Taijiquan (Tai Chi)

Not sure which practice to begin with? Read Tai Chi vs Qigong.

This subcategory covers where taijiquan came from, how it divided into the family styles, what the Wudang forms are, what the classical texts say, how push hands works, and how the health and martial sides relate. Seven pages in all.

The name, and what it claims

The name means, roughly, the boxing of the supreme polarity. Taiji is a cosmological term from the Chinese classics, discussed at length in our Tao Philosophy section; quan means fist or boxing.

The name is not original. The art was called by other names in its home village — a long boxing, a soft boxing, a cotton boxing — and the philosophical title was attached in the nineteenth century, by educated men in Beijing who were teaching it to an educated clientele. This matters because the name asserts a connection to classical philosophy, and the assertion came after the art, not before it.

None of which means the connection is empty. Some of the correspondences do real work in training. But you should know that the name is a claim someone made, at a datable moment, for reasons we can partly reconstruct.

Why it looks the way it does

The first thing anyone notices is the slowness, and it is worth explaining, because it is the feature most often misunderstood.

Taijiquan is not slow because slowness is the point. It is slow because slowness is a training method. Moving slowly makes it impossible to use momentum to disguise a structural fault: if your weight is not properly distributed, at slow speed you will wobble, whereas at speed you would simply carry through. Slowness also allows continuous attention to the whole body, which fast movement does not.

Traditional curricula include fast practice, explosive issuing of power, and weapons forms performed at speed. A school that only ever moves slowly has kept one training method and dropped the rest. This is not necessarily a criticism — for health purposes it may be entirely appropriate — but it should be recognised for what it is.

The scale of it today

Estimates of the number of people practising taijiquan run into the hundreds of millions, overwhelmingly in China and overwhelmingly older adults practising in parks in the morning. Most of them learned a standardised short form developed in the 1950s for public health purposes.

That standardisation was deliberate government policy, and it succeeded spectacularly. It also created the situation in which the most commonly practised version of the art is a simplified sequence with the martial content largely removed, taught by instructors who may never have studied applications.

Again, this is not a scandal. A public health intervention that reaches hundreds of millions of people and demonstrably reduces falls in the elderly is a considerable achievement. But if you are trying to understand taijiquan as a martial art, the version you see in the park is not a reliable guide to it.

Origins, briefly

The documented origin is Chen village in Henan province in the seventeenth century. From there it was transmitted to Yang Luchan in the nineteenth century, who took it to Beijing, taught it to the aristocracy and to imperial guardsmen, and softened it in the process. From Yang and from Chen descend the other major styles.

The competing account attributes the art to Zhang Sanfeng at Wudang. Our Foundations subcategory examines that claim in detail and finds it unsupported before the late seventeenth century. The Origins page in this subcategory goes through the evidence for the Chen village account.

The family styles

Five styles are conventionally recognised as major: Chen, Yang, Wu, Wu (Hao) and Sun. They are related by documented teacher-student transmission, and their differences are real but often exaggerated in the telling.

Broadly, Chen retains the most visible explosive movement and spiralling; Yang is the largest and most even in tempo and is by far the most widespread; the two Wu styles are more compact; Sun incorporates elements from xingyi and bagua and uses a distinctive stepping. The dedicated page covers what actually distinguishes them and what is merely presentation.

Wudang taijiquan

The forms taught on Wudang today are covered in their own page. The honest position is that they are recent in their present shape, that their relationship to the family styles is complicated, and that this does not prevent them from being well constructed and worth practising.

Visitors are sometimes disappointed to learn this. We think the disappointment comes from expecting the value of a form to depend on its age, which is not how skill works.

The classical texts

Taijiquan has a body of short technical writings, collectively the taiji classics, which practitioners treat as authoritative. They are dense, aphoristic and genuinely useful — they contain the clearest statements of the principles discussed in our Foundations pages.

Their history is complicated. They were compiled and circulated in the nineteenth century, their authorship is disputed, and some attributions are certainly false. The page on core principles treats them as what they are: an extremely valuable technical inheritance of uncertain provenance.

Push hands

Push hands is the partner exercise that tests everything else. Two people maintain contact and attempt to unbalance each other while remaining relaxed and structurally sound.

It is the bridge between form practice and application, and it is also the point at which self-deception becomes impossible to sustain. It has its own page, including an honest treatment of the ways push hands can go wrong — the cooperative habits that make everyone look skilled, and the competitive habits that turn it into wrestling.

What is actually difficult about it

Taijiquan has a reputation for being gentle and easy, which is true of the first few months and false thereafter. It is worth knowing in advance where the difficulty lies, because it is not where beginners expect.

Memorising the form is the easy part. A long form has over a hundred named movements and looks daunting, but most people can learn the sequence in a few months. Almost nobody has learned the art at that point; they have learned the order of the postures.

The difficulty is in the quality of each movement, and it is difficult because the corrections are invisible from the inside. Your weight is not where you think it is. Your shoulder is raised and you cannot feel it. Your knee is tracking inward. Discovering these things requires either a teacher's hands or years of unusually patient self-observation, and there is no way to hurry it.

The second difficulty is that the qualities the art trains do not transfer automatically to pressure. Many practitioners are relaxed and well-structured in solo practice and revert to bracing the moment a partner pushes. Closing that gap is the real work, and it is why partner practice cannot be skipped.

Misconceptions worth clearing up

That it is only for the elderly. The demographic is real but reflects how the art was promoted in the twentieth century, not anything about the art. Chen village training is physically demanding by any standard.

That it is a form of meditation. Some practice is meditative in effect, but the art is not a contemplative discipline with movement added. Treating it as moving meditation tends to produce practitioners who are calm and structurally hopeless.

That it cannot be used quickly. The slowness is pedagogical. Applications are performed at ordinary speed, and the classical texts describe issuing power in terms that are anything but leisurely.

That the styles are secretly the same. They share principles and a common ancestry, but the training methods differ enough that a competent practitioner of one is a beginner in another.

That older is better. Lineage length is not a measure of skill. What matters is whether your teacher can do the thing and can teach it, and those two abilities are also independent of each other.

How to approach the subject

If you want the health benefits, almost any competent teacher and any of the standard forms will do, and the evidence supporting those benefits is good. Consistency matters far more than style.

If you want the martial art, you need a teacher who trains applications and push hands with resistance, and you should expect the process to take years rather than months. Such teachers exist but are a minority.

If you want to understand taijiquan rather than practise it, read the Origins page and the Core Principles page, in that order. Between them they cover the history and the technical content, and the rest of the subcategory fills in detail.

Key points

• Taijiquan lives a double life as a fighting method and a health exercise, and most disagreements about it come from people discussing different halves.

• The philosophical name was attached in the nineteenth century in Beijing; the art existed earlier under plainer names.

• Slowness is a training method for exposing structural faults, not the point of the art; traditional curricula also include fast and explosive practice.

• The most widely practised version is a 1950s standardised short form created for public health, which is not a reliable guide to the martial art.

• The documented origin is Chen village in the seventeenth century, with transmission to Yang Luchan and thence to the other major styles.

• Push hands is where form practice is tested and where self-deception becomes impossible to sustain.