C.J.W. wrote:Did I just felt an itch in my ear?
Just because fajin isn't expressed in the form practice doesn't mean it isn't there, my friend.
If you look at Bagua, Cheng style also favors smooth movements like Yang Taiji, while Yin style incorporated fajin. Would you say that Cheng style is less martially effective than Yin?
Granted, it's true that the vast majority of Yang stylists don't know a damn thing about fighting and are, in general, much less interested in combat applications than Chen stylists. The main reason being that the soft movements and appearance of Yang styles tend to attract folks who are more keen on the spiritual, cultural, and health-promoting aspects of the art. (There are Yang stylists who can fight, just relatively very few and far between given the large number of practitioners.)
In IMA, what you see isn't always what you get. What appears strong may actually be weak, and what seems weak may actually be......VERY strong.
I can agree with all of that.
I think we all get onto dodgy terrain when we start arguing about what Yang Lu Chan and anyone else longer back in the past did or intended or didn't intend, could or couldn't do. It's all conjecture. But as regards the present day: I have felt a good number of Yang or Wu practitioners, some better known, some less known, whose main or public form was "smooth and flowing", or maybe even "soft looking", with no explicit fajin or suchlike, and yet they could issue sudden, shocking, scary power that you didn't feel coming (and in this context a half-second warning would be defined as clear advanced notice). The other qualities and methods of these people were quite diverse, but they all fell into this basic category of "non-dramatic form / dramatic power when you touch them". That's not my opinion, it's my experience.
-- By 'Yang' I don't mean just (or even mainly) the 'traditional' Yang style but also various offshoots and further developments in the broader style.
And by 'dramatic power' I certainly don't mean staged presentations where a master knocks over a row of his own students or similar crap.
And of course, there's a wide range of auxiliary (solo) exercises for training fajin and similar qualities, some with (reverse) breathing, some with poles or other equipment, that form part of various Yang and Wu systems. Even when people do these exercises, their basic form remains "smooth".