“Think over carefully what the final purpose is:
to lengthen life and maintain youth.”
- Song of the 13 postures.

I’m basing today’s sermon on this often overlooked couplet from the Song of 13 Postures. You see, there’s a lot of talk on online discussion forums asking where it all went wrong for Tai Chi Chuan. How did this deadly pugalistic art of the Chen and Yang families from the bloody 1800s in China become this watered-down, series of sanitised slow-motion movements for old people to do in parks?

As this line from the classic points out, it was never just about fighting anyway. Tai Chi Chuan was always about something more. The argument for staying healthy is a strong one. Even if your main purpose in pursuing the art is to acquire fighting skills what good are they if you’re overweight, ill or have limited movement in your joints? If you’re not healthy then that’s going to seriously inhibit your ability to defend yourself. Yet, do the historical masters of Tai Chi Chuan live up to this ideal? Sadly not. The famous Yang Cheng-Fu was also famously obese and his most famous student, Cheng Man-Ching, was often famously inebriated. Neither of these two unfortunate facts takes anything away from their skill levels in the art.

Is Tai Chi Chuan enough for health? Bear in mind when the words of the Song of 13 Postures were written. Daily life was much more of a grind in 1800s China than it is for us today, with all our fantastic labour (and boredom) saving devices. These days very few of us lift heavy objects, walk very far or move about as much as people used to do on a regular basis. We also eat a lot more, and most of it is high-sugar, high-fat crap.

Quietly, to myself, I often ponder whether the health benefits to be gained by Tai Chi Chuan match up to those that can be gained by, say, going ballroom dancing twice a week. In conclusion, I’d say ballroom dancing is probably the more healthy option, but you can’t go ballroom dancing for those brief 10 minutes in the morning when you’ve got the kitchen to yourself before the kids charge down the stairs and start wrecking the joint. You can’t ballroom dance in that last half hour of the day while the wife is catching up on her soap operas and you slip, unnoticed into the back yard to do a little bit of the form under the stars. And most importantly, for me, you can’t ballroom dance your way out of a violent confrontation.

So, I’m left with Tai Chi Chuan. The great all-rounder. It’s hard to but a label on what it is exactly. It doesn’t specialise in one area too much, but touches on many. Jack of all trades, master of none, or universal panacea? You decide.

This week in class we were working on Peng Jin (Ward off energy), the fundamental Yang energy (Jin) of Tai Chi Chuan.

A lot as been written and debated about Peng Jin in Tai Chi circles, but I think the following quote sums it up pretty well, for me at least.

From the classics:

“The Song of Peng

What is the meaning of Peng energy?
It is like the water supporting a moving boat.
First sink the ch’i to the tan-t’ien,
then hold the head as if suspended from above.
The entire body is filled with springlike energy,
opening and closing in a very quick moment.
Even if the opponent uses a thousand pounds of force,
he can be uprooted and made to float without difficulty.

I like the imagry of water and a boat floating on water. I also like to use the imagery of a rubber ball when teaching Peng to people. If you imagined that you were punching a large rubber ball then the bounce-back you’d experience is Peng. The hard part is turning yourself into that rubber ball!

To manifest Peng you need to be relaxed (sung) – excess physical tension really spoils the technique. There are various exercises you can do to help you develop the feeling of Peng, one of which I present here: Hold out your arms and get a partner to press down on your arms, then try to compress their force into your centre and bounce them out. The big mistake you’ll make first is to use your arms too much to try to push them off you – that’s not it. In this video you can see that my arms are nice and relaxed. You’re looking for that springy force coming back up from the ground.

This exercises also requires that your partner hold their arms somewhat rigidly. If they let their arms go all soft and floppy as you bounce them then nothing happens. This is just a training exercise after all, and not a martial technique, so it require some co-operation, so give your training partner a hand and don’t be too difficult to work with!

Great blog post.

“Our ancestors are very great, the principle of Taichi is very mysterious and beyond every word,” I heard this all the time.

I am not denying the greatness of that circle composed with two fishes, although according to some experts, the two-fish circle can only be called yin-yang diagram, the real taichi diagram is just a plain circle. Besides, it really looks cool when a person practices taichi in that circle or builds a house by drawing that circle at the center of the house or puts that circle on the clothes. It is so popular that as long as Chinese culture is mentioned, it mostly probably comes out covered with a mysterious face with the introducers’ blinky words. If you have some questions, they would say, “it is normal that you don’t understand, it is very deep and our ancestors are too smart.”

I think just this can best show the attitude of modern Chinese to traditional Chinese culture— they pretend to know it by pretending not to know it.

Sometimes it’s good to use Push Hands as a base from which to practice applications from the form. Here’s some Tai Chi throwing apps we were working on in class this week.

A question that comes up a lot from beginners seems to be “what defines Tai Chi Chuan?”. Non-beginners seem to not worry about this question and just practice, which is for the best, but it seems everybody goes through a stage where their mind needs to define and categorise what it is they’re doing. What makes it Tai Chi Chuan, as opposed to, say, Bagua, or JuJitsu?

I can only answer from my current understanding. I’ve been doing Tai Chi long enough to realise that today’s epiphany is tomorrow’s half-truth, so I wouldn’t say this will be my final word on the subject, but it’s something I’ve settled on recently.

When defining what Tai Chi Chuan is I look first at the name – TaiChi boxing/fist. So, it’s a martial art whose chief feature is about TaiChi – the interaction of Yin and Yang. Therefore, for a movement to be Tai Chi Chuan it requires that the interaction of yin and yang is correctly distinguished (i.e. in harmony) in all the movements, and (crucially) also in the fighting strategy (no double-weighting).

That’s it!

On one level my answer sounds like a ridiculous over simplification, and it is, but that doesn’t make it ring any less true. It’s only when you ask yourself ‘what does distinguishing yin and yang mean?’ that you realise how deep the wormhole goes. There are obvious, simple, answers like always having your weight on one leg and not both at the same time, but there are much more subtle answers to do with where force is inside the body, and how it is utilised.

A good place to start with this line of enquiry is by looking at your own form with No.4 of Yang Cheng-Fu’s 10 Important Points in mind.

4.) Differentiate between insubstantial and substantial. This is the first principle in T’ai Chi Ch’uan. If the weight of the whole body is resting on the right leg, then the right leg is substantial and the left leg is insubstantial, and vice versa. When you can separate substantial and insubstantial, you can turn lightly without using strength. If you cannot separate, the step is heavy and slow. The stance is not firm and can be easily thrown of balance.