GrahamB wrote:Richard -
I've heard you talk of the split between goose and crane before, but the idea of two lineages in Chen village that can be traced by a goose or a crane used in the form is a new and fascinating possibility to me. The two lineages theory is older of course.
Also the idea that the first x postures represent the snake and the next x postures represent the crane, is a new one for me, but also a real possibility. Like you say, SPP has opened up the idea of the form as story telling vehicle to the wider Tai Chi world already... and that theory does fit with the way the forms are done - the opening moves have more of a snake, coiling quality, and the later crane/goose moves are followed by raise arms and brush knee, which are all very wing-like... however, it's also possible we are letting our imagination do a lot of the heavy lifting there...
Perhaps.
But, perhaps, the storyteller let his or her imagination to the heavy lifting too, and saw this too. The story becomes sort of a mnemonic, which is my preferred theory.
It is a theory, so let’s beat it up as much as we can to see how it holds up.
GrahamB wrote:I wonder how other styles of Tai Chi fit into that theory though... for instance, the "White Crane" posture in Wu style (Wu Jianquan), which would be a crane lineage in your theory, looks like both the "goose" posture of small frame and the "crane" postures - i.e. does this theory hold up across the board?
And, as we've discussed before, to make it even more confusing, my lineage calls it a stork, at least in the lineage passed on to me verbally - White
Stork Cools its Wings. In the original book written by Gu Ruzhang on the lineage, he calls it a
crane, or at least that's how Brennan translates it: "7 白鶴亮翅 WHITE CRANE SHOWS ITS WINGS" (interesting that both the snake and the crane mentioned in the form are "white" though).
In any case, Tai Chi has never (to me at least) taken the level of animal mimicry much beyond a simple tip of the hat from the name of a posture to an animal - crane, monkey, tiger... - if you compare that to the actual, much more shamanistic, 'taking on the spirit of an animal' approach of (older) Xing Yi and Xin Yi - that's on a different level.
Who can say what has been lost to the mists of time though, especially given the trauma these CMA lineages lived through - war, famine, lawlessness, chaos, republicanism wiping old non-scientific traditions out, then communism wiping
everything out, etc...
We are often left with only echoes of the original idea.
G
RE: “Stork” this is most likely a translation artifact. Stork would be guàn (鹳), which can also mean crane, or guàn (雚), which now means heron but used to apply to storks too. This is why the Chinese characters matter. In form name lists with Chinese characters, for example, there is much less variation. English translations are all over the place.
RE: “White” While a white crane is now defined as a Siberian crane, although I think it used to refer to the Red-crested Crane. I think this usage was more symbolic than referring to a specific species, like Qinglong, Blue-green dragon, is a symbol that carries meaning. These were symbolic in Chinese culture and sometimes Daoism or Buddhism or both. I am not remembering specifics right now. You can search the Internet. Just remember the White Snake has to spit out its tongue to have relevance.
I find taijiquan uses animal essence, the one characteristic that an animal, or class of animals, represents, rather than animal mimicry. For example, a snake’s essence would be coiling, so we borrow coiling from the snake.
RE: The two Wu Jianquan pictures. Now, that is interesting, he does both. The character in the name text is crane, hè (鶴).
One of my working hypotheses is that Yang Luchan studied with both Chen Changxing and Chen Youben. He is likely to have seen the others performing their form after he was accepted as Changxing’s student. Why not teach both ways later on?
BTW, this is one piece of evidence that YLC was actually in the Chen Village, circumstantial as it may be.
I have done this. Incorporated the small frame-Chen Taijiquan White Goose sequence into my Practical Method form to see how it feels. I’ve not taught it, but I could to an advanced student or two as a variation. There are repetitions here, so it could be done white crane then white goose, or vice versa.
Remember also these are not postures, like the static pictures we see in photos. The word we translate posture is shì (势), which denotes a sequence of movements.
. I always imagined that the snake represented the circular/coiling movement that allowed it to avoid the cranes linear thrusts/pecks. But, in these forms (shi), the snake attacks linearly, and the crane makes the circle with its wing. 