kenneth fish wrote:First - I am not a taiji practitioner (although I spent a lot of time and sweat and energy learning taiji). I am old enough to remember when darn near nobody knew what Taiji was, and even fewer people practiced it - even in the Chinese community. In the early 1960's, you might have seen a few old people practicing in the park in SF, but that's about it. Even in New York, with a relatively large Chinatown for its time had nothing really in terms of Taiji. Nor was it respected as a system of martial arts - it was a calisthenic for old people. The situation in Hong Kong and Taiwan was pretty much the same - there was a lot of martial arts training available, but Taiji was basically something that old people did, and for good reason. There was no public record of Taiji teachers having much in the way of real martial arts ability - especially not in comparison to the giants of traditional martial arts who were around in those days (Hong Kong and Taiwan were chock full of great teachers- think Liu Fameng, Zhang Dekui, He Niu, Yip Man and so on).
In those days if any Tiaji teachers made absurd claims, they would quickly find themselves being asked to put their money where their mouth is - usually resulting in lost teeth or loss of face.
Then came the late 1960's and the 1970's. Somehow, especially in the West, Taiji gained a reputation as a martial art without being put to the test - I believe most of this was the result of Westerners promoting it in America and the UK, and the Chinese being all to happy to jump on the gravy train. Also, the Mainland government, eager to promote martial arts without martial content, began to publicly promote the alleged health benefits of Taiji among its people en masse.
This is not to say that there were not famous, highly capable fighters who also did taiji - but pretty much to a man they all owed their skill to earlier study of something else - for example Guo Lianying - his Shaolin was superb. Taiji came later in his career.
Now we are at an even more absurd juncture, where the dialogue regarding Chinese martial arts uses Taijiquan as a yardstick to measure the worth of other Chinese martial arts. Even more laughable, the highly unskilled Chinese martial arts landscape in the West has polluted the waters in Taiwan, China, and Southeast Asia - the "search for spiritual development" through Taiji and related tripe is now commonplace. It is the martial arts choice of the athletically disinclined who want nothing to do with the violence inherent in actual martial arts training.
This is not to say that there are not valuable things to learn from training a framework of movements slowly, delving deeply into the mechanical forces and coordinations inherent, explicit, and implied in any system of CMA - but even this is seldom seen in Taiji practice, both here and abroad - this takes sweat, concentration, intuition, and hours upon hours of work.
From my point of view, the good currency has been driven out by the bad.
Excellent post that raises some interesting questions. No doubt there are some TCC players who can scrap but many many more who cannot.
The same can be said of Kung Fu in general.
I suppose it all comes down to why we train and how we train it.
