tai chi

Simon Cox on Zhang Sanfeng and the history of Tai Chi Chuan

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The article On the Historical Mystery of Zhang Sanfeng by Simon Cox, on the history of Tai Chi Chuan and its connection to Zhang Sanfeng is great. I’ll just quote a couple of paragraphs from near the end, but recommend you read the whole thing for context:

It seems like Tai Chi was really a Republican era (1912-1949) category that became a sort of umbrella term for various Chinese martial arts that are practiced slowly, containing such multitudes as the ancient martial arts of Chen village, the later arts of the Yang family, and the weird things people were doing at Wudang, in Zhaobao village, and even the government-created variations on these styles.  From this view, asking which style started it all is rather meaningless.  The historical connections simply aren’t there.  From the densest of historical positions, there is no evidence anyone practiced anything called Tai Chi Fist before the 20th century. It arises as a high prestige category in the context of post-Qing Chinese nationalism. Every slow-ish martial art in China seems to have been automatically re-branded as a form of Tai Chi.

According to the Yang Family oral tradition, Yang Luchan 杨露禅 (1799-1872), the founder of the style, called his art variously Cotton Fist 綿拳 or Transforming Fist 化拳, and it was only during his time in Beijing that a Confucian scholar Weng Tonghe 翁同龢 (1830-1904) witnessed him demonstrating his style and wrote a poem about how it embodied the principles of Tai Chi.  According to this oral tradition it was after this event that the art came to be known as Tai Chi Fist.  This story was first published in the 1930’s and is almost certainly apocryphal.  But even if we take it at face value, we arrive at the inevitable conclusion that Tai Chi Fist was an appellation applied first to Yang family martial arts and then later, during the first decades of the 20th century, expanded to include Wudang and Chen styles.

Simon Cox – On the Historical Mystery of Zhang Sanfeng

Chen Man Ching’s Tai Chi Method

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I don’t feel I’ve written enough about body mechanics recently. I’ve been too busy enjoying myself reviewing books and interviewing people for podcasts, but I guess it’s time I stopped having fun and got back to being serious!

Watching a video of Professor Cheng Man Ching for my recent book review of Yang Short Form, I was struck by how little the Professor used his arms in his Tai Chi form. Take a look:

Sometimes it looks almost like he just gives up as his arms go limp! (Like at 1.20 in the video). This is one of the big criticisms I hear of the Cheng Man Ching form – that it’s a bit limp – but if you look at what his legs are doing it’s a bit like watching a swan on the water – you can’t see anything moving above the water, but beneath it there is a lot going on.

There are plenty of people in the Tai Chi world who disparage Professor Cheng Man Ching and his abilities. They claim that it was really his high level political connections in the exiled Nationalist government in Taiwan that made people praise his Tai Chi, not his actual abilities in the art. However, I think his impact on the Tai Chi world has been undeniably huge, and he attracted a lot of students, many of whom came from other martial arts and were experienced in those arts. I don’t think that would have been possible without some real ability being offered. From watching videos of his form and push hands, his deep rooting in his legs and ability to transfer the ground force into his opponents looks impressive to me. While there is no evidence of him transferring this ability into an actual martial art, he did appear to actually engage people in playful push hands on a regular basis, something a lot of Tai Chi teachers don’t do.

Cheng Man Ching was heard to say that he once had a dream where he had no arms and it was only after that that he felt he understood Tai Chi. That’s what his method looks like to me – the arms don’t matter. He’s sunk very low in his legs all the time, channeling the ground force upwards into his torso, and the arms are almost an afterthought, held up with as little energy as possible. 

Personally, I can’t say I’m a fan of this method. To me it seems logical that in Tai Chi your body needs to have the sense of being stretched slightly from fingertips to toes at all times. I don’t mean stretched in a Yoga-like way, I mean that the skin needs to feel stretched over the bones and muscles, as if you’re made of rubber. Take a look at a picture from history of Wu Chien Chuan, of Wu style or Yang Cheng Fu of Yang style and I think you can see what I mean.

That way it’s like a guitar string being tightened so that it makes a sound when plucked in the middle. A lax string can’t be played. In Tai Chi that ‘middle’ is your dantien. If you’ve got a slight stretch on your body, from fingers to toes, then you can control movement along the length of this stretch using your dantien, so a movement of the dantien will naturally affect a movement of the extremities, if you let it.

