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Contents Illustrations v Acknowledgements vi Preface 1 Part One 1: A Brief History of Taijiquan 12 2: The History of the Taijiquan Classics 29 3: The Language and Literature of the Taijiquan Classics 51 4: The Ideas of the Taijiquan Classics 62 Part Two: The Taijiquan Classics Translated 75 Taijiquan Jing 77 Taijiquan Treatise 79 Exposition of Insights into Taijiquan 81 Thirteen Posture Song 83 Playing Hands Song 85 Part Three: The Annotated Taijiquan Classics 86 Taijiquan Jing 89 Taijiquan Treatise 103 Exposition of Insights into Taijiquan 121 Thirteen Posture Song 142 Playing Hands Song 149 Appendix Chinese Texts 153 Notes 154 Bibliography 188 Index 200 </toc Illustrations 1: Qing Dynasty China 11 2: Qi Jiguang postures 13 3: Zhili and Henan Provinces 14 4: Chen style posture 16 5: Yongnian City 17 6: Zhang Sanfeng 21 7: Wang Zongyue's Taijiquan Treatise 29 8: Wuyang County 31 9: Important Points of Playing Hands 46 10: Jing, stillness 50 11: Taiji Diagram of Zhou Dunyi 61 12: Yin-yang diagram 65 13: Combinations of yin and yang lines 65 14: Post-Heavenly sequence of the trigrams 101 15: Pre-Heavenly sequence of the trigrams 101 The Taijiquan Classics: An Annotated Translation Including a commentary by Chen Weiming Barbara Davis (c) 2003 Preface Taijiquan now needs almost no introduction. Since its modest beginnings as a family-held martial art in northern China, it has travelled in the hands of immigrants, refugees, emissaries, cultural ambassadors, and exchange students across national boundaries, finding dedicated followers in all corners of the world. Taijiquan drew from the rich tapestry of China's culture. It used evocative images from ancient military practices, Chinese legends, the animal kingdom, and the natural world. It brought together methods of fighting arts, of medicine, and of qigong. It borrowed ideas from the Yijing and from the great Daoist and Confucian philosophers. From at least the nineteenth century, taijiquan practice was supplemented by oral and written literature. Essays, poems, and ditties created a means of communication and dissemination. A group of those early works-now known as the Taijiquan Classics-laid a foundation of theory and practice that has nourished the millions of people who have taken up its study. But while the Taijiquan Classics have served as a touchstones for practitioners well over a century, the authors, origins, and their exact contents remain mysterious and disputed. The Taijiquan Classics: An Annotated Translation explores taijiquan's textual tradition from the vantage points of seasoned practitioners, novices, and scholars alike. The book is divided into three parts, the first of which includes an overview of the history of taijiquan, and the development, transmission, language, and ideas of the Taijiquan Classics. The second part of the book contains the five core texts of the Taijiquan Classics as handed down within the Yang Family taijiquan lineage, which was first commercially published in the 1920s by Chen Weiming, a leading disciple of Yang Chengfu. Part Three takes a look at deeper layers of the five texts, using a commentary by Chen Weiming as a springboard. His commentary is translated here for the first time in English. An assortment of annotations are included in an effort to open a window into the Chinese world-view of the Classics. Detailed notes and a bibliography are supplied for those who wish to read further. Though short in length, the Taijiquan Classics have inspired generations to higher levels of accomplishment. Like any truly great literature, they are multilayered. The longer we practice taijiquan, the more we can glean from the Classics. The more often we read the Classics, the greater their influence on our practice. *** In the mid-1970s when I first began to study taijiquan, there were precious few taijiquan books in English. When the Essence of T'ai Chi Ch'uan was published in 1979-one of the first translations of the Taijiquan Classics-I became as fascinated with the Classics as I was with taijiquan itself. Each time I read through the book, I found new insights about practice and theory. Finally, like Confucius' copy of the Yijing, my copy's binding broke. When I later first read the Classics in the original Chinese, yet another awareness surfaced, that taijiquan and the Classics were firmly rooted in Chinese culture. Without learning more about China, about the world of taijiquan's early practitioners and their ways of thinking, some aspects of taijiquan would remain elusive and beyond my grasp. My curiosity got the best of me. I soon found myself immersed in a wide array of material that encompassed Chinese literature, social history, literacy, book production, textual analysis, family records, and government documents, all of which described parts of the world of late imperial China from which taijiquan and its practitioners arose. With the help of my professors, I studied the meanings of specific words and phrases of the Classics, searched for imagery and allusions. I noticed that the Chinese versions did not necessarily match each other exactly. Whole texts and authors appeared and disappeared, sentences were reversed, titles and words were changed, and paragraphs were added or omitted. Among all the material I read about China, there was a curious gap: there was little information about taijiquan or other martial arts. This was puzzling, as the martial arts were clearly such a colorful and celebrated part of China's culture-and still were, as evidenced by the ever-increasing popularity of martial arts films and books. As I learned more about the field of sinology-Chinese studies-I found that there were a number of reasons for this situation. The martial arts had, for the most part, been linked with a rougher, nonliterate, lower class of men, thus, written records were sparse. Elite, literate culture had dominated the Chinese society for thousands of years. That heavily documented culture-politics, government, literature, philosophy, organized religion, and history-only occasionally touched on the lives of the average person or the lower classes. Research on China quite naturally focussed almost exclusively on the elite culture. Only recently had sinologists begun to turn their attention to study of what was called "popular culture," including everything from food to fortune-telling to almanacs to martial arts. At the same time, research on the martial arts was made difficult by martial artists themselves. The secrecy, clannishness and myth-making crucial to preservation of lineages, particularly during adverse political and social climates, worked against creating clear and verifiable histories. The interweaving of fact and fiction that existed within the martial arts community about its own history created contradictory stories about each martial art, its texts, its personalities, and feats. By sheer repetition, some of these legends took on the aura of fact. While these stories were inspirational, they did little to tell about actual circumstances. The Chinese label this kind of history "yeshi," (wild history). While acceptable in its original context, it is not allowed by "modern scholarship." For these reasons, the history of taijiquan is a field fraught with many dead ends, factional politics, and unavailable or nonexistent sources. Future researchers may be able to expand our understanding of taijiquan's past by utilizing sources such as archives, interviews, movement analysis, and surviving documents, perhaps in the form of correspondence, photographs, and school records. There is also much research still to be done on other old taijiquan texts, and on those from other martial arts such as xingyiquan, shaolinquan, and baguaquan. Such research will help place taijiquan and its companion martial arts within a clearer historical and social context. Thus, the ideas and research in this book will be successful if they raise just as many questions as they answer. They should be taken as pieces of a puzzle, the details of which may become clearer over time. The questions and ideas presented in this book are not meant to detract from a rich mythological sense we may have of taijiquan history. Instead, my hope is that they add to our understanding by illuminating the obscure and explaining the puzzling. At the time of this writing, the world is caught up in the age-old battle of good and evil, right and wrong, and us against them. Our study of taijiquan hopefully helps us to see the continuum of yin and yang rather than only the polarity of black and white. Minneapolis, 2003
Library of Congress Subject Headings for this publication: Tai chi