Comment by Squeeeez
20 hours ago
"this gentle form of exercise" - cue Chen Xiaowang (head of one of the major styles of Tai Chi) : https://youtu.be/gj6UaEay5Lg
20 hours ago
"this gentle form of exercise" - cue Chen Xiaowang (head of one of the major styles of Tai Chi) : https://youtu.be/gj6UaEay5Lg
Well it had to happen sometime. Im in this video.
Fajin or the explosive use of power is practiced (after a few years of training the moves slowly) and is necessary from time to time to help remind the body the actual speed of the martial application as well as to test that you are standing right, not overreaching etc. It is very easy if you do the moves for a one time slowly to get into bad habits very gradually and have poor posture, resetting with the faster moves helps to expose those weaknesses. We always warm up a lot before doing those moves or you can hurt yourself.
Should also look up the spear form, which is also done quite quickly.
Yes, at it's core it is a martial arts, not wellness.
More accurately, it was a martial art in the 19th century, when it was practiced by professional bodyguards, but that did not resemble much what is today called Tai Chi.
What is practiced today is a health-preserving exercise derived from that martial art.
This is the same as for what is today called "karate", whose origin is from a 19th century martial art practiced by professionals, i.e. bodyguards and law-enforcement officials, but from that in the 20th century health-preserving exercises and sportive competitions were derived, which do not look at all like the original art.
There are people who claim that they still know which were the martial art techniques from which the movements of the Tai Chi forms were derived, but at least for most of them the claims are unlikely to be true and if they demonstrate a supposedly original movement there usually exists no evidence that it truly was transmitted from the ancient masters and it is not just a modern guess of how the original movement might have been.
As a health-preserving exercise, Tai Chi is indeed one of the best.
The 19th century isn't THAT long ago. Master Sun Lutang, founder of one of the martial art branches of Tai Chi died in the 1930s (1). There are folks alive today, such as Grandmaster Lin Chih Young (2) who can claim a lineage to him that goes back only three generations, and there are others walking around who are only four or five generations removed. These lineages are unbroken and, although some of the ancient material has, indeed, truly been lost, much of the Wu Dang / Taoism-based martial arts are still preserved and can still be "transmitted" to anyone willing to find these teachers and put the time in.
Many of these 19th century masters cross-trained in all of the related arts from that era and proceeded to carry down these traditions to their students.
Therefore, the original movements can, indeed, still be found in the world, and you can still learn them. You just won't see any of these movements displayed in Hollywood (because they're not flashy enough for the big screen), or in an MMA ring (because they're not designed for sport fighting), or through any school or lineage that remains or currently exists in China post-Cultural Revolution (because all of the true practictioners fled to Taiwan and elsewhere).
But you're right in that it doesn't AT ALL look like the Tai Chi that most of the world practices today. Many of the movements and forms have kept the same names... but they are trained and performed VERY differently from what most people would recognize.
(1) https://linnatural.com/about-our-martial-arts-school-in-coro... (2) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun_Lutang
Full disclosure: I mentioned Grandmaster Lin specifically because I've met, witnessed, and learned from him directly having attended seminars that he's run in the past.
"There are people who claim that they still know which were the martial art techniques from which the movements of the Tai Chi forms were derived, but at least for most of them the claims are unlikely to be true and if they demonstrate a supposedly original movement there usually exists no evidence"
Erm, with martial arts it is really easy to find out, if something has any (combat) value simply by trying it out in a (training) fight. So I do lot's of martial arts and I can say with confidence some technics of Tai Chi helped me become better. And I know many other fighters who also do Tai Chi. But .. I also don't know anyone who has done just Tai Chi, but also do it.
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Not to "Well, Actually," but it was intended to be both. Tai Chi and its related arts (xingyi, tongbei, etc.) were formalized and taught by the old masters as expressions of the Tao. The base movements are derived from the basic elements of the Tao, and Taoist meditiation and internal medicinal practices (qigong) were as important as learning how to produce explosive force (fajin) from it.
Learning Tai Chi in the way that it was meant to be learned means cultivating not just your external body but also your spiritual self, mental wellness, and internal organs as well.