Category: Theory and Practice

There is a saying that “It takes four hands to learn Tai Chi” (obviously one can still learn with a disability, this is just a saying). Posture correction is important in learning of any styles, but in Tai Chi in particular, having that tactile interaction is very important. Without touching, one cannot know what yielding 走化 really means. Without touching, one cannot feel the difference in power generation. This is why at Sifu’s workshops, anybody can touch him, to feel what it’s like.

Tai Chi must be learned with your body, to train the neuromuscular system (what Tai Chi call Ting Jin 聽勁). It’s not about rote imitation of postures or moves.

I hesitate to put lessons up on the web for these reasons. Maybe Qigong exercises, but not Tai Chi or Standing. There are some teachers who do, and some of them are my friends. More power to them.

Sifu learned from many great teachers, among them was grandmaster Han Xingyuan, one of the two “Han brothers” who learned from Yiquan Founder Wang Xiangzhai. The primary training method of Yiquan is Standing Meditation. Seemingly paradoxically, Standing can train strength without the traditional external methods such as lifting weights or punching bags.

There were times when I asked Sifu, “when someone does this, I don’t know what to do”, and he would say “you need to do more standing”. There is a saying, “Without Standing, there is no understanding”. The benefits of Standing is immense indeed.

There is a story of Ben Lo, who learned from Cheng Manching, stayed in the hospital bed for months and could only move one arm. So he continued his training by doing “Standing Meditation” (not a contradiction if you know the true meaning of Standing) with just one raised arm. He credited his power came from this period of training.

To me, this is the Yang side (as in Yin Yang, not Yang style per se) of the internal martial arts.

A natural question is, can people only practice Tai Chi without Standing practice develop these power, and… I do not know. All I know is that this system works for me. As Sifu said, “everyone needs to find their own happy medium” and I have found mine.

One of Sifu’s signatures is “no force” (not “Empty Force”, i.e. bouncing people without touching them) but yielding without force, and even when expressing force (Fajin 發勁) the force seems to come in as a wave, not as a focused point.

This yielding with no force is contrary to what I learned before. When first doing that, a common mistake – which I myself made plenty of, is trying too hard to be soft and yielding. It’s not based on true Song (non-collapsed relaxing 鬆). The first step is to train the sensitivity of you skin and learn to Song. Once I started to get past that hurdle, then the problem became that my yielding just wasn’t that great, and people who used force would easily trapped me.

There is no magic. Sifu said “everything is in the form” – mobilize with Qi, learn to move the joints, and harmonize external and internal. On one side, your arm has a wrist joint, elbow and shoulder joints. Beyond the arm, you have hip, knee, foot joints. If they trap you on one side, you have the other side. The Classics says “Stick, adhere, link, and follow”. Yielding then is just the understanding “in your body” of these core concepts and principles, plus the principle of Zhong Ding 中定.

We can say that this is the Yin side of Tai Chi.

While some people practice Tai Chi for health, other people practice for the martial arts aspects, sometimes preferring to call what they do Tai Chi Chuan (Chuan being the pinyin for the word “fist” 拳). Some in the latter camp even go as far as saying that when Elder Yang Chengfu created the Yang large frame that, he “watered down” the martial aspects and the popular YCF forms are only good for health and useless for fighting.

The truth is that Yang Tai Chi has always been about both. Of course, the fighting forms such as the Fast Form train the fighting art more, but the difference between Tai Chi for health vs. for fighting really has more to do with the use of Yi 意. Sifu Sam Tam could bounce you with Tai Chi – long force that feel like being hit by a wall but no shock to the body, or with Xing Yi, where it feels like being hit by a pole, to Yiquan, where it feels like being hit by a jackhammer, and the difference is the Yi – the mind intent. The move and internal is exactly the same. Elder Wong Yongquan said the same thing.

To fight, as my good friend Michael Phillips used to say, “you need bullets in your barrel”, and Tai Chi and other internal martial arts do give you different types of “bullets” different from other martial arts.

In 2020s, unless you engage in sports or street fighting, being able to fight is not of primary concern for most people. The form that Sifu taught me is slow and gentle, like other Yang Tai Chi forms. It is also true that the moves can turn into applications, hidden in plain sight. But in the end, practicing Tai Chi improves balance, lower blood pressure, and provides much health benefits and that’s more important to all of us as we age.

Of course not all forms are the same, but finding the right teacher is more important. Look for the quality you want to study or improve on, and find the right teacher that will give you that.