Thoughts about Chen - Yang TJQ and so on

[Trick]

i dont know to make of that interview!? before they(yangs) did some moves quick and crisp, and some moves slower and flowing(and yet he seem not to understand YCF's slower smothier form?) And in pre YCF taijiquan there where more sparring, from prearrange to free sparring. And if you really had to fight you had to be ruthless ......I dont know, maybe this info is mindblowing to some.

Have you come to any conclusion yet?

well, almost the same as Wayne wrote.

[Trick]

and that the interviwed despite being an advanced student of an great master still seem not to understand Taiji the fullest. well gdmmit isnt that an bombastic conclusion by me

[Bao]

and that the interviwed despite being an advanced student of an great master still seem not to understand Taiji the fullest.

Why? How do you mean?

[Trick]

his method seemingly limited to bone breaking and more sinister way, so sinister he cant talk about them.....one sided skill

[Bao]

his method seemingly limited to bone breaking and more sinister way, so sinister he cant talk about them.....one sided skill

One sided? I don't get that feeling from reading the interview (encountered this interview many years ago and have read it a few times) But one-sided is what Chang Yiu-Chun claims about YCF Tai Chi.

"When my teacher used to do his T'ai chi ch'uan, we would often say that he was like a canon shot one second and like the great river in the next second. He was very energetic. The Yeung Cheng-po style is all soft and flowing with no canon shots. "

"He (YCF) was quite large and strong and he could also be quite brutal in his pushing hands but he learnt the original style first."

What he says is that the YCF Tai Chi was YCF's own invention and that he discarded half of the art and made some practice (san shou) less brutal. From having both sides, YCF style had only one side, the soft one. Chang Yiu-Chun also says that they practiced PH for sensitivity but that they put emphasis on combat early. This doesn't make Yang Shaohou only brutal or only hard. Instead he says that what he did had both sides, the soft and flowing as well.

"Many people watched him (YCF) practice the original style and he even taught a few people. But when he invented his own style and changed it over a few years, all of his students forgot about the original style. "

This though is a simplification, because most of YCF's top students also studied with Yang Jianhou and/or Yang Shouhou. So to say that they received and taught only the soft side is wrong. Methods and exercises from Yang Shaohou is still taught in YCF lineages.

Oh, BTW, Erle Montaigue clams that Chang Yiu-Chun was his teacher. He probably met him briefly in 1981, doubt that it was his teacher for any extensive period. There are no other sources on this person than the interview, so some people says that it was Erle who made him up. But as the interview is said to be from the middle of the seventies, I doubt it. Erle probably got very inspired by it though.

Would like more about who did the interview. I've read a mentioning about that it was someone with the family name "Hu".

[Steve James]

There may be loads of people practicing the original style in the original way, but there's no way to confirm that what they are doing is "the best" at anything at all.

[Bao]

IMO, the point is not to absolutely find the first or most original or authentic stuff. It's more about personal improvement. Some things make more sense than other things. Some things are more complete than other things. If you don't constantly keep researching and try to discover things, it's hard to known what you lack. If you just want to practice something anything whatever, then none if this matter.

[Steve James]

Bao, let me put it this way. There's never been a need to claim that Taijiquan is the best martial art. It doesn't need to be the best to be worthwhile. Researching what is the best for "you" is fine. Imo, there are too many people claiming that everyone else's shit is fake because they know the "real" deal.

I'm really a heretic. I don't believe that YLC was invincible. So, I don't think tcc was ever the best, even with the old time training. I would say that even if someone does exactly what the old timers did (i.e., full time ma), he won't be invincible, invulnerable, immortal, and will have only a slightly better chance of choking out Royce. Jmo.

My suggestion is that the only way to keep it real is to keep it humble. There's a huge disconnect between what tcc practitioners say about their own style and what they and much of the martial arts community say about tcc. It's either the supreme ultimate or just bullshit. Yeah, the truth lies somewhere in the middle for ALL of them.

[salcanzonieri]

okay, yeah, but pretty much everyone went far away from the original intention of my first post on the first page. And only Bao seems to understand me, i think,

What I am saying is that I believe that one can improve one's knowledge and then skill and then ability by understanding the roots of where one's martial art come from.
(The Okinawan and Japanese karate people went far back to their Chinese roots to refresh their art and to improve its' efficiency and effectiveness)

For me, over the span of 35 years, I learned Shaolin martial arts first, like Louhan and Taizhu Chang Quan and Hong Quan and Tong Bei. Then Shuai Jiao, and then internal Shaolin like Chang Yuan Gong and Luohan 13 Postures Gong and Rou Gong and Rou Quan. and THEN, when I learned Taiji, Xingyi, Bagua, I picked it up quicker and understood the forms better because I saw right away that i already learned most of it, just the big 3 internal arts had a different ("Taoist") strategy. The Big 3 Internal Chinese Martial Arts were essentially Shuai Jiao & Shaolin mechanics with Taoist Internal Arts moving strategy, in the long run.
And, it served me well, around the world, in self defense situations, as necessary. Even when stuck in middle of a riot in Germany. When I moved it was all one merged style, I felt where the Shuai Jiao (root of Shaolin), Shaolin, XYQ, TJQ, BGZ converged, in that order. A self defense movement was all at once being in all those styles at the same time.