The classics use the analogy of a bow, the most famous line being “Store up the jin like drawing a bow.”

Anybody can feel this stretch by adopting a Tai Chi posture and relaxing and trying to create an expansive feeling, but it gets stronger over time and with repeated practice. A lot of the chi kung exercises that come along with Tai Chi are designed to help you feel this stretch from fingers to toes, and help to make the connection stronger and more usable over time.

Chen Man Ching’s idea of Tai Chi seems different to me. It’s more like he’s got no arms and the jin is stopping in his shoulders, not reaching his hands. At least that’s how it appears to me.

REVIEW: Yang Short form: A beginners guide to Taiji Chuan by Leo Ming and Caroline Addenbrooke

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Yang Short Form: A beginners guide to Taiji Chuan, is a beautifully made, hardback coffee-table Tai Chi book, containing a brief section on history and principles of the art, over 200 colour photos mainly for showing you the form, a few verses from the Tao Te Ching to act as inspirational quotes and more.

There’s no denying that at an RRP of £49, it’s expensive. For people wondering why this book costs that much on Amazon (although you could pick it up for 18% less at time of writing), the high production values and hard cover explain the price. Printing in colour is expensive these days.

Sifu Leo Ming is the teacher who appears in the photos, and his student Caroline Addenbrooke is the author.

The main point of the book is to teach you the Cheng Man Ching short form, and if you view the book through the lens of ‘Can I learn a Tai Chi from this book?‘, it succeeds, I just have a few issues with some of the information presented here.

Consider the title

My problems start with the title, “Yang Short Form: A beginners guide to Taiji Chuan“. The Tai Chi form presented in this book is the Cheng Man Ching short form, which is certainly a Yang short form, but it’s a bit of a stretch to call it the Yang short form. People generally call it the Cheng Man Ching Short Form or the Chen Man Ching 37 form, which would have been a more accurate name, since Cheng’s form varies quite significantly from the official Yang form that belongs to the actual Yang family.

Secondly, the use of “Taiji Chuan” awkwardly mixes two different romanisation styles together in a way I’ve never seen done before, making it something of an outlier in the Tai Chi world. Tai Chi is usually either written Taijiquan/Tàijíquán (pinyin) or Tai Chi Chuan/Tai chi ch’üan (Wade-Giles), or shortened to simply “Tai Chi“. I find the decision making process of mixing the two systems together used here to come up with “Taiji Chuan” a bit baffling. Why do that?

Similarly, inside the book there’s a mix of different romanisation styles. Shaolin appears as “Shao-lin”, while changquan appears as “Changquan”, (so they’re happy to use pinyin there…) Dantien appears as “Tan Tien”. But Qi is “Qi”, not “Chi”, and Xingyi is “hsing-i”! I can’t work out the logic. In a way, so long as the system used is internally consistent it doesn’t matter, but it is a bit frustrating.

Finally, “beginners guide” is used in the title without an apostrophe! Well, that is just… wrong.

But, let’s move on from the title of the book and look at what we’ve got here. 

All the history all at once

The history section starts with a pretty safe phrase, “The history of Taiji Chuan is unknown”, and if it had stopped there I think I would have been happy, but it then goes on to tell a version of Tai Chi history anyway that includes every folk tale in the Tai Chi master’s repertoire! It talks about the classic Chan Sanfeng origin story, but also has the Chen village origin story straight afterwards before giving a brief rundown of the current styles of Tai Chi, before then pivoting back further into time and linking Tai Chi to the Shaolin Temple because that’s where “qigong theory” started… If you know anything about the history of Tai Chi you’ll know that these kind of myths are probably just that, myths, but they help the marketing of the art.

There are other problems with the accuracy of information, too – there’s a picture of a statue of Chang Sanfeng in the history section which is captioned “A statue in Chenjiagou depicting the legendary Chang San-Feng”. I thought that didn’t sound right. A quick 5 minutes on Google confirmed that his statue is of Chang, but it’s found (not surprisingly) in the Wudang mountains, not Chen village, as stated. Unless I’m wrong and there are two identical statues, but I don’t think so. The most famous statues in Chen village are the statues of Chen Chanxing and Yang Luchan.

