Overlord wrote:Regarding to Kang Gewu, he also comments Liuhebafa the byproduct of Xingyi, Bagua and Taiji. The funny thing is his grandmaster Jiang Rongqiao a Xingyi Bagua expert, after learning only a half of Liuhebafa attested it’s way too complex to be a byproduct of Xingyi Taiji and Bagua.
Funny you bring up Gao Bagua, not sure what branch of Gao Bagua you are from.
AFAIK in Taiwan, the only Gao Bagua practioner inherited from Zhang Junfeng is Hong Yixiang,
During my visit in Taiwan to Tiger laoshi, A han laoshi and A pei laoshi, and from earliest to late students of Hong, they were not aware that Hong was expelled from Zhang’s school. This is vastly different from what Kenneth had claimed. In fact Hong’s family still got a cassette tape recording Zhang’s last words, he even said that if later on his students find something is missing in the taught techniques they should seek out Hong Yixiang to fill in the gap and complete the study.
My exposure to Liuhebafa is quite limited, but from what I have seen (especially Master Kam Tung's demos), I can tell it contains body mechanics (i.e. power generation) that are quite different from the Xingyi and Bagua that I know.
My Gao Bagua is not from Zhang's lineage, and I am afraid I am not at all familiar with the politics that has been going on within the Yizong school.
My grand teacher's father was a wealthy landowner -- and an avid martial artist -- from Gao Yisheng's hometown in Shandong. They had known each other even before Gao began learning Bagua from Cheng Tinghua's student Zhou Xiang. When Gao returned from Beijing as an accomplished Bagua master, he was so impressed by his skills that he hired Gao as his family's live-in bodyguard and private Bagua teacher for both him and his young son. He also helped Gao set up a Bagua school in town and became his very first disciple. (This piece of history and his name are both mentioned in Liu Fengtsai's book on Gao style Bagua.)
As far as I know, my lineage is perhaps the oldest Gao system in existence that predates all other major lines passed down by people who studied under Gao in Tianjin (e.g., Zhang Junfeng, Wu Mengxia, and He Kecai). It is quite similar to Liu Fengtsai's line, but still contains noticeable differences in flavor and movements -- especially in the Post-heaven 64 palms. (One of the reasons being that my grand teacher and his father also learned Xingyi from Shang Yuxiang, and incorporated elements of Shang style Xingyi into their Gao Bagua.)
On an interesting side note, my late grand teacher apparently had mentioned on numerous occasions that when he and his father first began training under Gao, the Post-Heaven 64 palms didn't exist and there was no "Gao style Bagua." Gao would just randomly demonstrate and teach them circle-walking drills and sanshou techniques. It wasn't until later when Gao began to stylize his art and give names to the techniques, and all of the sudden there was the story of this mysterious Daoist who had taught him the "complete" system of Bagua that even Dong Haichuan didn't know....
So if we were to compare the 64 palms from my lineage to the ones in the Yizong school, the first thing you'd notice is that ours are relatively short and simple -- most likely "prototypes" from the days when Gao was still formulating his own art.