johnwang wrote:The 108 moves Yang Taiji form has one right leg "outside crescent kick". I assume the left leg "outside crescent kick" is not in the form because the form creator might assume that students could reverse the form themselves. But what I don't understand is why the "inside crescent kick" is not in the form. We may assume that if the form creator understood the "outside crescent kick", he should also understand the "inside crescent kick". Why did he include one but not the other?
What's your opinion on this?
In the traditions through which I have been taught, forms are pedagogical frameworks, a sequence which a teacher and student follow to learn a martial art. That’s why generally speaking they begin with easier or foundation movements and progress to harder, more advanced, or more complex (less foundational) movements.They bring up topics or skills the teacher needs to teach. There is a difference between learning a form (the outside shell) and being taught the skills that compose the form.
Skipping a lot of other form usage stuff, to your question, your assumption agrees with the way I was taught. The teacher teaches you one side, and it is up to you to practice both sides. Not all of my teachers have taught this way though.
Both kicks are in the Thirteen Postures form from which all “taijiquan” forms descend. There are several Lotus kicks or Double wave lotus, an outward crescent. The Tornado kick is a spinning inward crescent, and technically a flying, spinning inward crescent, though rarely done that way. To learn this most challenging kick, one must train the inward crescent
ad nauseam. So, to learn the inward crescent and separate single inward crescent kick is not necessarily required.
Why doesn’t it appear in the Yang 105? That is an evolutionary question. It does not seem to have been a listed movement in the Yang form in 20th century, however most of our form name list are from the
Guoshu movement period. The publications especially were designed to present a taijiquan that everyone could do, but, as I said before, the spinning inward crescent is a challenging movement.
Why drop the name instead of just teaching a stationary inward crescent? That gets into the mind and thinking of probably Yang Shaohou, Wu Jianquan, and Yang Chengfu who were the standard bearers of the period. As mentioned before, it may have just been incorporated into a "turn the body” movement, and on one thought to add an inward crescent as stand alone movement.