Looking_Up
Yang Yang is great guy. I met him many years back at a Great Lakes Tournament.
Regarding the comparisions of Chen’s taiji with baji, the comparision is probably more applicable to the pao Chuei, er lu form. The person who did the comparison prefers me not to identify him but I can tell you he has studied both Chen taiji and baji for over 20 years and when he visited, he went over some of the jings. He ranks, in my opinion, as one of the top 3 baji players and his Chen’s is right up there too!
The best I can do is to refer you to the article Tony Yang and I wrote in the Journal of Asian Martial Arts, vol 8, no. 4, 1999, pp. 93 and 94.
You will find the 5 elements as desriptors/explanations for the storage and release of power.
The important jings of baji tend to be:
Chen zhui jing–sinking jing
shi zi jing—crossing jing
chan si jing–chan si jing
Of course, an jing, hua jing, ting jing are included but these are not unique and many jings may be expressed in any one movement.
Rotating the dan tian (not refered to as such in baji) can be accomplished through the da qiang (big spear training) and heng haa breathing, at least at my stage, is found in one of my da qiang exercises.
But I have to tell you the truth, we honestly don’t sit around discussing these in any depth. We spend a lot of time doing basics and occassionally a discussion will arise. We did the depth for the article and I have been told that GM Liu warned my teacher not to get so hung up on the jings. You’ll find them when you have trained long enough in the basics and my take is that all of the jing discussion is sort of like taxonomy of botany or zoology. Its a classification system designed to make sense out of what one experiences in training over a lifetime.
Master Su once showed me the difference between the chan si jing of baji and taiji. He took a beer bottle and rotated it along its bottom outer rim–that he said is taiji. He then rotated the bottle on its vertical axis–that is baji. My teacher considers his Chen’s taiji much closer to a xiao jia form than lao jia (he learned from Du Ye Ze but also learned from Wong Meng Bi. Wong Meng Bi learned from Chen Fake in the early days of Chen Fake’s development and GM Liu made corrections on my teacher based on what he exchanged with Chen Fake in 1928, Beijing. Also GM Liu had some close association with a Zhao Bao master but no one seems to know what he learned. According to my teacher, GM Liu had a lot of respect for Chen Fake and Chen’s taiji.
In a month or so we will post a video made my Andy Lianto, one of Tony Yang’s students. Andy is attending a film making class at NYU and they did a project which had him using praying mantis against my teacher using Chen’s taiji. I haven’t seen it yet but we are going to try to post it next month.
I’ll let you know. There is a website in Malaysia that does a job on the baji stuff but I can’t remember it.
Later
Seems like the site is having some glitches in programming though. :mad: Any chance you can post a link directly to the page where the video can be found?