The rundown of the different styles of Tai Chi in existence today is accurate, but if you want a proper investigation of the history of Tai Chi, I’d suggest looking elsewhere.

The section on principles of Tai Chi is also very brief. It’s all the usual advice you find in Tai Chi books about relaxing, centering, evenness and slowness, etc. There’s nothing wrong here, but it’s very surface level.

Teaching forms is where Yang Short Form gets it right. The book uses the method of breaking down each move into tiny fragments and showing them next to each other, conveying the sense of movement through the form nicely. As such you can definitely use the book as an aid to memory of this form, or even teach yourself the form from it. Take a look at this example of Single Whip:

Diagonal Flying:

Of course, Tai Chi purists will say that the choreography of the form is not the important part, and that the body method is vastly more important, however, for better or for worse, the vast majority of Tai Chi practitioners in the world are not looking for a book on that. They are simply trying to learn some movements as a form of exercise for health, and this book will serve them very well.

I don’t do the Cheng Man Ching short form myself, but I have learned it in the past, and as I was looking through the movements it struck me that there were one or two idiosyncrasies presented by Sifu Leo that I hadn’t seen before. I noticed three things in particular:

1) A low squat Sifu Leo does as a transition between each ‘Fair Lady Works at the Shuttles’ move: 

2) A front kick/leg raise, he puts into Repulse Monkey.

3) In Golden Pheasant Stands on one leg – he again squats all the way down to the floor between the knee raises.

This struck me as peculiar, so I checked the form against a video of Chen Man Ching, mapping the movements in his video to the ones in the book, and while the forms match (all the movements are here and none have been added), the above curiosities are not performed by Professor Chen Man Ching. 

Also, there are 43 moves in the form shown here, and Chen Man Ching’s form was said to be 37, but I suppose it depends how you count the moves. 

I don’t think these three variations to the Cheng Man Ching form matter that much, but I think it’s safe to say that they are not standard, so I should point them out. It’s also important to note that there are no marital applications or discussion of push hands in the book at all.

Overall, if you practice the Cheng Man Ching short form for health and you want a visual reference to remind you of the moves then this book will fit the bill – it’s beautifully designed and the form is clearly presented. If you’re looking for a scholarly discussion of the history of Tai Chi, or an in-depth dive into the body mechanics, then other books are available.

REVIEW: Chen Taijiquan Illustrated, by David Gaffney & Davidine Siaw-Voon Sim

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Chen Taijiquan Illustrated is an exploration of pretty much everything that makes up Chen Taijiquan, from principles, and body methods to practical usage and philosophy. But the most notable thing about this Taijiquan book, and the place where we should probably start, are the illustrations, because they are what really separates this book from others of its ilk.

Almost every page here (and there are over 200) has some sort of detailed drawing on it that adds context to the text surrounding it. In fact, the whole book takes the form of a visual notebook, as if you are discovering a secret copy of the best-looking training notes you’ve ever seen. Surrounding the drawings are quotes from the most iconic practitioners in the Chen lineage, past and present, as well as explanations of principles, concepts and requirements of Taijiquan. Take a look and you’ll get the idea:

As you can see, the drawings are mainly done in a stylised cartoon way, which is actually very effective, and it’s pretty clear that these are photographs that have been traced over digitally, to produce the illustration, rather than drawn from scratch. The overall effect is really nice, and refreshingly modern and accessible. 

Because a Taiji master’s posture takes years to develop and is a reflection of their skill, you can learn quite a lot from just looking at it. So, having a drawing based on a real photo gives you the best of both worlds – you get to see the genuine skill of the practitioner on show mixed with the accessibility and visual appeal of an illustration. 

In fact, in a lot of cases you can guess the famous master that the drawing is based on. For example, the book cover shows, I believe, a digital tracing of a photo of Chen Xiaoxing, brother of Chen Xiaowang.

It should be pointed out that not all the illustrations in the book are done to the same high standard, but there are only a few where the quality dips significantly.

Chen Taijiquan Illustrated is split into three sections – Section 1, Body Rules (Shape and energy), Section 2, Practical use/Application and Section 3, Philosophical Roots. Section 3 on philosophy is tiny compared to the massive section two, which consists of a catalogue of pretty much all the practical methods found in Taijiquan – peng, lu, ji, an, listening, sticking, neutralising, push hands, hand methods, leg methods, stepping, chin na, etc. Pretty much everything to do with the Chen style is here!

