jjy5016 wrote:Why do you think taiji is different?
The classics talk about the waist being the commander and power being directed by the waist.
To me they are both the same in this respect.
To be more precise the
Tai Chi classic you mentions says: (and I'm sure somebody here will want to quibble about the exact translation, but just ignore that - you get the general sense of what it's talking about anyway)
"The chin [intrinsic strength] should be
rooted in the feet,
generated from the legs,
controlled by the waist, and
manifested through the fingers."
Note - the feet and legs being a big part of generating force that is then commaned or controlled by the waist (which is the bit you quoted).
Later, you can see in the same classic how the legs and waist are considered together, and the unit that drives things:
"The principle of adjusting the legs and waist
applies for moving in all directions;
upward or downward,
advancing or withdrawing,
left or right."
In contrast Hsing-I classics tend to go more for the idea of everything being the driving force together:
"The top wishes to move, the bottom automatically follows. The bottom wishes to move the top will automatically lead. The center section moves, the top and the bottom will coordinate. Internal and external are combined, the front and the rear mutually required. This is what is called threading into one."
This to me sounds more like what you are describing that your teacher was explaining - the machine gun like effect.
Historically Hsing-I and Tai Chi Chuan evolved separately. It was in the early 20th that people (like Sun Lu Tang) started mixing them together and call it all Neijia (sure, they didn't invent the term, but they owned it), hence you get the intermingling of ideas which I should stress isn't necessarily a bad thing, but if you look at the history of Hsing-I (and its precursor XinYi, which I consider all as evolutions of the same art) then its a relatively new phenomena in the lifetime of the art.
This idea might seem crazy (and very controversial) to people today, in the post "neijiaquan" world, where it's all about the 'ground path' and 'peng' in all 3 arts equally, but just look at the history on a timeline. In fact, I have no expectation of anyone to really agree with this, but just ask that you put aside preconceptions and look at the history and classics with fresh eyes.