The end of an era as we say farewell to the Journal of Asian Martial Arts

The Journal of Asian Martial Arts has always been a quality magazine that I have enjoyed for many years. Filled with thoughtful and scholarly articles about the many faces of the various Asian fighting traditions - an enjoyable source of inspiration and education. It came as a shock a few months ago to hear from the editor Michael DeMarco that the journal was to cease publication due to cost issues. So ends one of the very best Asian martial arts publications, as my friend Kim Ivy said - a sad reflection of the times on many levels!    

 On a brighter note - In celebration of the journals' two decades of great work the JAMA team are publishing a new book called Asian Martial Arts: Constructive Thoughts & Practical Applications. With nine articles by leading martial art scholars covering history, media, healing, spiritual, and combative components and 27 articles by renowned practitioners of many different disciplines demonstrating their favourite techniques and offering practice tips. I was honoured to be asked to contribute a piece about Chen Taijiquan applications.The cover is fantastic and I can't wait to get hold of a copy.

The journal's new website will be live in a few weeks where you can get hold of  a fantastic archive of articles, with new content to be added. Anyone who loves traditional martial arts would do well to support this project.

Don't Just Look for the Good Things!

Training with Zhu Tiancai during his first visit to the UK in 2001

We are all striving to improve as we learn - even Chen Xiaowang says he's constantly examining and refining his practice.   Some years ago, another great contemporary teacher of Chen Taijiquan, Zhu Tiancai, stayed in our home for about a month during his first visit to Europe.  One of the things he encouraged us to do was to watch films of well-known practitioners, to see if we could spot any mistake in their practice.  He explained that even if a master's skill is higher than your own,  when you can pick out a mistake, then you have understood something important and can begin to work on this aspect within your own training.  If the mistake is there and you cannot see it, this is indicative of your own level of understanding.  Also, just because you have spotted some deviation doesn't mean you can do better, or that that practitoner's overall skill level is not superb.  Here we are not talking about differences in choreography, but in deviations from Chen Taijiquan's core principles.  Some people never get past the stance of seeing all famous practitioners as perfect and any suggestion that they could be making mistakes as almost sacriligious.  Even highly skilled practitioners have deviations within their forms. Your ability to spot these is indicative of your own level of understanding.  Drawing motivation from the fantastic skills of the famous teachers is great, but do it with your eyes open!

Chen Ziqiang - showing 100%

Chen Ziqiang - showing 100%

After the big response to a recent post about the pros and cons of simplified forms I found Chen Ziqiang's stance on Taijiquan training/teaching to be illuminating. He has just finished teaching a series of workshops at our school. Participants ranged in age from 14 to 75 with a great mix of backgrounds and abilities - professional Taijiquan and other martial arts teachers, lawyers, labourers, business people, teachers, an artist, some retired homemakers etc... All serious enough to attend the workshops, but obviously having different goals and reasons for training. Some travelled a long distance to be there (coming from Italy, Slovenia, Poland, Slovakia, Ireland...), others were students nervously attending a seminar with one of the Chen family for the first time. How did he deal with this mixed group?

Rt Josh Fishburn - youngest participant!

Simple - "show them 100% of Taijiquan with all its possibilities, then they know what it can be. Then if they apply themselves 100% from their current starting point even if they ultimately only achieve 50 or 60% of this they will still have attained a  worthwhile level of skill". To his way of thinking people should be exposed to Taijiquan with all its content and difficulty. All the low stances, powerful and intricate movements and martial content. Then they themselves can approximate and modify movements that are, at this moment, beyond them. He was adament that if students were shown things in the beginning in too simplified a format (or 30% of Taijiquan as he put it) then they were much less likely to be inspired to stretch themselves to the limit and reach their own true potential.

CTGB Laojia Yilu group

Jack Dempsey on the importance of "Following the Process"

Today we have access to many high level Taijiquan masters, but how does that help the Western student trying to replicate the skills they exhibit? I’ve always believed that to simply copy what these masters do is not enough - to just follow what they are doing today may not bring the results we hope for, instead – WE MUST FOLLOW THE PROCESSES THEY WENT THROUGH!!!  Perhaps the main advantage Chen Village students have is that they get to see people at all stages development. Gross movement is mastered before subtle details are filled in.

