So this releasing crap just keeps going, huh?

Discussion on the three big Chinese internals, Yiquan, Bajiquan, Piguazhang and other similar styles.

Re: So this releasing crap just keeps going, huh?

Postby windwalker on Tue Mar 21, 2023 9:51 am

robert wrote:
charlie_cambridge wrote:My first CMC teacher was Liam Comerford 2001-2007, then Ben Lo 2008-2010 (most senior student of CMC in US). I trained what they taught me (holding low one legged postures every day etc) until I met PK in 2014.

I have a question if you don't mind. There's a video of ZMQ discussing qi circulation and taijiquan.
It's not clear if he taught students how to circulate qi while they did the form.
Did Ben Lo teach students how to circulate qi while they did the form?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r0tLYajHBm8


Sharing some of my experience with Ben...
Me a student of the time from another teacher "Professor Ken Wen Chi, “亓冠文”
who had trained under ZMQ in Taiwan, recommend that I stop in
to meet Ben and check out his classes...

Which I would do when visiting my Home town SF
as a drop in from time to time...did have time to chat with him before and after
the training sessions. ..



Some thoughts

He didn't expressly talk about the qi flow, but did use alignments in the opening posture among others, mentioning that it was used to connect the Qi....
The connection ie flow was self evident. Doing the from according to his standard, provided one was able to meet his requirements it was also self evident.


Ben, like other noted teachers i've meet...did have his own limitations based on his experience relative to "Qi"
In other words, based on some conversations with him. what he could not do, nor had experienced in his opinion was still a question to him...
Understandable.

He had some other students open their own gym

"Martin Inn founded the IRI and has taught T’ai Chi Ch’uan for over 50 years. With Benjamin Lo, he is the co-translator of The Essence of T’ai Chi Ch’uan and Cheng Tze’s Thirteen Treatises on T’ai Chi Ch’uan. "

"Here T’ai Chi classes are taught with the emphasis on the development of the ch’i with respect to the wisdom of Traditional Chinese Medicine.
The purpose and goals of the school are to teach and develop the art of T’ai Chi Ch’uan as a tool for improving one’s health.
Through the understanding of one’s ch’i energy, one may embrace more fully life’s treasures of harmony and happiness.




Ben was very strict in his method of training...

also very funny at times...

Once when correcting me...he said " with this finger I can move you"
testing my posture with his small finger placed at the small of my back..

I looked at him and said "yes this is true, but its the finger of a taiji master "

he stopped thought about it, laughed saying " you'r right"
Last edited by windwalker on Tue Mar 21, 2023 11:06 am, edited 4 times in total.
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Re: So this releasing crap just keeps going, huh?

Postby origami_itto on Tue Mar 21, 2023 10:00 am

robert wrote:
charlie_cambridge wrote:My first CMC teacher was Liam Comerford 2001-2007, then Ben Lo 2008-2010 (most senior student of CMC in US). I trained what they taught me (holding low one legged postures every day etc) until I met PK in 2014.

I have a question if you don't mind. There's a video of ZMQ discussing qi circulation and taijiquan. It's not clear if he taught students how to circulate qi while they did the form.


I have to mention Da Liu again here. He was a student .. maybe roommate for a while if memory serves me... of ZMQ in New York and in his book T'ai Chi Ch'uan and meditation, he outlines specifically how the movements of their own accord stimulate qi flow in the lesser and then greater heavenly circulation. Assisting with the mind I guess makes it more powerful.

It's pretty common teaching that his opening with the hands flat and bending the wrists in a particular way is meant to stimulate and open the meridians, and his method of doing repulse monkey with parallel feet is intended to help open the lower gates that make that stuff work in the first place.
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Re: So this releasing crap just keeps going, huh?

Postby charlie_cambridge on Tue Mar 21, 2023 12:43 pm

Hi Robert,

Short answer:
Not explicitly when I trained with him. At his 2005 summer East Coast Salisbury camp (my second weeklong camp with Ben, where I met him prior to moving to the Bay Area in 2007), one person asked him a question about that, something along the lines of "what about the qi?" She had been to a number of camps and had a certain personality and was sort of deliberately asking to provoke her expected "Ben Lo" response, and as expected he simply replied "you'd don't have any yet, don't worry about it. [i.e. go hold more posture and do more form etc]"

As a random aside, I only saw many years later the first camp I met Ben Lo at was actually recorded, here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=12K2fxfuvvQ
I had long hair, looking on in background at 1:57 while Ben was pushing with Russ.

A year or two ago Michael Jang shared a tumblr archive of private Ben Lo footage: https://jangarchives.tumblr.com/
one of them was a clip of Ben speaking to a Berkeley crowd (back in 70s or 80s?) with Lenzie in attendance, and Ben telling the crowd explicitly that back in Taiwan he had 100s of things but here in US no one can do them right so he only focuses on 5 most basic principles. Somehow over the years that messaging changed such that many of his US students (and I don't blame him based on the way he taught at the camps I was at) are very clear in their understanding that "Ben has 5 key principles"...
My personal experience is that Ben knew much more than he taught. He made a comment at his camp once that if a teacher has one good student, then that's proof it's the other students' fault (if their taiji is terrible) not the teacher's, and I found that quite telling.

Longer answer:
Do you have anything specific in mind when you ask about "circulating the qi"? We generally don't like to talk about "qi" in the context of taiji because it's easily confused and misunderstood, and used broadly to mean many different things. For example "qi" could simply mean air or breath, but that's not the meaning in the taiji/daoist context. In the daoist context Qi could also be used generically to refer to the entire system of Jing, Qi [same word but more specific meaning referring to middle dantian/deep emotional here], Shen. In a martial art context often when people speak of qi (or ki in Japanese) they are referring to a specific elastic power and organization of the muscles (what we call Jin as opposed to contractile Li in taiji), maybe also coupled with some strong intention and activation.
In taiji we also speak of yi > qi > li (or mind intent > energizing > activation > forces > movement), where "qi" refers to a system of energizing and activation that our intention causes that precedes the muscles beginning to generate force. These are all related but different things, and a bit confusing when the same word "qi" is used to refer to all of them.

