Trick wrote:...DaLiu and Zheng Manqing as I understand referred to the I-Ching and the Tao(Taoism?) in their writing and teaching of Tai Chi...warriorprincess wrote:The Taoist connection I heard, again from my friend, was encouraged by the hippies in the 60's & 70's.
Da Liu studied I Ching and had a great interest in it. Just about everyone who wrote about Tai Chi and IMA from the very beginning of the 20th century connected their teachings to Daoism. The older Tai Chi classics also has a clear relationship to Daoism.
warriorprincess wrote:Isn't Tai Chi as most people know it (slow form, meditative) only about 100 years old? The story I heard was that Tai Chi masters were asked to teach the general public as there were not many doctors. They took out the jumping and stamping (Chen excepted) and slowed the martial forms down. This is mainly from a Wu style friend of mine but I can't imagine that all other forms of TC were already slow.
The original Chen small frame was not very athletic, so not everything called Chen boxing was very strenuous. Yang Luchan created his own medium/large frame to introduce to officials and literati. The upper class never did anything that could make them sweat. Most of them would never practice hard kung fu and they looked down on "boxers." So Yang Luchan needed to teach it mainly as a health art and make the movements more visually appealing to attract the clientele.
Yang style was probably not taught extremely slow. Probably it was YCF who slowed it down and made it even more bigger because he taught very big classes with a lot of people who should be able to see and follow what happened. It's only some of the YCF and CMC schools that emphasise the ultra slow practice, the rest of them don't. Wu style had originally only the fast form, but introduced the slow and square versions only because Yang style had became popular.