the rum soaked fist: internal martial arts forum

Jake Mace is back, but here he is with Thad Wong, a Liang style teacher who learned (learns) with Tom Bisio. Thad is teaching some methods and applications of Liang style baguazhang - and he seems like an enthusiastic and meticulous teacher!

Some of my thoughts:
1. I like Jake! He seems quite open-minded and eager to learn more. His own style may not be everyone's cup of tea, but he definitely seems to train hard!
2. It was quite interesting to watch from a Liang style point of view as well - since the material is quite familiar to me, yet somewhat different, too.

If anyone ever finds videos of "rare" Liang style variants, like that of Chu Guiting (Shanghai) or Tian Jinfeng (Xi'an), I would love to see that, too!

video of Liang style Bagua by one of Zhu Guitings students

really like that explanation about 17:30 - 17:45 of his wedge and pierce.

on a tangent at about 0:35 (the slow mo clip is shown a few times) looks like an application of brush knee (the "brushing" / pull) hand is high in this instance. this is more about the height of wu(hao) form of "brush knee". and the other hand is "brushed". and normally there isn't a sideways hammer fist haha.

At the beginning of this clip is Zhang Huasen with Tom. Look at the way ZHS moves - all I can say is that he is impossibly relaxed. You've got to touch hands with him to understand.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=17Q6bBsaLb0

ZHS studied Liang Zhenpu bagua with Li Ziming for 30 years or so ...

what's always interesting to me about good baguazhang clips is you can see as much subtlety and "internal" as you want as you might in taijiquan, but the angles and mechanics are always so clear that even if one can't do every or any bit of "internal", things are still super clear and look workable and learnable.

kenneth fish wrote:video of Liang style Bagua by one of Zhu Guitings students

i would not say that Chu GuiTing was Liang's successor
(which the video says)

he actually had many bagua teachers
and sort of created his own thing

but from the video -- you can see that the changes are mostly based on Sun style with a little modification



franklin

He seems quite open-minded and eager to learn more.

I used to collect techniques when I was a kid. Any MA book was fine if the technique looked cool.

But I must say that I appreciate Mace as a dummy. He is willing to fall and doesn’t do anything to obstruct or make it hard for the bagua dude. Seems to be a pretty good training partner.

Thanks Kenneth - I will have to find time to watch through that!

Chu Guiting is quite interesting in the Liang lineage - although he was officially Liang Zhenpu's disciple in baguazhang, he had already been a disciple of Li Cunyi in xingyiquan, but many disciples of Li learned much baguazhang as well. I do think it would have been hard for Chu to learn on a continual basis from Liang, since Liang was based in Beijing, while Chu was in Shanghai. I think that a lot of Liang style was standardized by Guo Gumin and less so by Li Ziming later on, so Chu's style is interesting to see, although the Li Cunyi, etc. influence is probably very strong.

Technique-wise, Liang style is very heavily influenced by Six-harmony boxing and Yue-style Sanshou, which is clearly shown in the video clips posted here. Personally, I'm much more interested in knowing more about the internal aspects of Liang style as opposed to the run-of-the-mill qinna and applications.

Are you familiar with Six harmony boxing or Yue-style sanshou? (I am not, but I thought the latter might be related to eagle claw.) I don't think that the techniques shown are unique to Liang style, though.

They say that the 64 straight-line combat techniques of Liang style came from Liu Dekuan, who was a student of the Dong Haichuan and taught the techniques to Liang style founder Liang Zhenpu. Prior to Bagua training, Liu was already an adept in Six Harmony boxing and Yue-style sanshou, which is how those qinna techniques found their way into the combat set he created, and later incorporated into Liang style.

While I can't say I'm familiar with Six-Harmony boxing, the movements and some of the applications of Liang's 64 combat techniques are quite similar to Yue-style sanshou (a.k.a. Yue-style Bafanshou), which also consists of 8 sets of linear forms.

The 64 hands were added to Liang style by Guo Gumin (who learned from Liu Dekuan), not by Liang Zhenpu; in any case, the 64 hands can also be found in other baguazhang styles in Beijing, such as some Cheng styles (e.g. Liu Jingru - I think he had two versions, one classic one, and a more "Cheng-ified" version). Wang Peisheng also taught a rather modified version.

Might be interesting to compare with Yue shi sanshou (which I guess you may have embedded, but I cannot see now!).

edededed wrote:The 64 hands were added to Liang style by Guo Gumin (who learned from Liu Dekuan), not by Liang Zhenpu; in any case, the 64 hands can also be found in other baguazhang styles in Beijing, such as some Cheng styles (e.g. Liu Jingru - I think he had two versions, one classic one, and a more "Cheng-ified" version). Wang Peisheng also taught a rather modified version.
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Interesting. The Chinese sources I read claim that Liang learned from Liu directly, and it was Liang who later passed it down to Guo Gumin and Li Ziming.
But regardless of who taught who, there's no doubt that it originally came from Liu.

Ed, there isn't a one-to-one correspondence, but if you look at 64 hands set there are many many similarities in technique and flavour/shenfa to Yue Jia Sanshou, to me it is pretty obvious that the 64 hands came from Yue style sanshou (and not Liuhe Men). Obviously just my .02 cents, YMMV, etc.

Most everyone agrees that it came from Liu for sure!

Hey Nick - hope you're well. The 64 hands actually has a 1-to-1 correspondence to the old 8 palms, too - linking very well to other material. I will have to take a look at Yue shi sanshou myself to see the relationships with that! But you can also see some xingyi- and taiji-like methods mixed in as well (and Liu certainly practiced those styles, too).