If you are talking about moving the mind through the body to move the body's energy field, Huang and PK teach that very deliberately (it's one of the most important components of the training), but we generally don't use the term "qi" because people often have so many conceptions about the word "qi" that they can easily imagine things that are completely off from what we are actually talking about.

Personally I'm pretty sure Ben Lo knew about this but he did not speak of it during my time with him. Only after studying with PK where he teaches very clearly and specifically what to look for, did some of Ben's less obvious "tics" (that I only observed him spontaneously do say maybe once for a moment in ten+ hours, and that previously I and probably most of his students either dismissed as random tics or did not even notice) make more sense to me.

robert wrote:
charlie_cambridge wrote:My first CMC teacher was Liam Comerford 2001-2007, then Ben Lo 2008-2010 (most senior student of CMC in US). I trained what they taught me (holding low one legged postures every day etc) until I met PK in 2014.

I have a question if you don't mind. There's a video of ZMQ discussing qi circulation and taijiquan. It's not clear if he taught students how to circulate qi while they did the form. Did Ben Lo teach students how to circulate qi while they did the form?

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Re: So this releasing crap just keeps going, huh?

Postby robert on Tue Mar 21, 2023 2:05 pm

charlie_cambridge wrote:Short answer:
Not explicitly when I trained with him. At his 2005 summer East Coast Salisbury camp (my second weeklong camp with Ben, where I met him prior to moving to the Bay Area in 2007), one person asked him a question about that, something along the lines of "what about the qi?" She had been to a number of camps and had a certain personality and was sort of deliberately asking to provoke her expected "Ben Lo" response, and as expected he simply replied "you'd don't have any yet, don't worry about it. [i.e. go hold more posture and do more form etc]"

...
A year or two ago Michael Jang shared a tumblr archive of private Ben Lo footage: https://jangarchives.tumblr.com/
one of them was a clip of Ben speaking to a Berkeley crowd (back in 70s or 80s?) with Lenzie in attendance, and Ben telling the crowd explicitly that back in Taiwan he had 100s of things but here in US no one can do them right so he only focuses on 5 most basic principles. Somehow over the years that messaging changed such that many of his US students (and I don't blame him based on the way he taught at the camps I was at) are very clear in their understanding that "Ben has 5 key principles"...

Thanks. I understand Ben's response. There's a training progression and you have to develop certain abilities before you're shown the next step. Windwalker mentioned the first step in his response, the idea that the body needs to be connected.


charlie_cambridge wrote:Longer answer:
Do you have anything specific in mind when you ask about "circulating the qi"? We generally don't like to talk about "qi" in the context of taiji because it's easily confused and misunderstood, and used broadly to mean many different things. For example "qi" could simply mean air or breath, but that's not the meaning in the taiji/daoist context. In the daoist context Qi could also be used generically to refer to the entire system of Jing, Qi [same word but more specific meaning referring to middle dantian/deep emotional here], Shen. In a martial art context often when people speak of qi (or ki in Japanese) they are referring to a specific elastic power and organization of the muscles (what we call Jin as opposed to contractile Li in taiji), maybe also coupled with some strong intention and activation.
In taiji we also speak of yi > qi > li (or mind intent > energizing > activation > forces > movement), where "qi" refers to a system of energizing and activation that our intention causes that precedes the muscles beginning to generate force. These are all related but different things, and a bit confusing when the same word "qi" is used to refer to all of them.

It is difficult to talk about. There is an aspect of qi written about in CIMA.

以心行氣。務沈著。乃能收歛入骨。所謂命意源頭在腰隙也。

Use the heart/mind to circulate qi. Sink the qi, then it is able to collect and enter the bone (spine), the song says: "the command comes from the yao (waist/lower back)".


I translate 行, xing, as circulate, but many people translate it as move. This aspect of qi and jin are related. ZMQ writes about this, and he discusses it in the video I linked to, but he's sitting at a desk, not standing in front of a class. It seems like he is trying to teach it, but I'm not aware of many of his students passing this on. I thought Ben might have and so that's why I asked.


charlie_cambridge wrote:Personally I'm pretty sure Ben Lo knew about this but he did not speak of it during my time with him. Only after studying with PK where he teaches very clearly and specifically what to look for, did some of Ben's less obvious "tics" (that I only observed him spontaneously do say maybe once for a moment in ten+ hours, and that previously I and probably most of his students either dismissed as random tics or did not even notice) make more sense to me.

Based on the videos I've seen it seems like ZMQ sincerely tried to teach people in the US taijiquan. It takes time for the body to change and I'm not sure many of his students had enough time to get the deeper aspects while he was in the US.
Last edited by robert on Tue Mar 21, 2023 2:06 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: So this releasing crap just keeps going, huh?

Postby wayne hansen on Tue Mar 21, 2023 3:06 pm

Let’s face it,it was a hippyathon in the US
Some may have been fighters but most weren’t
You can learn good things at seminars but you have to be special
People should be honest when they claim teachers
Did they spend countless hours with them or were they just seminar students
Don't put power into the form let it naturally arise from the form
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Re: So this releasing crap just keeps going, huh?

Postby Trip on Tue Mar 21, 2023 3:08 pm

robert wrote:Based on the videos I've seen it seems like ZMQ sincerely tried to teach people in the US taijiquan.


You are smart,
and seem to Grasp the Bigger Picture

A Humble Salute to you :)
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