and slower bits – quite obviously in Chen style, but also in the even-paced Yang styles. Let the movements guide you – they’ll tell you where you should naturally ‘go with the flow’. Now your techniques will start to become more realistic and you’ll be able to appreciate the type of movement required to make them work.

As Bruce Lee said. “Be like water, my friend”.

¹. See Douglass Wile’s Lost Tai Chi Classics from the late Ching Dynasty

 

Q&A with Michael Babin

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michael

I’ve known Michael Babin (online) for a number of years, and always enjoyed his insights into online discussion forum arguments and martial arts in general. Michael lives in Canada and may, or may not, be a retired Tai Chi teacher. Do we ever retire? Now David Roth-Lindberg, another online friend, has done a Q&A with him and published it on his blog, Thoughts on Tai Chi.

It’s worth a read as Michael has quite a few insights into the world of being a Tai Chi teacher and his dry sense of humour always amuses me.

Q&A with Michael Babin

Michael’s blog

Thoughts on Tai Chi

Tai Chi beneath the surface

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As we approach the holiday season, stress starts to enter the body and mind, family dramas intensify and it’s easy to forget the simple things in life. That’s where Tai Chi can help.

The question of what use Tai Chi or martial arts are to modern life comes up frequently. Unless you’re in a job that requires frequent encounters with violence most of us will live our whole life with minimal exposure to violence.

So what else can martial arts offer? This short film by Pamela Hiley shows some of the meditative sides to life that Tai Chi can reveal, where questions resolve to silence and are answered by nature.

“True to Life’ is a cinematic essay portraying the spiritual ideas of Pamela Hiley, a Welsh born Taiji master living in Norway. This is an exploration of Taoist philosophy, seen through her eyes, with very little factual information apart from ideas on the transcendent mind: breathing, balance, defence, neutralisation of conflict and moving beyond polarity. We follow Pamela on a trip to China where she meets with masters and students of these ancient arts – they love and share a deep respect for the mysteries of their common practice. But this film is not about a journey in the physical world, but rather trip into the the inner landscape of the mind.”

 

A new take on an old challenge video…

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For a while now (10 years in fact!) there’s been a video on YouTube purporting to show a push hands challenge match that went down between Chen Xiao Wang, the recognised head of Chen style Taijiquan, and a XingYi practitioner from Taiwan called Liao Bai.

The challenge is often cited as a rare example of an uncoperative push hands exchange featuring Chen Xiao Wang, and one in which he doesn’t come off looking as proficient as he normally does. While nothing of substance happens at all in the clip, the fact that Liao Bai is able to launch a couple of strong attacks through Chen Xiao Wang’s defences, and occasionally make Chen move a foot is seen as some sort of a victory for him.

Firstly, I find the idea that this is some sort of victory slightly bizarre to begin with – I mean, he made him move his foot? Really? Is that it?

Secondly, the explanation that accompanies the YouTube video is written by only one side of the two parties involved, and heavily partisan. The clip is described as a “freestyle push hands”. However, it may turn out that what we’re seeing is nothing of the sort.

Mike Sigman posted recently:

Liao came to a workshop of CXW’s and bragged that no one can take his Tiger Fist releases. The video pretty much starts where CXW calls him on it and says, “OK, you do it”. Liao attempts a number of times to release his Tiger Fist (you can see it is the same release every time) and CXW attempts to absorb and instantaneously release back into Liao Bai, by CXW’s use of Receiving Jin. A lot of people embarrassed themselves and their reputations by publicly posting this video and saying it was “push hands”: it wasn’t even close … it was an example of CXW trying to use Receiving Jin in an open, unrehearsed setting, thus making it a good video to study.

OK, Mike is clearly a paid-up member of Team Chen Style :), but even so, I find his explanation persuasive. What they’re doing in the clip is clearly not push hands in any way, shape or form.  There’s just some awkward feeling out – a touching of the arms, then Liao Bai tries to launch attacks, while CXW tries to absorb them, without attacking back. Chen is clearly not even trying to attack back. If his only aim was to show he could absorb the attacks (using Receiving Jin), then this makes sense. And for the most part he succeeds.

Either way, it’s rare to find a clip of Chen Xiao Wang that’s not cooperative, so it’s instructive. Most of the time Chen succeeds, but not always. That’s what ‘real’ looks like. It’s not going to sell seminars or generate income, and it comes with risks to both health and reputation so I can see why he does so little of it, but you know it when you see it.

I created this blog post to counteract the popular narrative that surrounds this video. If we’re going to get to the bottom of it then it’s important to hear from both sides, and so far the idea that it’s a push hands challenge has gone pretty much uncontested.

It might be time to view it again, with fresh eyes.

 

Bad news people – Qi is not mystical

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woman holding eye and concentrating

Magic? Or something else…

I read this in a blog post today:

“I remember one time when a student was showing a qigong posture she was taught from another teacher and spoke about how qi circulated through it. He adjusted her posture slightly and said “now you have qi circulation”. “

From here. 

When you read something like this I think it reinforces the incorrect idea that Qi is some type of etheric, mystical energy that rises in our bodies like steam and can be directed by the mind… (in fact, that’s what the article goes on to talk about)

Well, frankly, it isn’t. At least in the context of martial arts, it isn’t. Acupuncturists probably have a different opinion on that, but I’m not talking about acupuncture.