 The following observations by the great 1920s boxing champion Jack “The Mannassa Mauler” Dempsey on the difficulties of high level fighters teaching fighting skills to beginners gives us food for thought.  Published in 1950, Championship Fighting: Explosive Punching and Aggressive Defense seeks to understand why so few great fighters make great teachers:

“In your heyday as champion, you can't "see the forest for the trees." As an historian might express it, you're too close to your career to get the proper perspective of highlights and background. It was only after I had retired and had begun trying to teach others how to fight that I investigated the steps in my stairway-analyzed my own technique. And that was a tough job.

You see: by the time a fellow becomes a successful professional fighter, nearly all his moves are so instinctive, through long practice, that it's difficult for him to sort out the details of each move. Accordingly, it's nearly impossible-at first-for him to explain his moves to a beginner. He can say to the beginner, "You throw a straight right like this." Then he can shoot a straight right at a punching bag. But the beginner will have no more conception of how to punch with the right than he had before. That's the chief reason why so few good fighters developed into good instructors. They failed to go back and examine each little link in each boxing move. They tried to give their pupils the chains without the links.

When I began breaking down my moves for the purpose of instruction, I found it most helpful to swing my memory clear back to the days when I was a kid at Manassa, a small town in southern Colorado. I was fortunate as a kid. My older brothers, Bernie and Johnny, were professional fighters. They had begun teaching me self-defense by the time I was six years old. In my break-down, I tried to recall exact details of the first fundamentals my brothers taught me. I jotted down every detail of those instructions I could remember, and every detail that dawned on me while I was practicing those early fundamentals.

Jack Dempsey - "Absorb instructions, pointers and theories"

Then I moved mentally across the Great Divide to Montrose, Colorado, the town where I spent my latter youth. There was more interest in fighting in Montrose than in any place of its size I've ever known. It was a town of would-be fighters. In some Montrose families there were four or five brothers who wanted to be fighters. I found plenty of kid sparmates there and plenty of instructors- some good, some bad. My investigation of technique took me on a long mental journey as I followed my fighting trail through the West, where I had worked at any job I could get in mines, lumber camps, hash-houses, on ranches, etc. I was fighting on the side in those days, and I was getting pointers on self defense from all the old-timers I met. Each trainer, each manager, each fighter had his own ideas and his own specialities. Like a blotter on legs,I absorbed all that information in those days, and then discarded what seemed wrong.

Swinging back through Memory Lane, I found myself, at twenty-one, making my first trip to New York, where I fought Andre Anderson, "Wild Bert" Kenny and John Lester Johnson, who cracked two of my ribs. Although that New York trip was a disappointment, I received much valuable fighting information from top-flight heavies like Frank Moran, Bill Brennan, Billy Miske and Gunboat Smith, when each dropped into Grupp's Gymnasium.

And I recalled the details of my later post-graduate courses in fighting from Doc Kearns and Trainer Deforest, one of the best instructors in the world. Deforest's career went clear back to the days of Peter Jackson and London prize-ring rules.

That geographic investigation of my own technique really humbled me. It hit me right on the chin with the booming fact that since I was six years old, I'd had the opportunity to learn punching from a long parade of guys who had studied it. I had absorbed their instructions, their pointers, their theories, in Manassa, Montrose, Provo, Ogden, Salt Lake City, Goldfield, Tonopah, New York, San Francisco, Chicago, St. Paul, and many other cities-before I met Willard at Toledo. And let me emphasize that in the days when I was drinking in all that information, the fighters, trainers and managers knew much more about punching than they generally know today. You must remember that when I fought Willard in 1919, it was only twenty-seven years after Jim Corbett had beaten John L. Sullivan at New Orleans in the first championship fight with big gloves. While I was coming up, the technique of the old masters was still fresh in the minds of the fighting men. Now, it is over thirty years since the day I fought Willard. During those years fighting became "big business"; but in the scramble for money in the cauliflower patch, the punching technique of the old masters-Sullivan, Corbett, Bob Fitzsimmons, Tommy Ryan, Joe Gans, Terry McGovern, and others- seems to have been forgotten”.

