Ten Principles Tai Chi

At the start of our form, we give the following instructions:

Set your feet shoulder width apart, and in your own time, lower your centre of gravity.  Tension below the belly button, relaxed above the belly button.  Eyes looking forward, and the tongue up to the roof of the mouth.  Attention on tan tien.  Deep breathing in and out, contraction and expansion of your belly.

In the beginner’s class on Thursday, I was asked about the purpose of the tan tien.  I normally give the following explanations:

1. It is a little bit below the belly button, and a little bit inside.
2. According to Western science, it is the centre of gravity for the human body.
3. According to Eastern philosophy, it is an important part of taoist internal alchemy.

But what exactly is taoist internal alchemy?  That was an excellent follow-up question :)

I don’t practice taoist internal alchemy myself, as it’s something that isn’t part of the system handed down to me by my teacher.  It wasn’t that my teacher didn’t believe in chi and its cultivation per se, it was simply the case that my teacher rightly believed that we have no place teaching things we cannot demonstrate and put to the test.  As a result, my knowledge on the subject is simply theoretical, and I have no formal teaching in it myself.

Taoism is one of the oldest surviving philosophies in the world, best known through the great work the Tao te Ching attributed to Lao-tzu.  At the core is the concept of The Way (the do in Japanese martial arts such as akido, iaido, judo and kendo) and how we can all find our own harmony with The Way.  Practitioners of taoism are known as taoists.  As a way of living, it has a lot to offer us Westerners, and it is said to be the underlying philosophy that Tai Chi is based on.  (More on that in a later article!)

Man everywhere is obsessed with his own immortality, and taoists it turns out are not immune to this desire :)  The difference I guess is that some taoists believe that real immortality is not only possible, has actually been achieved in the past (by such as Cheng San-feng, the legendary creator of Tai Chi).  Just as western alchemists attempted to turn base metals such as lead into pure gold, so taoist internal alchemy is concerned with practices to turn the base energy into a refined spirit.

One of the practices of taoist internal alchemy is to turn ching (generative energy) into chi (vital energy), and then to turn the chi into shen (spiritual energy).  The area we call tan tien in our class is actually the lowest placed of three separate tan tiens (the second is at the solar plexus, and the third between the eyebrows).  The lower tan tien is used to refine ching (generative energy) into chi (vital energy); very appropriate from a western point of view given its location at our centre of gravity, at the place in Tai Chi where all our movement is controlled from.

This is a gross and decidedly ill-informed over-simplification of the subject, I must stress!  Anyone interested in learning more should seek out a qualified instructor on the matter, or failing that start with reading Eva Wong’s translation of Cultivating Stillness.

I freely admit that I’m not all that comfortable talking about my own experiences with the mystical side of Tai Chi.  Part of it comes from my teacher’s own understandable feelings on the subject, and part of it comes from my own training as a scientist and qualification as an engineer.  There’s also the important matter that, if we tell our students what feelings to expect, the mind has a funny way of manifesting those feelings whether or not the work has been done to make them real!  And, as if that wasn’t enough, I’m sure that there are some in our community who exploit students’ interest in and (dare I say) desire for such experiences.  I do not want to become one of them, even unwittingly.

But what it comes down to is this.  At the end of the day, how can you share your experiences with someone else?  You can’t, not without a common frame of reference (a teaching tool I need to write a lot more about!)  As teachers, it must be our role to direct our students through a programme of learning that will result in our students having these experiences for themselves.  How to achieve that is perhaps the ultimate question of teaching, and it was the last question my teacher and I discussed before he left us.

And, as I experienced on Tuesday night watching my Improvers’ students explore the principle of Relax the Waist, on those rare occasions when we pull it off, there are few pleasures in life more satisfying :)

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In last week’s Beginners’ class, we enjoyed a great discussion about the books I recommend on this website, and which books are of any use to someone just starting learning the art.

