Yang Family Tai Chi Discussion Board

In traditional Yang style, fajing is practiced with a long staff, and to a lesser extent with sabre and sword. You can also practice fajing with single moves, but it is best to see an expert do it before you try.

One man's opinion: not worth it. You have tons of tiny bones and ligaments in your hand. Don't mess them up with parlor tricks. You only get issued one set of these. Someday you may want to play guitar with them. Plus this kind of thing can lead to concentrating on developing brute, localized force ...

One other point which might be useful to mention to avoid any confusion is that the 'chi' of 'tai chi' is not the same word as 'qi'. The ji (older romanizations chi) of taijiquan (pronounced like the letter G) is a word that means 'extreme', as in 'when things go to their extreme they necessarily go...

I should add that there are others who post here, and whose opinions I respect, who don't agree with my explanation of the role of qi.

So for example heat and motion are produced in the engine of an automobile, but the driver only indirectly affects all that. He has the accelerator, clutch, steering wheel, brake, etc which are his focus. The machine does the rest. IMO, in traditional Yang style, Qi could be likened to the electrici...

There are many schools of martial arts. Some do put a lot of emphasis on qi and the manipulation of it. I met people in Taiwan who did various forms of that and it is not all hooey. That said, I can't comment too much on that sort of thing because I have not studied that. Traditional Yang style, and...

I don't really consider those small adaptations in context to be fudge moves. For example the rollback after the brush knee move in Grasp Tiger Return to Mountain. Yang Zhenduo instructs that the right hand must lift up and circle. There is no sense of anything extraneous or fudged here. The circlin...

One interesting aspect is that Chinese scales of the type mentioned are not symmetrical like a western scale and hence are not quite as symbolic of even-handedness, equality on both sides, etc. It seems that the image is more illustrative of free movement along an axis than the associations of justi...

Ok here's the rest of it. This last bit is relatively non-controversial. It strikes me as somewhat more cohesive than some of what precedes. Reading this essay I sometimes suspect that we have in this text a hodge-podge of earlier sayings stitched together and possibly some notes or commentary mixed...

Pretty good!

15. 英雄所向无敌，盖皆由此而及也。
16. 斯技旁门甚多，虽势有区别，概不外，
17. 壮欺弱，慢让快耳。有力打无力，
18. 手慢让手快，是皆先天自然之能，
19. 非关学力而有为也。
20. 察四两拨千斤之句，显非力胜；
21. 观耄耋御众之形，快何能为。

likewise,
'If you observe [some other matter which I am too lazy to look up, someone chime in here], what good is speed?'

Now in these next lines the essay sort of sets up a straw dog which it will knock down: strength defeats weakness, fast beats slow, etc, and that these are all natural abilities and not learned skills. Having enumerated a series of these generalities, it says 察四两拨千斤之句，显非力胜； 'but if you scrutinize th...

Even if you took peerless heroes literally and not as hyperbole, there would presumably stretch out over history a sequence of such heroes, each being replaced as he got too old, or something... In modern English, the phrase 英雄所向无敌 would sound like 'martial arts greats' or 'the greatest fighters'. [...

Those heros without peer have probably all gotten to it by this route.

Gai 'presumably', jie 'in all cases' .