Yang Family Tai Chi Discussion Board

Greetings Dan, Well, what's important here is getting the translation right, and the fact that Brennan missed the passive marker, bei, makes a big difference in understanding the passage. Chen Yanlin is referring to both the one who issues, and the target of the issuing. Again, in Brennan's translat...

Greetings Audi, You wrote: Even though I do not agree with all of Brennan choices, I still find much of choice of words in translating "liberating." For instance, translating 凌空勁 as the energy of "traversing emptiness" is much better than what I have seen in the past. I understan...

Hi UniTaichi, That's interesting speculation that the scanned card reflects the "original," version, but frankly that strikes me as implausible. If it were the original, why is there seemingly no evidence of this so-called original version surviving elsewhere? Why is it that none of the ma...

Greetings UniTaichi, As I mentioned, there are some variant characters in the card that jens posted. My translation was based on the received version of those first few lines of the Taijiquan Treatise. The last two characters (而生 bottom left) of the card appear to be wrong. Ordinarily they would rea...

Hi Sean,

Have a read through this old thread, which I think includes a link to a place where you can purchase the book.
http://www.yangfamilytaichi.com/phpBB3/ ... 41&start=0

--Louis

Here's another remarkable achievement from Paul Brennan -- a translation of some of Chen Yanlin's most interesting and valuable materials from his book, 太極拳刀劍桿散手合編 TAIJI COMPILED: THE BOXING, SABER, SWORD, POLE, AND SPARRING. http://brennantranslation.wordpress.com/2014/03/18/taiji-boxing-according-...

Greetings Jens, Those are the first few lines of the Taijiquan Treatise: Taiji, being born of wuji, is the mother of yin and yang. In movement it differentiates; in stillness it consoidates. It is without excess or insufficiency. Follow, bend, then extend. There appear to be some variant characters ...

Greetings Sean, If you like T'ai Chi Secrets of the Yang Style, you might also like his translations of the Wu and the Wu/Li traditions: http://www.amazon.com/Tai-Chi-Secrets-Style-Translations/dp/1886969175/ref=sr_1_50?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1394816994&sr=1-50&keywords=yang+jwing+ming ...

Greetings extrajoseph, Thank you for this information. I’ve found a downloadable pdf of Huang Wenshu’s 1936 book, and look forward to delving into that. So, roughly, According to Huang Wenshu, Mr. Tan Mengxian was a senior in the National Defense University of the early Republic whose deep study of ...

Greetings Audi, Re: Martin and Louis, could either of you explain what the Five Elements/Phases have to do with Zhou, or why "above" and "below" are singled out? Also, what are the "six jins" that are referred to? Those are good questions, and honestly, I don’t know the...

Greetings Martin,

Yes, I saw the Praying Mantis kaihuachui link as well, but outside of the Bafa mijue I've never encountered 開花捶 as a term of art in taijiquan. That makes me wonder if Tan Mengxian had a Praying Mantis connection.

Take care,
Louis

Greetings Martin, Nice to see you here in this forum, and this is good work you're doing. I very much agree with your analysis regarding the use of strategy. I've long found these texts, the bāfǎ mìjué 八法秘訣 of great interest. I've also wondered for a long time about their provenance. They are eviden...

Greetings Matt, I'm not very familiar with the Wu Mengxia materials, but I see a lot of translation problems in the Annotations page that you posted. The Chinese passage being translated can be found on this page: http://baike.baidu.com/view/8311973.htm It's not clear to me why the three characters ...

Greetings Audi, You wrote: ~~~ 5. 頂匾丢抗 "crash in, collapse, come away, or resist" I do not like some of the choices here. My understanding is along the lines of: "jutt out, collapse [good word], lose, or resist. I particular wonder about translating 頂者出頭之謂也 as "Crashing in means ...

I think I lost the equivalent of 2-3 years worth of training by thinking of many of the Chinese terms as only philosophical terms, rather than concrete ones. One of the things that initially impressed my most about the Yangs was how practical they seemed. Because of my experience, I tend to favor t...