Trick wrote:everything wrote:piquan has the drilling up before the downward, right? if you can drill up, you can go straight forward. drilling/turning already has inside-out and outside-in. hence piquan is the "mother". yes, i'm mini-obsessed with boiling everything down to the "mother palm" so to speak. it makes sense why Bruce Lee or Wang Xiangzhai wanted to "reduce" to "formlessness" or "void" (to reference a different 5 elements term).
actually Heng is often considered as the mother, but im with the Pi on that.
all the elements has a couple of variations, but with Pi its own variations extends quite clear into the other elements and explored further in the animal shapes.
edit - i see wayne mentioned Heng already.
really interesting. i know little about xingyiquan mostly from reading here, but it's odd that we have a lot of different answers. i thought santishi is the main stance for zhan zhuang, and in a related fashion, pi quan into santishi is kind of the "main thing" to do as part of building that foundation. perhaps that is a common misunderstanding? not sure. i don't understand why they would "hold" the "end" of pi quan, but actually build from heng quan (other than it's a big cycle, which i'm really not into, either). maybe some xingyi folks will explain.