How the heck did Taiji get a reputation?

[kenneth fish]

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.

[Rabbit]

I think it's really up to people like martialrainbowmagic who seem to have the energy and commitment to the art to prove it's validity...

[froggie]

+1
Great post Dr. Fish!

Is it safe to say that hippies are to blame for this mess?

[Daniel]

Good post, Dr Fish, thank you. It´s of course easier to make money from teaching pseudo-spiritual "Eastern" stuff than traditional MA or IMA - few people want to put in the time for that, or pay for it.


D.

Sarcasm. Oh yeah, like that´ll work.

[yusuf]

same as aikido.. a good, strong martial art turned into dancing with the ether, and then used as a yardstick of martial efficiency by people who have never been punched in their liver

[gzregorz]

Marketing...

[gzregorz]

Marketing...take a martial art, says it's meditation, say it's for chi, say it can also be used fighting and that doing it perfect is nearly impossible to do, those who don't do it are somehow inferior because it makes you a better person and some people will pay you through the nose to learn it.

The reality is old school taiji as a martial art just doesn't have a big market.

I hear the Communist promoted it for health (after the cultural rev of course).

[gzregorz]

same as aikido.. a good, strong martial art turned into dancing with the ether, and then used as a yardstick of martial efficiency by people who have never been punched in their liver

That's true too. Most Aikido people I
meet, not all, like to think they can kick ass but see doing all non-aikido as low level street fighting. In most cases these people are too out ot shape for full contact stuff anyway.

[jonathan.bluestein]

I'd agree that 99.5% of the Taiji these days, if not more, is no good for fighting, and that much of it isn't that superb for health either because it's practically "empty". But I'm not sure it's right to be as one-sided as saying it was always "no-good".

There's tons of material in real lineages of Li taiji that came out of old Yang taiji, that you can't see anywhere these days except in Li taiji. So either the Yang family had dropped/lost it, or they hide it and teach it to a few few. Either way, much of that stuff was fighting-oriented, including fast forms.

How about Wu family - Wu Quanyu and Wu Jianquan? Did they study anything apart from their style and the old Yang curriculum?

Nowadays you also see the younger Chen generation applying their taiji in a promising manner. And while you don't see people like Chen Yu, Xiaoxing or Xiaowang going into cages with gloves on, I don't think anyone would've volunteered trying these people in combat. Really now - I would never in my life would have volunteered taking one punch from these individuals.

I guess Mix can come in here with some stories of master Yang Hai, who learned Chen Taiji since childhood, and I'm sure wasn't wasting his time in terms of learning how to fight.

A bit lower on the globe there are people like Ruddy Curry who teach Taiji for real fighting.

I can't say I could judge the fighting skill of the benevolent late Montaigue, but he did have great gongfu, and presumably taught his Taiji for fighting as well. Can't tell you if that worked out for his students, but as far as I know he always had the fighting aspect in mind.

So while it's true that the majority of practitioners won't justify the stories, I think there were always the few who did posses fighting capabilities with this art.

[cerebus]

Well, like many others, I started off practicing Tai Chi solely as a method of relaxation & moving meditation to balance out my Shaolin & Northern Mantis training. When I came to the Internal Arts as martial arts, my first interest was Hsing-I.

Eventually I also learned a fair amount of Bagua, and finally Tai Chi again, but this time with a martial emphasis. Then I became a bit more interested in the martial aspects of Tai Chi and spent some time training Tai Chi almost exclusively and really working on maintaining the relaxation, alignments and body movement of my Tai Chi in sparring as well as learning certain "empty-body" training drills to make full use of Tai Chi in combat. Eventually it became pretty clear that Tai Chi was by far the most relaxed, powerful and efficient method of fighting I had learned yet and I went on to test it by fighting a big guy at a local biker club "tough man" contest with very satisfactory results.

Now I continue to train my other internal arts, though not so much for fighting as for physical & mental self development. Tai Chi is my fighting art these days and will probably stay so...

[cerebus]

Oh, and just to specify, I practice the Cheng Man Ching style of Tai Chi...

[Doc Stier]

The observations and comments offered by Dr. Fish and others are certainly true today on the whole.

Nonetheless, there are sufficient historical records from apparently credible eyewitnesses regarding Tai-Chi Chuan practitioners of the late 19th and early 20th centuries who reportedly possessed high level fighting skills. Successive generations in the founding families of each major TCC style apparently chose to edit and modify the earlier training methods of their respective styles in order to create a more widely marketable and profitable Name Brand product which emphasized qigong health exercise benefits and meditative spiritual self-cultivation benefits in lieu of the older emphasis on Tai-Chi Chuan as a soft style gung-fu to develop effective fighting skills.