The initial section on body requirements is very good, and something you can keep coming back to and the book goes into much more detail than you’d expect to find in a basic beginner’s book, which makes me happy. The explanations of the concepts and techniques in the second section can sometimes err towards being more of a catalogue of techniques than an in-depth ‘how to’ of each one, but there is always going to be a limit on how much can be achieved in print, and the illustration of various masters doing the method being discussed speaks volumes in itself, and adds a lot of depth. It’s also nice to see the martial methods of Taijiquan being discussed in detail, something that is also rare to find in a Taijiquan book.

Let’s talk for a moment about what the book doesn‘t include. For a start, there is no attempt to teach a form in this book, which is probably a good thing, as Chen style in particular would be hard to teach in a printed book due to its intricate nature and complex, spiraling movements. Also, there is no history section – personally I’m glad about that, as it’s a massive subject and would require too much space to do it justice, and frankly, it’s been done to death elsewhere, and matters not a jot to your actual practice of the art. If you want to discover the key to “internal movement” then you’ll find good pointers here, but if you really want to delve deeply into subjects like peng, groundpath and internal body mechanics then I’d say you should check out Ken Gullette’s book on the subject. Finally, there’s no mention of weapons here, which are obviously a huge part of the Chen art. The emphasis here is on body methods and bare hand methods only.

Taijiquan is a practical, doing art, not the sort of practice that benefits from too much intellectualism, and the visual nature of the book is great at reminding you of that fact, grounding the concepts and principles in practical reality.

Overall, I think this has to be one of my favourite books on Taijiquan ever produced. This is really one of the most comprehensive collection of training notes you’ll ever come across. And because everything is fitted around pictures, there are no long, boring, passages of text, meaning you can dip in and out at any point. In fact, just picking it up, flicking to a random page and starting to read for a few minutes can easily give you inspiration for your practice that day.

Highly recommended, and while obviously best suited to Chen style practitioners (there’s a lot of discussion of silk reeling), I think a Taijiquan practitioner of any style would get a lot out of it. I certainly did.

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”.

The power of connection, with Henry Akins

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I like it when you can find those rare moments where martial arts seem to cross boundaries and blend into each other. I came across this video recently of Henry Akins explaining the concept of connection in BJJ, as taught to him by Rickson Gracie, and it doesn’t half remind me of Tai Chi…

There’s a lot of talking at the start, but he gets down to action at around the 4 minute mark and starts demonstrating rooting – something that you’ll find being practiced in most Tai Chi classes. These are what you’d see described as ‘simple jin skills’ or ‘jin tricks’ by a lot of Tai Chi experts. And they are what you are supposed to be doing in Tai Chi all the time, when you practice the form and when you do push hands. They’re the root (ha!) of classic phrases from the Tai Chi classics like, “4oz defeats a thousand pounds”.

In fact, a lot of people seem to think that these jin skills alone qualify something as being internal, which is why you see the descriptor, “internal”, being added to the name of a lot of martial arts, like ‘internal Wing Chun’ or ‘internal Karate’.

My take would be that, sure, these are an essential part of the internal package, but they’re not the whole enchilada. For instance, Henry is not doing anything particular with his dantien, and indeed, you don’t need to do anything in particular with your dantien to do these things. But these are still the first few steps to being an internal art.

As you know if you’ve read my blog for a while, I’m a BJJ practitioner myself, so it’s great to see somebody like Henry applying these principles to BJJ. I see it as a path to a version of the art that you can still do as you get older. I don’t think you’re going to be winning any competitions if you dedicate yourself to practicing these jin skills (the power and aggression of youth is pretty darn overwhelming to fight against in competition, particularly if it’s being done by dedicated athletes who train to a level the average guy with a job and two kids can only dream of). All I’m after is something that gives me the edge in friendly, hobbyist rolling and enables me to stay in the game and on the mat for as long as possible. “Do not go gentle into that good night”, as Dylan Thomas put it.