CTGB Instructor Andrew Hesketh under the watchful eye of Chen Ziqiang

Back to Taijiquan - If we want high level skills we need to examine what is appropriate at each stage of our development. Is it really necessary for a beginner to stand for extended times and do the beginners in Chenjiagou do this?   Are you really at the correct stage to begin push hands training? Would it not be more beneficial to refine the forms you already know than to collect another one? When you are practicing the form are you laying down correct fundamentals and then building upon them at the appropriate time. Don't just copy blindly. 

To paraphrase Jack Dempsey - "LIKE A BLOTTER ON LEGS, ABSORB ALL THE INFORMATION AND THEN APPLY WHAT IS USEFUL!!!

Links in a chain

Davidine Sim, Feng Zhiqiang & David Gaffney in front of  Feng's school in Beijing

I've just got back to the UK after a couple of weeks'  training in Poland with Chen Ziqiang, one of the best of the young teachers from Chenjiagou. While we were there we heard the sad news of the passing of Grandmaster Feng Zhiqiang, a renowned disciple of Chen Fake. It really brought home the value of the  art that we practise. Generations of masters have passed the baton of real Chen Taijiquan skill for the best part of four centuries. It is important for all of us who teach the system to remember that we are no more than links in a chain that connects us back to Chen Wangting and forward to future generations of practitioners.

I met Feng Zhiqiang about eight years ago in Beijing and found him to be warm and welcoming.  His great Taijiquan skill is well known, but perhaps most illuminating was the way he treated the ordinary people in the local neighbourhood. On the way from the small apartment he shared with his wife to go to lunch at a nearby restaurant we got into the lift with Master Feng when he started to chat with the lift operator. She was a simple looking young woman whom he obviously knew well. Master Feng took an apple from his pocket and gave it to the woman. She took it, thanked him and went to put it in her pocket. With a stern voice but with a twinkle in his eyes he scolded her and insisted that she ate the apple there and then which, after some persuasion, she did. Afterwards he explained to us that she was poor and always put her family's needs before her own. If he did not make her eat the apple she was sure to give it to some one else and do without herself! Master Feng spoke of the importance of treating both  "important" and ordinary people the same. That he was kind to the ordinary people around him, the lift operator and later a street cleaner we met on the way to the restaurant shows the quality the great man possessed, and not just in his taijiquan skill.

After a lifetime of practice Master Feng's "Twelve Principles of Taijiquan" is worthy of study:

1. The heart and spirit void and quiet from start to end.
2. Center equilibrium.
3. Use the mind to move qi. The heart is the commander.
4. Start with sink and drop. Search for soft and smooth.
5. The inside/outside and upper/lower should work together.
6. The transition of yin/yang will help you find hard/soft.
7. The silk reeling force should be present through the body.
8. Search for open/close by folding the chest and abdomen.
9. Concentrate on the dantian to improve neigong (internal force).
10. Keep your heart calm, mind quiet, and practise slowly (stillness in movement). 
11. The form is like a moving standing pole (huo zhuang).
12. You will be successful if you know both how to practise and how to nurture yourself (yang sheng).                                                                                                                                                                       With the sadness of Master Feng's passing still lingering,  the training with Chen Ziqiang resumed. I guess this is how it has always been. From Chen Wangting, through the pantheon of great masters, some heralded, others forgotten, the art will survive as long as there are people who really value it. Thus the legacy continues.           

      
                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                       

So, what is Taijiquan?

I came across an interesting article published in a Chinese martial arts magazine some years ago in which the current heads of Yang and Chen family gave their views on the development of Taijiquan. The first statement by Yang Zhenduo – bear in mind that this is addressing a Chinese audience – was: “The development and progress made by the Japanese in Taijiquan sets us a very good challenge. They have put in great effort. If we don’t follow suit, we should be worried that they will surpass us”! Later in the article he spoke of Taijiquan in the West: “People in the West describe Taijiquan as an Eastern dance because Taijiquan's movement is elegant and beautiful to look at. But we should not regard Taijiquan as a dance…although Taijiquan is soft, relaxed and slow, IT IS A MARTIAL ART”!

