Yang Family Tai Chi Discussion Board

Psalchemist, The Yoga vs. T'ai Chi issue is a subject TCC teachers are asked about all of the time. Just as there are a few different styles of TCC, there are many, many different styles of Yoga. The "styles" of TCC are less differentiated than the varieties of Yoga are. Perhaps this has t...

Greetings All, Stephen's post got me thinking, and I remembered some pertinent passages of Wu Kung-tsao's "Gold Book" that address some of the issues he brought up. Here are several bits of it, the translator was Doug Woolidge, I believe: When the mind moves ch'i and ch'i sends the body, t...

Psalchemist & DavidJ, Good advice! I would be very reluctant to try this kind of stuff without a qualified instructor. If you are young and have a background in gymnastic type pursuits it will be a little safer, however. The main two points are to tuck in your chin, hard, and keep it tucked whil...

Greetings All, I know about the disorientation while falling that Jeff (Gu Rou Chen) is speaking of. This is an effect of the acceleration energy (there are some other energies that can be applied preceding the throw towards that end as well) put into a T'ai Chi throw. Wu Kung-tsao characterized it ...

Psalchemist & Co., Uplifting! You can say that again... What one has to do to hit the ground safely has three primary elements, at least for T'ai Chi Ch'uan purposes. The first element is proper positioning. Stabilizing the spine, tucking in the chin, tongue on the roof of the mouth; all designe...

Solipsism - The belief that the only thing that somebody can be sure of is that he or she exists, and that true knowledge of anything else is impossible. That is pretty close, but not exactly, to the Taoist/Buddhist take. They would want to say: true CONVENTIONAL knowledge of anything else is imposs...

Psalchemist, I've only seen a still photo of Chen Qingzhou doing a form that the caption said was "White Crane Spreads Wings." It was quite similar to what I am familiar with from Yang style: a vertical posture on one leg with the front leg up on the ball of the foot, one hand high (on the...

Psalchemist,

There are at least some Ch'en family forms which have "White Crane Spreads Wings" in them. From what I've seen, it does look similar to the Yang family version.

Cheers,
P.

Louis, That fits with what I was speaking of with Steve J. (much) earlier. FWIW, once we (my colleagues and I, I'm not speaking for all schools, naturally)understand how empty and full constitute our balance, our framework; we are taught to assign, to create, empty and full at the right time in the ...

LS- "Yang Chengfu wasn’t defining empty and full, but indicating how one can access the experience." Agreed. It is a principle that a beginner has to work through to learn stability on one leg, but it doesn't end there. With accomplishment the matter of balance on one leg becomes a given a...

Greetings All, Steve, it is an old syndrome, to be sure. Formerly in the Chinese martial arts you could not get away from the hierarchy (oligarchy?) of the Confucian family model for ranking in a traditional Chinese school of any sort. As you say, nowadays the sky is the limit - - - if someone has l...

Steve, Very good. I'm not sure that I understand exactly how it works completely, but I am familiar with the effects of the process, fortunately. At the risk of sounding like Bruce Lee, all T'ai Chi Ch'uan technique is only training to get students the point to where they can consciously discard all...

Steve, You haven't seemed contentious to me, quite the contrary, I've found what you are saying and asking to be courteously thought provoking. As for asking what the full of full and empty actaully IS, naturally people are going to want to know that. One thing that I'll tell my students is that the...

Gents, What Xiang Kairen has to say is as close as could be imagined to the way it has been presented to me by the current Wu family teachers. As for Wu Chien-ch'uan and Yang Ch'eng-fu (and Yang Shao-hou and Sun Lu-t'ang) they were indeed all very close friends and colleagues, teaching together in t...

“There are two kinds of double weighting. There is double weighting between the other and myself and there is double weighting in my own body. Double weighting between the other and myself necessarily results in “butting” (ding). Double weighting in my own body necessarily results in stagnation (zhi...