[QUOTE=taai gihk yahn;955261]some thoughts about taiji:
it seems to prefer “the bottom” when pushing hands (e.g. - “pang / peng” is about what to do / how to manage whne the opponent puts weight onto you) - so if pushing range is about setting up the clinch / grapple, then that “principle” is perhaps suggesting that it wants to get the underhook position to be able to uproot / throw? why would support the thesis that it was a grappling skill set primarily, …)[/QUOTE]
my opinion is taijiquan’s clinch is mainly used to setup hitting and not wrestling, because taijiquan doesn’t teach a lot of wrestling, even the few wrestling techniques from taizu is removed (look down at lake, fire burns sky, pigeon spin). i think shuai jiao was added later.
why focus on wrestling now? people dont want to get hit, people are scared to punch and kick
more importantly almost every single technique in the forms is hitting, wrestling and qinna mostly are “secondary” interpretatio or “secret application” which is dumb.
most techniques are straightfoward strikes very obvious
even “playing guitar” and “grab sparrow tail” are pipa finger strikes as the main aplication
[QUOTE=taai gihk yahn;955261]another observation: there is a lot of palm technique, much higher incidence than fist, in fact; so why not call it taiji zhang instead of quan? wel, supposedly Yang LC called in min zhang - cotton palm, originaly…why the change from palm to fist? perhaps not to step on toes of Dong HC, who was teaching ba qua at same time, and who once met privately w/YLC to “talk” about things? dunno, just suggesting; of course, there may have been some influence from the Mo brothers, the scholar students of YLC who happened to just “find” conveniently the “lost” taiji “classics” (which, according to my sifu, are written in a literary style common to the time in which they were “discovered” as opposed to like, a gagillion years before that - the difference between Nabokov and Shakespere, in a sense…)[/QUOTE]
from what i was told by friends and relatives taijiquan was called chen family fist or long fist. then i read the quanpu from the beijing online library (they scan all books) and it said it was called longfist, then yang luchan;s personal style was called cotton fist, then some of his scholar friends saw him perform called it taiji fist
which makes me sad because that means those ancient wudang taiji are fraud
about fist and palm, mostly i do my techniques from taijiquan with fist and not palm. techniques and forms are not permanent, i think you can do with both fist and palm
