TAI CHI WEAPONS, QUANTITY VS QUALITY

Nowadays, it is very common to see students moving into learning sword, saber, spear and so on right after they have finished learning the Tai Chi form. Within a short 1 year a student would have had learned the form and several weapons. It appears student today are more interested in quantity than quality.

In the past, a student was not allowed to learn anything else until the student had sufficiently mastered the form which required good awareness of internal body. Weapons were considered as an extension of body and were not allowed until mastery of own body had been achieved. Quality was more important than quantity then.

However, time had changed. People has fewer patient and different objectives o learning Tai Chi Chuan. Instructors have no choice but to cater for this change. Is it a right thing to do allowing students to proceed learning weapons before they have truly mastered the form and body? I don't have the answer. I guess it all boils down to the objective of the student taking-up Tai Chi Chuan. Instructor should assist student to attain his/her objective and not impose the instructor's own agenda.

However, it is my sincere hope that within these quantities there exist a group of people who want quality and willing to walk the traditional part of acquiring Tai Chi kung fu. When they do, instructor must not keep secret and should assist in whatever way they can.

Happy training friends.

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TAI CHI 1 INCH PUNCH

The recent Ip Man’s movies have generated a lot of interests in Wing Chun kung fu which to me is a very good thing. A friend who taught Wing Chun told me there is a surge of enquiry to learn Wing Chun over the past few months. A close friend who is learning Tai Chi Chuan got so excited after watching the movie that he went to sought out a friend who is practising Wing Chun to spar. Some of the Wing Chun attacks breached through his defence using ward-off (peng), but he was able to push the Wing Chun guy a few times too. I believe both of them had a lot of fun exploring. Of course as usual he will try the same Wing Chun techniques on me to see how I would fare and I guess he is convinced ward-off is quite a strong defence and attack in one if used correctly. The Wing Chun hype also led to another question “can Tai Chi deliver the same power of the popular 1 inch punch in Wing Chun?”

1 inch punch is made popular by Bruce Lee and is a technique used in Wing Chun for close-range fighting. It is not unique to Wing Chun though. Tai Chi Chuan also has inch jin and according to the writing of Yang Ban Hou, a Tai Chi student should further refine the 1 inch jin into 10th of an inch and 100th of an inch. In order to convince my students that Tai Chi inch jin is equally as powerful I decided to test the same. Frankly, this is my first time trying to break a wooden board using Tai Chi inch jin. Imaging where would I put my face if I fail in front of my students ha ha... luckily and to a great degree expectedly the board broke easily. We then tried two 1 inch boards and succeeded too. We wanted to try using 3 boards but couldn’t do that because we didn’t have enough board left to break. Will try that and update the next time. It is a relief to myself at least that Tai Chi Chuan’s inch jin is equally as powerful.