The different way he perceived Taijiquan in Japan and the West was depressing (unless you happen to be Japanese), but not really surprising. In the last few weeks several articles have been published in the British national press praising “the effectiveness of Tai Chi”. Surely a good thing you would think. One of my students brought me the first article which could be summed up in sentence “Tai Chi is good for older people and helps to stop them falling over so much”. Of course we all would agree that that’s a good thing! Another student brought me a second article, which could also be summed up in a single sentence – you guessed it - “Tai Chi is good for older people and helps to stop them from falling over so much”!   Today the Daily Mail, in ita female health section, included a guide to “Which Martial Art Should You Choose? Each art was introduced via a brief description of their combat techniques - Aikido: “uses quick and calculated movements in defensive strategies. The two goals of aikido are to overcome the opponent and to throw the opponent”. Judo: “concentrates on subduing opponents with throws and holds”. Ju jitsu: “includes kicking, striking, kneeing, choking, joint locking and immobilisation”. Thai kick boxing: “includes powerful and aggressive kicking techniques”. The one exception – you guessed it - Tai chi: “This style of martial art has become more familiar as people seek a relaxing, spiritual and healthy exercise to cope with modern stresses”.

Back to the Chinese article - Chen Xiaowang reinforced the point made by Yang Zhengduo: "iT IS MOST IMPORTANT THAT YOU SHOULD NOT LOSE THE CONTENT OF DEFENCE AND ATTACK - THIS IS THE BASIC REQUIREMENT OF TAIJIQUAN!"

At the time of writing he warned of the danger of presenting Taijiquan in such a way that people no longer understand what it really is: “…I’ve been teaching outside for a long time and am against making Taijiquan mysterious. I don't think Taijiquan’s theory and application should be excessively complicated, and explained with lots of hyperbole and talked about in a very mystical way. One does not need to go around the bush or in circles to explain the theories. Very simply, use the waist as axle and train sequential movement. These are very basic things . There is no need to make it so complicated that no one knows what it is and how to do it”.

Short forms – do we really need them?

When I was younger I trained Shaolin gongfu - the Malaysian master of the system placed great importance of having a sense of history. Of seeing yourself as a link in a chain – the art flourished before you came along and it was up to you to see that it carried on to following generations in its true essence. Chen Taijiquan players are rightly proud of the fact that Chen style is the parent style from which all the major branches of Taijiquan can be traced. Since Chen Wangting created the system at the end of the Ming dynasty the two most significant changes were probably Chen Changxing’s reclassification of the original forms into the Laojia Yilu and Erlu; and Chen Fake’s development of the New Frame routines. Both Chen Changxing and Chen Fake were renowned masters at the height of their skill when they made these modifications, both of which have stood the test of time.

How does this compare with the plethora of short Chen forms that are springing up all over the place? Off the top of my head I can think of the 56 Form, 38 Form, 36 Form, 32 Form, 20 Form, 19 Form, 18 Form, 13 Form, 11 Form, 9 Form, 8 Form… Can you see where this is going?

 10,9,8,7,6,5,4,3,2,1 ZERO! 

I can sort of understand where one of the grandmasters develops a short form, saying that it is for people who do not have time to practice the traditional routine. But what of the grandmasters students then taking the process further? For example, one of the current grandmasters created the 18 Form and then one of his close disciples creates a 9 Form. Why? Or the new 13 Form that is going all around the internet at the moment – if it is supposed to be a “simple form that can be learned in a week”, why are all the difficult kicks left in? 

The late Malaysian Taijiquan master Huang Sheng Shyan – disciple of Zheng Manqing – had a few sayings that I really like. He said “learn less and practice more” and “don’t be content to be the student of a successful teacher, make a success of your own practice”. If we want to be like any of the top masters, then we must go through the same process they went through. That means following the traditional forms. For those students who either cannot or don’t want to go through the full traditional syllabus why not just teach the beginning of the traditional form – this is what we do in our school. In Chenjiagou they would train “San Jingang” – that is the first fifteen movements of Laojia Yilu (up to the third Buddha’s Warrior Pounding Mortar). 

Do we really need all these new forms, or should we put our faith in the traditional ways and just get on with putting our time in?

Competency before intensity!

Chen Xiaowang

Basic movements

Chen Xin wrote that if you don't understand spiral movement you don't understand Chen Taijiquan. The reason for doing seemingly endless practice of the different silk reeling exercises and of training the form slowly is to reach a point where the whole body moves as one functional unit. Without this training, a student may only be able to harness forty or fifty percent of their body's potential. By realising the reeling silk method, they may be able to bring into play ninety or ninety-five percent (or even more!) when emitting force etc. This training method of fixing precise movement patterns before speeding up the movement has been passed down through generations of Chen Taijiquan practitioners for getting on for 400 years.

