Modern Forms of Tai Chi Chuan

Tai Chi Practitioner T’ai Chi has become very popular in the last twenty years or so, as the baby boomers age and T’ai Chi’s reputation for ameliorating the effects of aging becomes more well-known. Hospitals, clinics, community and senior centers are all hosting T’ai Chi classes in communities around the world. As a result of this popularity, there has been some divergence between those who say they practice T’ai Chi primarily for fighting, those who practice it for its aesthetic appeal (as in the shortened, modern, theatrical “Taijiquan” forms of wushu, see below), and those who are more interested in its benefits to physical and mental health. The wushu aspect is primarily for show; the forms taught for those purposes are designed to earn points in competition and are mostly unconcerned with either health maintenance or martial ability. More traditional stylists still see the two aspects of health and martial arts as equally necessary pieces of the puzzle, the yinyang of T’ai Chi Ch’üan. The T’ai Chi “family” schools therefore still present their teachings in a martial art context even though the majority of their students nowadays profess that they are primarily interested in training for the claimed health benefits.

Tai Chi Form 24 Taiji

Master Jesse Tsao demonstrating the “Tai Chi Form 24″.

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Along with Yoga, it is one of the fastest growing fitness and health maintenance activities, in terms of numbers of students enrolling in classes. Since there is no universal certification process and most Westerners haven’t seen very much T’ai Chi and don’t know what to look for, practically anyone can learn or even make up a few moves and call themselves a teacher. This is especially prevalent in the New Age community. Relatively few of these teachers even know that there are martial applications to the T’ai Chi forms. Those who do know that it is a martial art usually don’t teach martially themselves. If they do teach self-defense, it is often a mixture of motions which the teachers think look like T’ai Chi Ch’üan with some other system. This is especially evident in schools located outside of China. While this phenomenon may have made some external aspects of T’ai Chi available for a wider audience, the traditional T’ai Chi family schools see the martial focus as a fundamental part of their training, both for health and self-defense purposes. They claim that while the students may not need to practice martial applications themselves to derive a benefit from T’ai Chi training, they assert that T’ai Chi teachers at least should know the martial applications to ensure that the movements they teach are done correctly and safely by their students. Also, working on the ability to protect oneself from physical attack (one of the most stressful things that can happen to a person) certainly falls under the category of complete “health maintenance.” For these reasons they claim that a school not teaching those aspects somewhere in their syllabus cannot be said to be actually teaching the art itself, and will be much less likely to be able to reproduce the full health benefits that made T’ai Chi’s reputation in the first place.

In order to standardize T’ai Chi Ch’üan for wushu tournament judging, and because many of the family T’ai Chi Ch’üan teachers had either moved out of China or had been forced to stop teaching after the Communist regime was established in 1949, the government sponsored Chinese Sports Committee brought together four of their wushu teachers to truncate the Yang family hand form to 24 postures in 1956. They wanted to somehow retain the look of T’ai Chi Ch’üan but make an easy to remember routine that was less difficult to teach and much less difficult to learn than longer (generally 88 to 108 posture) classical solo hand forms. In 1976, they developed a slightly longer form also for the purposes of demonstration that still didn’t involve the complete memory, balance and coordination requirements of the traditional forms. This was a combination form, the Combined 48 Forms that were created by three wushu coaches headed by Professor Men Hui Feng. The combined forms were created based on simplifying and combining some features of the classical forms from four of the original styles; Ch’en, Yang, Wu, and Sun. Even though shorter modern forms don’t have the conditioning benefits of the classical forms, the idea was to take what they felt were distinctive cosmetic features of these styles and to express them in a shorter time for purposes of competition.

As T’ai Chi again became popular on the Mainland, competitive forms were developed to be completed within a 6 minute time limit. In the late 1980s, the Chinese Sports Committee standardized many different competition forms. It had developed sets said to represent the four major styles as well as combined forms. These five sets of forms were created by different teams, and later approved by a committee of wushu coaches in China. All sets of forms thus created were named after their style, e.g., the Ch’en Style National Competition Form is the 56 Forms, and so on. The combined forms are The 42 Form or simply the Competition Form, as it is known in China. In the 11th Asian Games of 1990, wushu was included as an item for competition for the first time with the 42 Form being chosen to represent T’ai Chi. The International Wushu Federation (IWUF) has applied for wushu to be part of the Olympic games. If accepted, it is likely that T’ai Chi and wushu will be represented as demonstration events in 2008.

Representatives of the original T’ai Chi families do not teach the forms developed by the Chinese Sports Committee. T’ai Chi Ch’üan has historically been seen by them as a martial art, not a sport, with competitions mostly entered as a hobby or to promote one’s school publicly, but with little bearing on measuring actual accomplishment in the art. Their criticisms of modern forms include that the modern, “government” routines have no standardized, internally consistent training requirements. Also, that people studying competition forms rarely train pushing hands or other power generation trainings vital to learning the martial applications of T’ai Chi Ch’üan and thereby lack the quality control traditional teachers maintain is essential for achieving the full benefits from both the health and the martial aspect of traditional T’ai Chi training.

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