I don’t think modern tournaments are ideal, but Yang style was proven rather well in tournaments of the past by CC Chen. Michuan was also proven well by Zhang Qin Lin.

If you could do me a favor and read two articles on my blog, you can link to it through my name above. The articles are titled:
form=dance and Unseen forces. I am interested in what you think of them, feel free to comment here or there.

Tai Chi folks in China, even the masters, are guilty of back-biting and criticizing and gossiping as anyone else. I spent a day training privately with Chen Xiaoxing during one of his visits to the U.S., and watched him in a living room as we put on a DVD of Chen Zhenglei doing a form. CXX began speaking bitterly and stomping around the room, shaking his head, then demonstrating the mistakes Chen Zhenglei was making. They are cousins and grew up together (CXX is a little younger, I believe).

I believe the Yang folks still like to say that tai chi was created by Zhang Sanfeng centuries before Chen Wangting. It’s probably in their interest, they think, to shift the attention away from the Chen family.

Again, that’s my opinion, but no one can find evidence that Zhang existed, and no one can trace tai chi past Chen Wangting.

All that is immaterial. I’ve studied both styles and have found no comparison between the two. Chen is so much more alive, fluid and powerful, at least compared to the way Yang is taught in America.

When you say you think it’s a joke when people are so focused on defending themselves, you might be missing the point. Mastery of a self-defense art is mastery of yourself. I love the martial aspects of tai chi, but I stopped doing martial arts to protect myself around 1989, when I had become a good fighter at last.

Until you can learn the art well enough to use the concepts and principles to defend yourself, you’re practicing an empty art. Learning to relax and soften when force comes at you, change, maintain your center, neutralize the attack and counter, are skills that are at the very heart of tai chi — NOT becoming one with the universe.

I haven’t met one Yang stylist in the U.S. who can fight. They have to be out there somewhere, but I have yet to run across them. I’ve been to major tournaments in Chicago where I was the ONLY internal artist who stuck around for fighting competition. I have met Yang folks who have been teaching for 20 years but don’t know how to use the kua. They think “double weighted” means your weight is 50/50 on both legs. They have little concept of ground and peng in their movements. I’m sure there are several who have these skills, but for the most part, Yang style tai chi in America is weak. The reason for that is the focus on the “health” and meditation aspects. The more you focus on “cultivating chi” the more you miss the real meaning of tai chi.

Any art could be bastardized into a health and meditation art. I could take taekwondo and slow it down and make it an art for cultivating chi. Unfortunately, it happened to tai chi because the Imperial family didn’t have the dedication to learn the complex nature of the art, and the “health” aspects grew from there.

I think your post was good. I might not agree, but I enjoyed reading your perspective. I agree that Tai Chi is a Taoist art, and there are deep aspects to the art that can be used for those purposes. But when you say that the modern emphasis of form work and martial application is causing this connection to be lost, I see it as just the reverse. When so few tai chi folks in America know how to fight with tai chi, and spend their time cultivating chi and nonsense like that, they are the ones who have ruined the art’s reputation in order to feed some psychological need for supernatural powers that they believe are developed with their focus on chi.

I’m enjoying the discussion.

I am sure my opinion is not the same as that of many people here.
I mean, my studies clearly indicate to me that the health aspects of taijiquan were found in daoist yoga that was incorporated into amalgamation that is the Chen family style.

The Chens say that the village now named after them was originally Changyang Village and that the ancestor of the Chens, a certain Chen Bu moved there and that he was a martial artist and since that time there have been martial arts in Chen village.

Chen Bu was 1st generation chen village and Chen Wang Ting was 9th generation. Wang-ting was reported to be a very skilled martial artist and a scholar and he did amalgamate many existing arts into his own which became passed down in the village. However there is no mention of this art being taiji until the Chinese government of t5he 1930s sent a scholar, Tang Hoa to investigate and he is the one that claimed that taiji was a Chen invention.

The evidence clearly shows common elements with the Chen art and taiji, however some people still maintain that taijiquan as a daoist martial art was not an invention of Chen, but was actually among the arts that Chen Wang Ting employed in the creation of his own art.

What is clear is that many of the martial internal elements found in taiji predate Chen Wang Ting. One version of things maintains that this was just dao-yin yoga, which according to this version was practiced for health. If this version is true then the health promoting aspects of taiji are not part of the martial training but are added to the martial training to achieve better results. However if this version is not true then taijichuan is likely not an invention of Chen village at all and actually predates it.

But who cares? History is always obscure and comes down to opinion. What about facts?

The facts are that non-martial practice of taiji has been studied quite a bit in modern times and moreover it has been repeatedly shown to be healthy in a way that mere calisthenics are not. I would actually care enough to link such studies, but the opinionated are known for basing their concept of truth on the ability of evidence to support their opinion, not for having a standard of truth outside of their opinion. So what is the point?

The truth is that your odds of dying of an attack are so remote it isn’t funny. Chances are you will die because of a poor diet or some other preventable cause, this is what is killing most people these days.

I consider it a joke when people are more concerned with protecting themselves in a martial way than they are with protecting themselves against the biggest threat they face, themselves!
In fact half of the martial attitudes are more likely to put the person at greater risk than one oriented towards health by making people think the key to self defense is to fight it out. However there will always be someone, bigger, stronger, faster, and more skilled.

When Yang Luchan taught the imperial soldiers he focused upon weapons like the jian. He was not interested in promoting health, he was interested in teaching them to kill, that was his and their job. History shows that you can have the taiji be martial, martial and healthy, or just healthy. There is no mutually exclusive combination or nature to this.

As a daoist art there is far more to taijiquan than just the martial or the health. This has nothing to do with the internal art BS that is so common today, none of those frauds are actually familiar with Dao. However they are clearly not the only ones who remain in ignorance of the profound connection of the dao and taiji. Sadly this aspect of the art, which is at the very heart of things is almost totally lost due to the modern emphasis of form work and martial application.

Will they ever realize that the 13 postures are not just physical?
I hope so.

Many of the masters you cited in the article started for health reasons, but I am sure there training was pretty martially orientated.

But ultimately, to each there own. I am just not part of the camp that if you train for health, you will magically be able to defend yourself if someone tried to attack you. When I spar someone for fun, I can easily pick out those who have been in a real fight and those who have not.

Personally, I like a more well rounded holistic approach of martial, health and spiritual

I’m sure other benefits of martial arts training like humility and reservation would have benefited him if he did some sort of traditional martial arts training, but boxing seems to have suited him just fine.

http://www.martialdevelopment.com/blog/precognition-and-psychic-martial-arts/

The link between Taiji and shamanic medicine has nothing to do with formal education, or even with modern TCM. It is not about adding some moves to a long boxing form that are “good for chi”, or “good for jing” or some other such nonsense. It is (first) about developing a particular kind of inner vision, and identifying correspondences that are not obvious within the 3-dimensional space (e.g. kidney and knee).

I certainly do not believe this link has been “lost”. I do believe that a relative few have the motive, means and opportunity to discover it for themselves–which is perfectly OK.

One has to be very careful when writing about these topics. It is not enough to be lucid, and practical, and factually correct. I don’t really like that article you cited either, though probably for different reasons.

Regarding no-touch masters, I respect your willingness to put money where your mouth is. Though if you really wanted to know what one of these people was capable of–and every one is different–then you would have quietly visited one yourself. I’m guessing that trip would have cost you much less than $5000. Well, technically, I’m not guessing, I know it to be true, because I have made these trips myself.