Every martial art has a foundation – those essential
principles which define it, and without which, no matter how good you look,
whatever you’re doing isn’t that martial art.
Yang Family tai chi has the Ten Essential Principles. They were codified by Yang Chengfu but
they’ve been around rather longer, either expressly or implied in the
performance of the art.
The Ten Essential Principles are:
1) Xu Ling Ding Jin ("Effortless Energy Suspends the Headtop")
2) Contain the Chest, Raise the Back
3) Song Yao ("Relax the 'Waist'")
4) Separate Empty and Full
5) Sink Shoulder, Drop Elbow
6) Use Yi, Don’t Use Li ("Use intent, not brute strength")
7) Upper and Lower Mutually Follow
8) Inner and Outer Mutually Harmonize
9) Mutually Linked Without Gaps
10) Move Center, Seek Stillness
I could give you my interpretation of these Essential Principles, but it would
be a wasteful duplication of effort.
There’s no point in trying to make the wheel any rounder. The best and most comprehensive work I’ve
ever read on the Ten Essential Principles is Yang
Chengfu’s Ten Essentials, with commentary by Lee Fife.
The document above is meant to supplement and complement classroom
instruction and individual practice.
Many of the essentials take time to develop. Beginners have enough to worry about trying
to remember where their hands and feet go!
But it’s important to learn at least the first five, related to posture,
early on; otherwise, we’ll waste time in the future unlearning bad habits.
You may get the intimidating idea that you have to work on all these principles
at once. A former classmate once had this
notion, and asked me how on earth he was supposed to have them all in mind as
he’s practicing. Coming up with a good
answer took the better part of several weeks. Once I’d satisfied myself as to what I was going to say, I told him that it’s not
necessary.
What you do is you focus for
a week or so on only one Principle – say, “Relax the Waist." It doesn’t matter which one. But you get comfortable with what it feels
like and then move on to the next principle.
In this way, you’ll know instantly when something “feels wrong,” at
which point you briefly pause and correct it.
You don’t have to focus on ten things at once (no one can do this), so
long as you “know what right feels like.”