Those who practiced the older training methods and material became a very small minority within a few decades time. Tai-Chi Chuan of nearly every variety was gradually viewed as nothing more than a slow motion health exercise for elderly folks who weren't physically capable of engaging in more athletic activities. And understandably, slow motion Tai-Chi Chuan was usually of little or no interest to those who desired real martial art skills.

However, small groups here and there were established and maintained around the increasingly rare older Chinese practitioners who had actually learned from and trained with pre-WWII teachers noted for their ability to effectively demonstrate practical Tai-Chi Chuan combat skills with impressive speed and power in applying their techniques. These groups continued practicing the same methods as the earlier generations of their style, rather than the newer edited and modified versions. In this way, the few who seriously trained the older Tai-Chi Chuan styles successfully perpetuated the knowledge and skills of the earlier generations, and continue to do so even today. But again, they represent a very small minority among the world's TCC practitioners, not the vast mainstream majority by any means.

[mixjourneyman]

Hey Greg: Mao promoted taijiquan as a health dance during the cultural revolution. Mao thought taiji was the cat's ass, as it were. As far as I know he even practiced it himself and was at the very least indirectly responsible for the standardization of the modern forms. Just fyi, the only taijiquan masters who suffered in the cultural revolution were people who fell out of political favor with Mao, the gang of four, or other slightly lower ranking officials who had feuds with them. Of course it was rather easy to fall out of favor with those people by just speaking your mind, so that is almost a moot point.
The basic thing though is that taijiquan was well loved by the Communist party and they really did promote it a lot.
Basically the communists were against the four olds, which were: 1: Old Customs, 2: Old Culture, 3: Old Habits, 4: and Old Ideas. Many things relating to taijiquan and traditional wushu fell under these four categories, but it did not mean that taijiquan as an art necessarily did.
Wang Peisheng is an excellent example of a taijiquan player who was persecuted, less because of his taijiquan, and more because of his political bad luck.
If you want, I can provide the relevant academic sources which site Mao's love of taijiquan.
I suspect that: Marrow of the Nation
A History of Sport and Physical Culture in Republican China
Andrew D. Morris

Would be a fairly good initial place to read about this, although Morris does tend to be more interested in Tiyu (Chinese Republican physical culture) than martial arts per se. Morris does however spend a significant amount of time breaking down taijiquan's role in both the Republican era and in and after the cultural revolution. Good read for sure!

[mixjourneyman]

Jonathan: indeed! My teacher loves taijiquan to the max. The majority of his personal practice is dedicated to taijiquan and he gets so excited when he makes a breakthrough in understanding. Having said that, one, a few years ago, I tried studying his taijiquan and had to give up. It is just too subtle and intricate. I think that unless you were willing to spend about four hours a day training jibengong, zhanzhuang, and maybe the first five moves of the form, for a good three years, it would be hard to ever really get anywhere with that branch of taiji. It really takes a lot of work. Having said that, he has at least two or three guys who really put in the work and are really freaky powerful and amazing.
I like to think that I'm pretty good at push hands, but when I push with my teacher, often he will barely move at all and I will sort of end up dancing around without any control of where my body and feet move. It is surreal


I personally think taijiquan has the most merit and benefit to people who have limited mobility, health problems, psychological stress/problems, substance abuse issues, or chronic injuries. Taijiquan can allow people to get back so much lost vitality and happiness. It is one of the best "natural" medicines in the world. I feel like the real secret of taiji is that it doesn't need to be the badassest martial art in the world, people can still get absolutely fantastic benefits from it, and that those benefits will always trump the ability to defeat another person in combat.

[donjitsu2]

I personally think taijiquan has the most merit and benefit to people who have limited mobility, health problems, psychological stress/problems, substance abuse issues, or chronic injuries. Taijiquan can allow people to get back so much lost vitality and happiness. It is one of the best "natural" medicines in the world. I feel like the real secret of taiji is that it doesn't need to be the badassest martial art in the world, people can still get absolutely fantastic benefits from it, and that those benefits will always trump the ability to defeat another person in combat.

That's actually pretty good point...maybe Taiji is better when you use it to fight "things" that aren't people....gives me something to think about.

Thanks man.