Kelly Holmes - perfect basic movements

Its fascinating to see some of the leading lights in modern sports performance training "discovering" the importance of fixing correct movement patterns before adding intensity. For example, Mark Bennett MBE, founder of Performance Development Systems (PDS), who provides high quality performance coaching & mentoring to national and international coaches, organisations, teams and athletes. In the British Army, he served as the senior instructor at 29 Commando running the physical development and commando training for the Regiment. In an article on how to train like double Olympic Gold winner Kelly Holmes, Bennett listed 5 crucial areas that must be attended to: nutrition, motivation, exercise, rest and movement. It's this last category that we are interested in here. Under the category of "movement" he wrote, "All Olympians know that to achieve great results, it's vital to spend time perfecting the basic movements before applying any level of intensity. This is called "competency before intensity". With this in mind, never be afraid to take a step back, reduce the level of resistance to perfect the movement...". Likewise, in Athletic Body in Balance: Optimal movement skills and conditioning for performance, leading coach Gray Cook describes a pyramid  made up of three levels - the base (the largest and most important level) representing the establishment of correct movement patterns, the middle level representing strength, power and general conditioning, the top level - built on the preceeding strong base representing functional skill. In Cook's own words: "The optimum performances pyramid is the pyramid in which movement patterns, movement efficiency and sport skill are balnced and adequate". The inhabitants of Chenjiagou have been following this cutting edge sports science for four centuries!

How many times are Taijiquan students seduced by the lure of the more (seemingly) exciting advanced forms, weapons, applications etc before they have even begun to put down an adequate foundation. This is a certain dead end road. Chenjiagou practitioners have the advantage of seeing learners at each stage of the learning process, so they readily accept the validity of the traditional syllabus. Western students hear the tales of the grandmasters spending long periods on the foundation form, but often either get bored or lose confidence. I read one "advanced" student of one of the Chen grandmasters proudly proclaiming his 200 hours of training with said teacher during which time he had apparently gone through the entire syllabus. Chen Taijiquan is a powerful and effective martial art that has stood the test of time. It has its own unique movement and energetic requirements and is not just Shaolin Gongfu or Karate done slowly. The slowness of Taijiquan allows the practitioner to pay attention to the myriad requirements which, when all in place, gives a tremendous degree of rootedness, structural integration and balance. Looking back at the notes I took during Chen Zhenglei's First International Advanced Training Camp in Hebei, China in 1999, I had highlighted the following advice he gave "train the movement, not the manifestation - train the body to be a completely integrated system". Slowness is the method not the aim of practice!

1997 International Advanced Chen Taijiquan Training Camp we were told to "train the body as an integrated system"

Contrast this with the depressing trend where martial artists of other disciplines open up Taijiquan classes, with no respect or awareness of the complexity of the discipline. Like the following example from the website of a longtime Shaolin teacher (who presumably took the trouble to learn the forms of his system) advertising his Taiji classes: "I also teach Taiji and Qi Gong, derived from my experience in Shaolin (Chinese) Martial Arts. I have studied some Yang and Wu Style forms and choose to devise my own forms for the time being. This is based upon the classical precepts, with a focus upon the cultivation of Chi (energy). Inspired from the heart of the Shaolin Temple and by the rogue monk who was expelled from its walls - by the young boy who secretly watched from a treetop the ‘inner teachings’ of the old man practicing by the moon reflecting on the water, like all monkeys, I experiment with what comes and use whatever sticks...I am more interested in simple movements that can help one relax and unwind, than sharing complicated patterns that lead one away from the belly and into the head. This is another way of saying that I like to teach the bodymind, watch people learn without effort and see them having fun." I wonder if this same guy went to his Shaolin master and described his Shaolin training as "learning without the need for effort" and said that it would be better to drop the traditional animal forms because they were complicated and made him to have to think. Whilst he was at it he could drop the conditioning methods because they hurt a bit!

