Taijiquan Is Not a Slow Choreography - Or Is It?
- 5 days ago
- 6 min read
Issue 1
Why We Are Different
by Prof. Dr. Dan Vercammen
Ever since I started practicing taijiquan (Tai Chi) in the late 1970s and especially since I engaged in the investigation of taijiquan’s history and backgrounds for my MA thesis¹, I’ve been trying to simultaneously train and protect the complete taijiquan. At first it was a difficult search. Imagine hardly a possibility to find Chinese books and knowledgeable teachers … I remember finding a small Chinese martial arts book published in Hong Kong in our local Chinese supermarket in 1980. What a joy! And then writing a letter in Chinese to the publisher to ask for a list of other publications about taijiquan. I ended up with two Chinese booklets on the subject.
What a luxury now to find almost anything one wants, thanks to the internet. Reading books on taijiquan (both in Western languages and a few in Chinese) in those days confused me. I found out that there were taijiquan classics, texts about how to practice and why taijiquan did things differently from other martial arts. It confused me, because I didn’t see the principles in the practice of my teachers.
The closest thing to what was described in the texts I discovered when watching Lee Ying Arng practicing taijiquan on video. My main taijiquan teacher played this video for me. It showed him doing his version of the Yang Style set, as well as applications. It wasn’t until I arrived in Shanghai in 1985 that I discovered that there were actually people who could practice the kind of taijiquan that was written about in the texts. Yet, there were also the others. It was obvious that taijiquan isn’t a uniform practice.
Most of the common taijiquan (or better, as they call it: “tai chi”) practitioners don’t believe you when you tell them that taijiquan is really a very effective martial art that combines softness and hardness, fights dirty, and wasn’t done slowly during the first decennia of its development. You get that effect with people because they associate the practice with the changes that Yang Chengfu, his circle, and some others made to the fighting art.
I’m not going to elaborate on the reasons why they did this (that’s stuff for another post), but it reflected a new wind blowing in the Chinese martial arts world. Once the trend was set, it evolved further in that direction and cumulated in a further simplification and popularization of taijiquan in order to produce a kind of Chinese gymnastics for old people. The easy-going way of this practice opened the door to not just the old but also the younger members of society with little time and little interest in hard practicing work. The Chinese use “taijicao” (taiji gymnastics) for this type of exercise, as opposed to taijiquan for the martial art.
My traditional taijiquan (i.e., the fighting type of taijiquan) teachers in China praised me for being able to “chi ku” (literally: “eat bitter”, the Chinese expression for being able to withstand hardship and suffer), a quality most of their Chinese students lacked. Hence, they made me do stances for 2 hours and train for most of the day. I had a lot of practice in those days, because it also required me riding my bike or walk a good distance to go from one training location to the other. Luckily, some places could be reached by bus, too (haha).
Another fun thing they did was throw me around (taijiquan contains Chinese wrestling techniques, similar to judo throws) or punch and kick me (and forbid me to hit them in return). I preferred that they took me to the grass in the parks and not do this to me on the stone floor in the cellar of the restaurant where we practiced … We wore sturdy shoes with thick soles to practice, not the soft cotton so-called “tai chi shoes”, because we would stamp on the floor frequently with a lot of force.
Contrary to what I was used to in Europe, we hardly did any set (or form) work. We only studied that part of the training after our taijijin (taiji energies) had developed enough to be used in one continuous movement. Free tuishou (pushing hands) and sanshou (sparring) were more important. I had to learn how to fight the taijiquan way.
They had observed that sparring and doing sets wasn’t a problem for me, having learnt tens of sets and full contact fighting in my southern martial arts days.2 The problem I faced was transforming the way I fought into real taijiquan.
In those days I still continued to learn slow taijiquan. This I did in the morning along with fellow students at Fudan University under the guidance of a sports teacher at Fudan University. This lasted until — after a few months — the number of participants had dwindled terribly. The teacher had probably become so frustrated by the lack of zeal that one morning he told me: “You take over the class, you’ve become better than me at taijiquan.”
Needless to say that the next week only a few disappointed students remained, and then they also quit, because the new teacher wasn’t Chinese … When I was back in Europe, I taught the standardized slow sets of 24 and 88 movements for a few years to most of my students, but made the shift to the traditional way of teaching that I had already introduced to a few willing disciples.
The martial type of taijiquan I learned in China came from the Dong (Yingjie) and Tian (Zhaolin) substyles of taijiquan, derived from the Yang family traditions. It is not the classical Dong or Tian style, however, having been modified by my predecessors to include more fighting and fast movements, and alchemical training. Yet, classical Dong taijiquan still retains a (semi-)fast set and Tian practitioners also learn how to fight.
The use of traditional weapons and body (and mind) conditioning contribute to developing defensive and offensive skills. These methods are all necessary to transform ordinary practice into a successful, complete training system. This is what we try to make available through our online and live courses.
What you should realize is that we make a deliberate choice to teach a full set of training methods and not just part of a(n often simplified) kind of sports or gymnastics. We do this because, in my experience, you gain most from this way of practicing and the results are lasting, not fleeting.
Does this mean — as people often assume — that I look down upon those who practice taijicao? Certainly not. Moving slowly, with simple movements can have very good effects, such as reducing stress levels and aiding blood circulation. If it’s your deliberate choice to practice this way, who am I to interfere with that?
Only, this is not what I want to offer, because I believe (no, I know for sure) that more can be obtained through the practice of complete, traditional taijiquan. But, because it demands much more effort and brings along some chi ku, it is not suitable for a lot of students. Fret not, dear people, there is enough of taijicao around. Unfortunately, there is too little complete taijiquan around.
My hope and my wish is that those who were contaminated by me to engage in the study of the full curriculum of taijiquan will continue to pass this way on. Then my predecessors will look down on us from the Immortals Palace in Heaven, smiling and content that their life’s work wasn’t in vain.
1 The subject of my MA thesis (1982) was “The Secretly Transmitted Yang Style Taijiquan”, an introduction to the history of taijiquan and a complete annotated translation of Wang Yannian’s book on his secret tradition of taijiquan (楊家秘傳太極拳）. In 1985 I started my research for my multidisciplinary PhD thesis in China, which was about the history, philosophy, and practice of the three so-called internal martial arts (taijiquan, baguazhang, and xin[g]yiquan) and their relationship with qigong and neidan (internal alchemy). I successfully defended this thesis in 1990 at Ghent University in Belgium and published several parts of it in Dutch and English.
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