So, as an experiment, recently, a 73 year old woman that learned the internal Shaolin sets named above with me for the last 10 years and had as a result strong lower dantein Qi movement and internal strength wanted to learn Yang Long form. She got the YCF long form in 4 weeks, she understood, from the internal forms we practiced for 10 years the antecedents of the postures and movements (example, for Brush Knee Twist Step, all I had to say was "oh, it's just the 2nd movement in the Chan Yuan Gong we did all these years) and she got it with minimal struggle. So, now we moved on to doing an "Old Yang" middle frame set that makes the YCF set seem too easy.

So, I would love to show people the missing "13 Postures" form, sometimes called The Yang Small Frame/Fast Form is still in existence in it's original form in these Shaolin Qigong sets, and if you examine them, you can not only understand the body mechanics of the Chen and Yang (and Wu, etc) forms, but you can see the applications right away, because in Shaolin you can fight (as in use Self defense) with Qi Gong sets as well as their Boxing sets. In fact, you can use a staff with these Qigong sets, the 13 postures, which means you can turn the TJQ long form into a staff form by just being shown this and understanding this and opening your mind to a whole other thing that is inherent inside the Long Form but locked away because TJQ practitioners today don't know the roots of their style. I am sure some people do. Some monks like Shi Di Gen has shown me that they know it and the Wu Gu Lin school knows it..
Famous master Zhang Ce understood it, and did many others, like Sun Lu Tang.

[wayne hansen]

Enough talk ,show us

[Trick]

his method seemingly limited to bone breaking and more sinister way, so sinister he cant talk about them.....one sided skill

One sided? I don't get that feeling from reading the interview (encountered this interview many years ago and have read it a few times) But one-sided is what Chang Yiu-Chun claims about YCF Tai Chi.

"When my teacher used to do his T'ai chi ch'uan, we would often say that he was like a canon shot one second and like the great river in the next second. He was very energetic. The Yeung Cheng-po style is all soft and flowing with no canon shots. "

"He (YCF) was quite large and strong and he could also be quite brutal in his pushing hands but he learnt the original style first."

What he says is that the YCF Tai Chi was YCF's own invention and that he discarded half of the art and made some practice (san shou) less brutal. From having both sides, YCF style had only one side, the soft one. Chang Yiu-Chun also says that they practiced PH for sensitivity but that they put emphasis on combat early. This doesn't make Yang Shaohou only brutal or only hard. Instead he says that what he did had both sides, the soft and flowing as well.

"Many people watched him (YCF) practice the original style and he even taught a few people. But when he invented his own style and changed it over a few years, all of his students forgot about the original style. "

This though is a simplification, because most of YCF's top students also studied with Yang Jianhou and/or Yang Shouhou. So to say that they received and taught only the soft side is wrong. Methods and exercises from Yang Shaohou is still taught in YCF lineages.

Oh, BTW, Erle Montaigue clams that Chang Yiu-Chun was his teacher. He probably met him briefly in 1981, doubt that it was his teacher for any extensive period. There are no other sources on this person than the interview, so some people says that it was Erle who made him up. But as the interview is said to be from the middle of the seventies, I doubt it. Erle probably got very inspired by it though.

Would like more about who did the interview. I've read a mentioning about that it was someone with the family name "Hu".

yes the interviwed teacher probably got the whole part, the interviewed seemingly just got the "cannon shot" part. but then he was probably (just)a rufian shield for his teacher so his teacher wouldnt get his hands dirty

[Trick]

if the Earl Montague's taiji is the whole real deal taijiquan, they can have it for themself

[Bao]

if the Earl Montague's taiji is the whole real deal taijiquan, they can have it for themself

Well it's not, so you don't need to worry about that. He merely put together small pieces from here and there and made up a whole lot of things.

[Trick]

"(The Okinawan and Japanese karate people went far back to their Chinese roots to refresh their art and to improve its' efficiency and effectiveness)"
okinawa and china have a long history together but only a few okinawans went to china for the purpose of learning hand to hand combat. mostly and firstly it was tea trade i believe

[Trick]

if the Earl Montague's taiji is the whole real deal taijiquan, they can have it for themself

Well it's not, so you don't need to worry about that. He merely put together small pieces from here and there and made up a whole lot of things.

yes thats how i inderstand it. was that interview made public by him? if so i wouldnt take it seriously