Essential Books on the Tai Chi Classics

I’m recommending some published works on the Tai Chi Classics: early writings about the essentials of Tai Chi Ch’uan. These have been translated various times by different authors and can be taken as poetry, as inspirational sayings, as a guide to the essential elements of the form(s), or as an introduction to Chinese literature, especially to the Tao Te Ching and the I Ching. I have referenced one of these before, The T’ai chi Classics, translated with commentary by Waysun Liao. This is one of my favorite books, giving historical background on Tai Chi, explaining in detail the concepts of Qi and Jing, translating and commenting on the classics, and finally illustrating and describing the Yang Long Form with emphasis on breathing and meditation while moving.

 

Recently I picked up a copy of The Essence of T’ai Chi Ch’uan, The Literary Tradition by Benjamin Lo. Lo was a student of Cheng Man-ch’ing and gave many workshops in the Professor’s Short Form. His translation is presented as poetic and includes a chapter by Cheng Man-ch’ing called “Song of Form and Function”. The Professor’s writings are always worth delving into and here, talking abut the Thirteen Postures, he is both poetic and eloquent, for instance, “The body is like a floating cloud….The whole body is a hand and the hand is not a hand. The mind must stay in the place it should be.”

 

On my want list is The Taijiquan Classics: An Annotated Translation by Barbara Davis and Chen Wei-Ming. The blurb says, “…this book explores the fundamental ideas and what they mean to practitioners, students, and scholars. It also incorporates newly discovered sources that address the history of taijiquan and newly translated commentaries by Chen Weiming.” Sounds like a must-read to me.

 

What are the classics? There are three treatises by Grand Master Chang San-feng, Master Wong Chung-yua, and Master Wu Yu-hsiang. The first dates to around 1200 CE, the second to around 1600 CE, and the third to the 19^th Century. In addition, in Lo’s book are “Song of the Thirteen Postures” and “Song of Hand-pushing”, both by unknown authors, and two treatises by Li I-yu and one by Yang Cheng-fu.

It is from these classics that the 13 essentials are derived. More about that is the next blog entry.

 

 

Tai Chi in the Age of Covid

Well, this being Wisconsin, our sessions in the park along the lakefront have been curtailed by weather and the earlier setting of the sun. Still, in the age of covid, close quarters are not recommended for group practice even though we all (all of us, right?) have been vaccinated against the virus. Therefore, embracing the current age of technology, we meet as dancing electrons on computer screens. In a word, Zoom. As covid closed in on us many venues for Tai Chi found solutions in online instruction. A quick search via Google will yield for you various links. While not as desirable as in-person teaching, it has the advantage over videos which do not allow for two-way conversations. Our group, The International Tai Chi Alliance, is small enough for all of us in our little boxes to fit on the screen simultaneously. The teacher can watch the progress of each student and, with the aid of the more advanced students, split off beginners into “breakout rooms” for individual training. The only difficulty I have found is my own lack of indoor space; my living room is too small to allow for a full-length image of myself. I have my laptop hooked into my large screen television monitor so I get a nice sized view of the class. Yet I wish for a larger space and I am considering rejoining our local health club where there is a big room used for workout classes. They do have wifi and a large monitor. Stay tuned to this blog to follow my future adventures.

I read several facebook groups on Tai Chi Cuan and have noticed a recent trend toward analyzing photographs of past Tai Chi masters. This sometimes entails the drawing of lines over the photos to show alignments and to determine weight distribution. I am obsessed as much as the next person with “doing it right” but I have to question the process of ferreting out the “rightness’ of a three (four?) dimensional event using two dimensional tools.

Photography has a history of being used to analyze position and motion that is as old as photography itself. The classic example is Eadweard Muybridge http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eadweard_Muybridge (1830 - 1904) who was an English photographer working in the American West. He is most famous for producing numerous studies of people and animals in motion using a series of cameras to capture successive stages of the body in motion through space.

In 1981 I wrote a book on animation called The Shoestring Animator, in which I used one of Muybridge’s motion studies, one called “Man Walking at Normal Speed,” as an aid to developing a hand-drawn animated “walk cycle.” It is thought that several early animation artists studied Muybridge to originate their own techniques. I pointed out that Thomas Eakins, a painter contemporary to Muybridge who used photographic studies in his own work, felt Muybridge’s panels were flawed since each successive camera viewed the action from slightly different position. I went on to say that the photos were close enough (for government work).

Animation is not Tai Chi, although there is a relationship in that both involve bodies in space and motion. The facebook posts analyzing Tai Chi reminded me of my own use of photos to create animated films. I often utilized a technique called “rotoscoping” in which live action cinema frames are traced and then rephotographed. To paraphrase one of my fellow filmmakers, Mary Beams, you can learn a lot about the universe by tracing live action. One thing you learn is that motion picture film doesn’t accurately reproduce motion. Here is why.

Because film is a series of still pictures taken one at a time, there is movement in between each exposure that is not recorded. Also, the frame rate of motion picture photography is 24 frames per second allowing a certain amount of blurring of the moving subject. Animators know this and exaggerate key positions of their drawings to make them more “life like.”

I think I blogged previously about the difficulty in using videos to learn Tai Chi. I remarked that the camera angle often hides or distorts some of the action. Since videos are not the best way to study motion, how can it make sense to use a still picture to learn Tai Chi? Photos of Cheng Man Ching and others were not taken as they moved. They were posed. Perhaps they were posed to display an emphasis on weight distribution or alignment at a particular time during the form, but I suspect these illustrations have to be taken as instances of the spirit of the movement and not written-in-concrete icons of the art. Can you photograph Chi? Can you diagram it? I think exploring the examples of the great masters through photographs is rewarding and enlightening but should be approached cautiously. I think of the book, The Da Vinci Code, and how searching for hidden code in the painting of the last supper really distracts from the ascetic enjoyment of a great work of art. I hope we don’t over analyze Tai Chi in the same way.