In Chenjiagou there is a saying that to achieve success and skill in Taijiquan you must be prepared to "eat bitterness". There is also a saying that "you must train according to the rules". It is not just about being easy and fun and without effort. The real marker of whether someone is serious about Chen Taijiquan is whether they believe in the method. Don't be in a hurry. Carefully work towards understanding the different requirements, train hard and advance step-by-step!!   

Goodbye "Linda - Little but Lethal"

Linda Hargreaves (1st right)

Its a sad day in our school today as we have lost  a much loved Taiji sister. Life really is a fleeting journey - at the school Christmas party she was full of joy and laughter, now she is no longer with us. Linda Hargreaves was small of stature but large in spirit. Training with a sabre that was almost as big as herself or doing applications with the big guys - earning the nickname "Linda - little, but lethal"!

3rd from the left, next to Chen Ziqiang - smallest as usual!

What I loved about Linda was her willingness to try everything - to have a go.  Coming to Taiji relatively late, with not such great health and - always - the smallest person in the class - her attitude, beaming smile and ability to encourage others led to her assisting her instructor Lee Davies Conchie in our Blackpool branch. When the dynamic Chen Ziqiang came to the UK last summer to teach the Cannon Fist, she leapt and jumped, kicked and punched, swept and spun through the seminar. Even the normally impassive face of Chen Ziqiang broke into a smile! 

How often people come to class and say "I can't". Linda was a glowing example of a person of normal ability achieving success because they  are determined to. She'll be sorely missed.

Push Hands - exploring your Limits!

The concept of "investment in loss" can be difficult to truly accept. The idea of individual effort and success is a cornerstone of western society. In 1997 I travelled with the team of my Chinese Taijiquan teacher to compete in the "International Atlantic Cup", a tournament with competitors from Hong Kong, USA and a number of other countries. Over the previous 15 years I had taken part in lots of karate and kick-boxing tournaments. This was my first go at push hands competition and it would be an understatement to say that I was excited. Then came the bombshell - there were 3 weight classes - and we had one heavyweight and two middleweights, myself and a good friend of mine. "Decide who is going to concede if you are drawn against each other". I thought I was hearing things, but the teacher explained that in China the most important thing was the result of the team. It was usual, it seemed,  for teammates to concede defeat if pitted against each other and coast during a bout to make sure that the one most likely to succeed went through to the next round fresh. After all my hard training I definitely wasn't going to concede.  And my teammate obviously felt the same! As it happened we didn't meet until the final so, in the end, there was no problem - I won a hard contest after an extension. If we had met earlier it would definitely have weakened one of us!     

I read a facebook comment posted by one of the students in our school  who recently started to learn push hands after four years or so of Taijiquan practice. He described his experience as "exploring the limits of what you know - and do not know - about the realities of taijiquan, in a friendly and supportive environment". This reminded me of a conversation from over a decade ago when I was training with GM Zhu Tiancai in Singapore. Zhu is an enthusiastic teacher who likes to intersperse his classes with anecdotes of his training with his own teachers Chen Zhaopi and Chen Zhaokui. During a break in one session, he descibed his experience of push hands as a youth in Chenjiagou. Push-hands, he said, was approached as a cooperative and analytic activity. People of all ages of either sex would train together, carefully working out the nuances of each angle and position. Ego and competitiveness played little part in the day to day training. He recounted one exception - a bigger and older student who used excessive force each time he pushed with Zhu. All he could do was run away. When he told his teacher Chen Zhaopi told him not to worry and at all costs not to try to use force to stop his opponent. As long as he didn't do this, moving away from  his opponent didn't mean that he had lost.  Later in another exchange between them Zhu reversed the forceful attack of his opponent and broke his (the opponent's) finger in the process. When the big guy complained, Chen Zhaopi  scolded him and told in no uncertain terms that it was his own clumsy force that had broken his finger!

Singapore 2001 - Pushing hands with GM Zhu Tiancai

 

Introducing Gabriela Morgado - translator of the Portuguese edition of "The Essence of Taijiquan"

Gabriela teaches in Lisbon, Portugal.She is a linguist who started her Taijiquan training with Yang Style in 1993, moving over to Chen Style in 2000.She has been to Chenjiagou a number of times with our school and has done a great job bringing "A essência do Tai Ji Quan" to Portuguese Taijiquan players.