My own experience with books over the years is three-fold:

1. As a beginner, I simply had no common frame of reference to understand the great advice available in the great Tai Chi books.  Looking back in recent years, I can now see that many of the answers I’ve sought were there under my nose the entire time, but I simply didn’t understand enough to see that.
2. There are a great many Tai Chi books that (imho) are utter rubbish.  I don’t mean that they are written badly, but that the advice they contain is demonstrably wrong.  Much to my wife’s disgust, I collect these almost as avidly as I do the better books, and my students can look forward to the day when I share these books with them, and ask them to pick out the many flaws they contain :D
3. The books that could be called authentic are a great source of advice.  I was taught to take nothing on faith, to always seek out and verify everything I was taught by Robert.  New information can promote a path of experience to new understanding, and in the light of new information things must change.

You can’t learn from a book.  Knowledge comes from a book, but understanding only comes from experience.  Books can’t replace a good teacher, but they can certainly validate good teaching.  And they can expose bad teaching too.

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With the brand new Tai Chi for Improvers course having just kicked off, my evenings and weekends are once again taken up with turning my notes from each class into teaching aids for the course.  

I’d appreciate the advice of my fellow Tai Chi teachers on what teaching aids work best for you.  Have you found written notes work best, and if so how have you organised them?  Videos make boost income, but what style of video best helps students learn?  Have you tried any audio CDs at all?

Let me know in the comments below.

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With the academic year over, I’m now focusing on planning the Tai Chi courses that I’ll be running from late September 2008.  I feel that the Beginners’ Tai Chi class went very well, and it only needs a few tweaks here and there.  This will be the first year I’ve run the Intermediate Tai Chi class, and there’s a lot of hard work to be done to prepare the syllabus for this class.

The students enrolling for Intermediate Tai Chi have all successfully completed the Beginners’ class.  They can all do the warm-ups, and they can all play the form from start to end under supervision.  They haven’t begun to incorporate the Ten Principles yet, and they haven’t done any push hands yet.  These are things that I’ve deliberately not included in the Beginners’ Tai Chi, because I believe that it’s simply too much all at once.

My current thinking (which will doubtless change as I refine my plans over the next two months) is centred around my desire to enable my students to take their Tai Chi and enjoy it for the rest of their lives without having to come back for regular classes.  I would love for them to come back (we all get on very well), but I don’t want them to have to.

Proposed learning outcomes for the Intermediate Tai Chi class:

• Students should be able to perform the warm-ups with minimal instruction.
• Students should be able to perform the form with minimal instruction.
• Students should be able to demonstrate an understanding of the Ten Principles.
• Students should be able to perform the static push-hands drills.

What do you think?

I’m wondering how to incorporate both learning the principles and getting enough time at the push hands drills in just 60 hours of contact time.  When you take away time for warm-ups, playing the form at least twice each class, and breaks, at the very best that leaves about 40 minutes each week to introduce students to new material (principles and push hands).  Will that be enough to cover both topics sufficiently?

Today, I don’t know.

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In the Ng Family Yang Style Tai Chi Chuan that I practise, we have the following sequence of moves:

• Squatting single whip
• Snake creeps down
• Golden pheasant stands on one leg left

I’ve been preparing written notes for my students this week, and two questions have been on my mind as a result.  Where do each of these moves end (and the next one start), and why does it matter?

It matters to me because I don’t want to be the latest in a lengthening line of instructors who leaves the art in a worse state than I found it.  Yang Luchan, the founder of Yang Style Tai Chi Chuan, seems also to have been its greatest practitioner.   Those who have come after him have passed on a lesser art each and every time, and it has gotten to the point that much of what is taught as Tai Chi today does not stand up to scrutiny against the Tai Chi classics.  (Pick up any modern book on Tai Chi, look at the photos, and tell me whether or not you’re seeing fundamentals like single weight being evidenced).

The thing that always impresses me about my teacher is that he’s always insisted on trying to get down to the core of the art as we understand it, to improve on the information we have.  Something is the way it is until new information comes along.  In light of new information, things must change.  We don’t own the art - it is our duty to hold it in trust for the next generation.  Whilst it’s in our care, we should not make it worse!

In classical Yang style, squatting single whip seems to be nothing more than another name for snake creeps down; two names describing the very same move.  We break the move into two parts - squatting single whip where we lower our stance by pivoting on alternate heels and toes, and snake creeps down where we use the left arm to defend against a kick.  Should we use the one name for both parts?  And where exactly does golden pheasant start?

However we decide, we have to start with the questions.

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