But at the same time, if you know what is meant by “Qi” (through your practical understanding) then that original sentence I quoted above does make sense. Let me explain.

You’ve got to remember that when a Chinese teacher talks about Qi in terms of martial arts, what they are talking about is related to your physical structure. The stuff that makes you up. Skin, bones, tissue, muscles, etc…

If you have “strong Qi” then it means you are physically strong. So, for example, a strong athletic young guy or gal would be described as somebody with “strong chi”. Usually, the posture is good, the eyes bright, the hair shiny, etc… These are all aspects of “strong Qi”.

A weak slumped, tired, or sick-looking person would be described as having “weak Qi”.

man old depressed headache

You, my friend, have “weak Qi”.

So, an old person could have either “strong chi” or “weak chi” depending on how they presented themselves. If you’re bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, you’re doing well. Your Qi is strong.

close up photo of blue peacock

Strong Qi, or BDE as the Yooth say today…

In Tai Chi your Qi refers to your physical structure in a movement, as well as a special type of conditioning of the body’s structures that takes place through exercises like Standing Post and Silk Reeling. Through these exercises, you can strengthen the felt connection from your fingers to your toes – a kind of all-over body suit. It’s the strengthening of this ‘body suit’ that explains the circus-style feats of strength you see martial arts groups demonstrating. Things like throwing a needle through glass, bending a spear on your neck, being resistant to blades and breaking rocks with your hands.

 

I would not suggest trying these things at home! Sure, there are often ways to fake feats like the ones above, but there are also ways to do it correctly, utilising the conditioning of the body’s Qi.

Martial arts techniques in Tai Chi require two things – Qi and Jin. Here we’re only talking about Qi. I’ve talked about Jin before.

Qi (Chi) relates to structure. So, if you adopt a Tai Chi posture that’s relaxed, sunk, stable and strong (i.e. your structure is good), then you are “using your Qi well”. And it could be said the “Qi is circulating well”. (Actually, nothing is circulating in the sense of water in a pipe). If your structure is off in some way then it could be said that your “chi is not circulating well”.

So, if we read that quote again, with the new knowledge that it is to do with posture and structure:

“He adjusted her posture slightly and said, “now you have qi circulation”. 

Could equally be written:

“He adjusted her posture slightly and said, “now you have better structure”.

So, to me that means, he corrected some defect in her posture (say an overly tense lower back, or tense shoulders, for example), so that her “Qi” started to circulate – i.e. the posture regained its natural strength.

Sorry guys, but none of this has anything to do with steam or heat or a mystical energy in the body. But it’s so easy to assume that this is what is meant when you read quotes like the one above.

Especially once you add to that the fact that people can feel pretty much anything they can imagine. 

 

Trust me, I’m a Doctor

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The most recent episode of Trust Me, I’m a Doctor featured Tai Chi!

“Michael Mosley finds out whether t’ai chi can offer the same health benefits as vigorous exercise – without all the huffing and puffing. ”

They compare the same time spent doing Tai Chi to the time spent doing Zumba, which is far more vigorous. Is he really “doing Tai Chi”? Well, that’s up for debate, but the results are surprising.

If you get iPlayer then you can watch it at the link below:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b0bnbjlc/trust-me-im-a-doctor-series-8-episode-6

 

Natural structures in Tai Chi

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I spent my lunch hour practicing Tai Chi with the leaves falling around me, which made me realise that Autumn is definitely here. Practicing under the trees also made me think about the strong parallel between the postures of Tai Chi and the structures of nature.

Take trees for example – the branches grow upwards and outwards:

alone autumn branch cold

Photo by Pixabay on Pexels.com

If you look at the postures of a Tai Chi form you can see the same ‘outwards and upwards’ structures:

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Animals have the same quality too. The horns on a deer are a good example:

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Photo by Pixabay on Pexels.com

But the alert, ready posture of most animals (when they’re not sleeping) also mirrors this:

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Photo by Pixabay on Pexels.com

The spine is always extended, the eyes engaged and the posture directed upwards and outwards.

The following is a Yang Tai Chi form video. Notice that his body structure is always opening outwards and upwards:

So why do we do this in Tai Chi? Well, natural structures are inherently strong structures. Nature has been working on trees, plants and animals for millions of years, and they have evolved into strong shapes that can take a battering from the elements and survive. In terms of postural considerations of Tai Chi we are aiming to mimic natural structures to take advantage of their inherent strength. For example, with the arms, the elbow is usually kept below the wrist in Tai Chi, when the hand is going up and outwards, this enables your arm to create the same sort of shape as a tree branch that grows outwards and upwards.

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If you collapse the structure of your arms – say, close your joints like the elbows and shoulders too much, you don’t get this effect of mimicking natural structures. Instead, the structure needs to be supported by more muscle usage if it is going to withstand pressure.

Think also of stretching the ‘body suit’ of skin, fascia, tendons. If you bend the joints too sharply you lose the stretch from feet to toes. If you look at a picture of a fower, plant or tree, it looks kind of ‘stretched out’, doesn’t it?

selective focus photo of cherry blossom

Photo by Tim Gouw on Pexels.com

There’s a lot to learn from nature.