Fu-pow I would be careful blindly accepting what Dr. Yang Jwing-Ming writes about Taiji. His real speciality is White Crane and much of what he writes comes from that perspective.
One of the more difficult stumbling blocks in learning taiji is disabusing onself from the idea that chi is a single thing and accepting the fact that chi is paradigm, used to explain a multitude of disparate phenomena. From low blood sugar, to bacterial infection, to lack of natural light in one’s house, chi is a catch all description. Let us say you skip breakfast in the morning and go train, in the middle of training you crash. In the western paradigm you have low blood sugar and eat power bar; in the chinese paradigm you have low chi and eat a power bar. Now let’s say after your work out you go apartment hunting. As you enter the apartment you notice it has only one window and it faces a wall. In the west we’d say the apartment is poorly designed; fengshui, however, would say the apartment has no chi or maybe even bad chi. Chi is a word used in chinese culture to explain almost any phenomena, the important thing to remember is that chi is not the same for each phenomena. No one thinks that low chi from missing breakfast is the same as low chi in your house. In the same way chi is used to descibe many things in both internal and external martial arts, but most of the time this chi is not same as the chi referred to in TCM. I say most of the time because I havn’t done enough research to say absolutly that nowhere is it the same, but I am convinced that within taiji it is different. If you think about it only makes sense that TCM and Taiji be different.
TCM is very complex and requires a high level of literacy to learn. An apprenticeship in it lasts for over ten years. Chen village is a farming village; the people there weren’t known as scholars, they were mostly poor farmers made tough by the difficulty of their lives. Most of the Chen Taiji masters were illiterate, even Yang Lu-Chan was illiterate. Even to this day I’ve heard people refer to the Chen villagers as “rednecks”, and it is often pointed out that the Chen villagers train taiji so hard because its their only way out of the village.
This is not the environment for a complex martial art built around TCM. This is the place for and art built around a single simple method that is very physically difficult, but upon mastery allows many skills to be derived from it. Farmers are not going to memorize (remember they can’t read) hundreds of pressure points, but they will train a very difficult physical movement requiring perfect body coordination over and over for 8-10 hours a day. When it becomes to describe this movement the most educated of the village will use the paradigms that already. (this is is normal cultural method) Thus, the’ll refer to chi, the i-ching, wuji, and taiji. To round off the descriptions they will incorporate sayings from popular boxing manuels of the time(like “five ounces to deflect 100 pounds”). The words are the same, but what is described is not.
When the classics talk about storing chi in the dantien they simple mean sinking the breath and diaphram into the lower belly. Circulating the qi through the dantien refers to the ability to power the arms and upper body through the articulation of waist, spine and lower back independent from the hips. When you develop the musculature to do this your belly will take round shape (looking something like a pot or beer belly except instead of fat it is solid muscle) this is often refered to as a “chi ball” in dantien. I’ve seen Chen Qingzhou chin na people using only this “chi ball”. I don’t mean a lite wrist lock, I’ve seen him drop people screaming using only the muscles in his belly. You might check my post in the dantien topic.
I hope this helps. Don’t take this the wrong way but I see you keep coming back to the chi as bio-electric energy and I wonder why. As I said before I’ve seen people ask Yang Zhendou to shock them with his chi, and him tell them that taiji does not have the type of chi. Until you convince yourself that the neijia arts don’t use etheric chi you will find that the nature of the neijia arts will elude you. If you’re ever in San Francisco let me know and I’ll be glad to show you what I mean. I will In the mean time you might keep an eye on Seattle as Li Tailiang, Yang Zhendou, and Chen Qingzhou all give seminars there. There is no substitute for seeing the high level professional martial artists who have earned not claimed the title “master”. You might also consider joining the neijia list as there are several skilled people who have developed excellent skills and can answer many questions regarding getting real physical skills. Be forewarned, however, all views are not considered equal and the ideas of those who can not are weighed accordingly. I
Do not attempt to share your interest in martial arts with pedantic, narrow-minded scholars. As soon as they find out, they will quote from the classics and regale you with all kinds of irrelevant non-sense. This is infuriating. You can deal with this by either avoiding them or keeping your art secret.
–Ch’ang Nai-chou