Push it, push it real good

In particular, Henry deals with one of the favourite subjects of Tai Chi – pushing. Henry pushes Bernardo, using power from his legs, not his arms – this is Tai Chi 101 – and then shows how to receive a push by aligning his body so that the push goes into the ground. He, (dare I say it?) tucks his butt, so that the force goes down his legs to the ground, rather than knocking him backwards. This is what you need to be working on in push hands when people push you. N.B. Tucking your butt does not mean adopting a forced and unnatural posture, it just means flattening the lower back and aligning the lower part of your spine with the upper, so that your bum doesn’t stick out.

What I like about this clip is that Henry, coming from a non-Chinese marital art, doesn’t use words like Jin and Qi – he just talks about alignment, relaxing and using the legs and ‘using the ground for support’. It seems much less mystical than the way it is typically presented in Tai Chi, and it goes to show that you can explain a lot of Tai Chi things without having to use words that are nebulous or hard to grasp for the Western mind.

But it’s really the concept of connection that Henry is teaching. As he says, a lot of the time in grappling what you want to do is connect to your opponent to use your techniques, and then learn how to disconnect from them when they try their techniques on you. He sees connection working in three main ways – and this is where I think Tai Chi teachers can benefit from his teaching –

  • Connecting within yourself,
  • Connecting to the opponent
  • Connecting to the ground.

That’s not a bad way to look at grappling at all, and I think it is a good way to help people understand that, when doing push hands, you can’t apply no force at all to the other person in a sort of noodle arms-display of rooting into the ground, because then you have no connection to them. If you move, they don’t move. Instead, you need to apply enough force at all times so that you are connected to their body and through listening (ting) you can feel when it’s time to break this connection too. Think of it a bit like an insect using the surface tension of the water to stay afloat.

Great work Henry, I would buy your instructional on Connection, if only it wasn’t almost $300. 🙂 But thanks for sharing that video above for free. I’ll have to wait for it to come into the ‘daily deal’ section of Fanatics, where they reduce the price. Osss!

If you haven’t already, check out my post on Jin Tricks and Mike Sigman explaining Jin. Both worth a watch.

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1,000 followers on Facebook! (and my most popular posts of all time)

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The Tai Chi Notebook Facebook page has finally got far enough over the 1,000 followers milestone that I feel confident in shouting about it a little bit! So, here we go – 1,000 followers!

Thanks to everybody who has liked, subscribed and commented on The Tai Chi Notebook over the years – it’s all very much appreciated!

If you haven’t checked us out on Facebook then please do, and why not give our Instagram page a look too, and our YouTube channel?

Also, I’ve changed the sidebar on the blog over to the right —-> It now shows the most popular posts on the page by views and likes, so if you’re looking for something interesting to read about martial arts and Tai Chi, then look here to find something.

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.

Making your own form

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“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.“

When you’ve been practicing Tai Chi for a while – a few years maybe – you’ll get to the stage where you start to think about making your own form. Something that puts all the bits you really like together, and is either shorter than what you usually do, or longer, or uses less space, or fits into your garden better, or… something.

It’s potentially driven out of a need to make your own mark on the world; perhaps a sense of ego. You want something that is yours! Or maybe it’s just that you are a creative person and you have a need to continually create. Or perhaps it’s just to bring a sense of aliveness and play back into your Tai Chi…

What will then happen is you’ll start making a form, and then you fiddle with it, and fiddle with it and fiddle with it… and years pass and you’re still fiddling with it.

Ultimately, you’ll realise that this process never ends, and that your form will never be “finished”. Just when you think you’ll got it finished, you’ll notice a part of it isn’t quite right.

Whenever I mentioned to my teacher, over the years, that I’d made my own little form he was usually completely nonplussed. I mean, he asked to see it, but I could tell it wasn’t setting his world on fire 🙂

As I was pondering on my millionth version of my form this morning, another thought occurred to me. An obsession with creating your own form is probably an indication that you are getting a little too concerned with the external aspects of Tai Chi.

Switch your focus in Tai Chi back to the ‘internal’ elements – your perception of your body in space. Slow down, put your mind on what you are doing, notice your breathing, feel the (for want of a better word) energy inside the movements, notice where your weight is on your feet, push up from the ground, etc…

Now you’ll find that it doesn’t really matter to you what form you are doing – it’s all the same. If you are focused on the inside, your concern for what order movements come in and how many times you repeat something isn’t what matters anymore.

Suddenly, the idea of creating your own sequence of moves seems a bit, well, meaningless. Instead, you create your own form every time you practice, with every movement you do.