A Tai Chi Reading List

 

Not long ago, one of my students asked for a “recommended reading list” for the study of tai chi.  I love requests like this.  It reflects well on the dedication of my students.

There are MANY books written about Yang family tai chi, to say nothing of the other family styles and hybrid styles.  Like most things, some of them are better than others; and of the better ones, some are best for newer students, while some are very esoteric and deal with concepts a beginner will find difficult or impossible to grasp. 

There’s no such thing as a “definitive” reading list; however, there is a selection of books that are reasonably easy to come by, which is generally agreed upon as being useful for any student.  My own library has about two dozen books on tai chi; but I don’t recommend all of them, and I certainly don’t recommend all for a beginning student.  A beginner really should focus on what’s being taught in class and on basic instruction first.

Newer students can enhance their in-class instruction with these books:
Essence and Applications of Taijiquan by Yang Chengfu
Mastering Yang Style Taijiquan by Fu Zhongwen

If you only ever pick up two books on tai chi, it should be these two.  Yang Chengfu’s book was written by Chen Weiming based on Yang’s dictation, and Fu Zhongwen was, like Chen Weiming, one of Yang Chengfu’s disciples.  These two books are straightforward and comprehensive.  They give a newer student a fundamental understanding not merely of how tai chi is to be done, but why it’s to be done this way. 

This is important – tai chi is an internal martial art; unlike arts like karate or taekwondo, certain principles must be accepted and understood early on.  If we practice tai chi the same way we practice karate, we’ll only end up with a watered-down, ineffective external martial art.  Likewise, if we only focus on movements and not why we’re doing them, we’re not practicing a martial art – we’re dancing.  And as I’ve said many times, if we want to learn how to dance, we should take a dance class, because you deserve a more attractive partner than me.

Once we get past these two fundamental texts – and they’ll take us a very long way in our art – we can begin learning some of the more specialized elements of tai chi, things that enhance our practice but which are challenging or impossible for beginners to wrap their minds around. 

The next books introduce these more esoteric topics:
Cheng Tzu’s Thirteen Treatises on T’ai Chi Ch’uan by Cheng Man-ching
Tai Chi Classics by Liao Waysun
Explaining Taiji Principles attributed to Yang Banhou
Yang Family Secret Transmissions compiled and translated by Douglas Wile
The Art of Learning by Josh Waitzkin

Putting “Tzu” after someone’s name is a way for Chinese to show respect to honored and influential people.  “Lao Tzu” and “Chuang Tzu” from Taoism, “Sun Tzu” from the military classic, are all familiar to us.  “Cheng Tzu” refers to Cheng Man-ching (this is the “Wade-Giles” way of spelling his name – the pinyin version would be “Zheng Zi” or “Zheng Manqing”), one of Yang Chengfu’s disciples who left China and moved to New York City where he taught for the rest of his life.  He wrote a number of books but this one is the best distillation of his thoughts on tai chi.  I don’t put it into the “basics” category, though.  What he has to say about tai chi is more contemplative and meditative; and if a beginning student reads it before achieving a degree of skill in the fundamentals, there’s a good chance the student will think tai chi is more of a philosophical or meditative practice than a martial art. 

Tai chi is philosophical and meditative, but losing sight of the “martial” aspect stunts the student’s growth.  I’ve spoken before about well-meaning but short-sighted instructors whose imperfect understanding of tai chi turned the art into New Age mumbo-jumbo.  What Cheng Tzu has to say is important and worth learning.  It enhances our art and makes it much, MUCH more than just a way to beat opponents in a fight.  But it must be understood in its proper context.

Liao Waysun’s book is much the same.  Liao teaches “Temple Style” tai chi in Oak Park, Illinois.  One of our longtime students takes instruction from a Temple Style teacher in Chesterton.  Externally it looks similar to Yang style, but its focus is different.  Liao’s book is similar in many ways to Cheng Tzu’s, especially if, like me, you’ve “nailed your colors to the mast” of Yang style.  There’s a lot to learn in it, but the beginner can easily get tripped up by the different, more contemplative focus.

“Explaining Taiji Principles” is the oldest book in the collection, going back to around 1875.  I haven’t found a print version yet – the link goes to an online translation.  It’s exactly what it says it is – an explanation of the principles underlying tai chi.  It doesn’t explain the postures, nor does it share “applications.”  In the 1800s it was assumed these would be taught in a student-teacher relationship, which I think is by far the best way to learn tai chi.  But most of its content is extremely practical.  I would have put this book before Cheng’s and Liao’s if it weren’t for the fact that it’s easier to get the latter two in “dead-tree” format in English.

Douglas Wile’s book seems to be out of print.  It’s a digest of things that were hard to come by at the time Wile wrote it.  As a distillation of tai chi thinking and principles, it’s valuable, and its biographical/historical introduction is worth reading as well.  But I’m unsure if I can make a case for a second-hand book the size of a trade paperback that costs the same as dinner for four at Applebee’s.

I can make a case for the last book.  It’s a book I wish I liked better than I do; or rather, it’s a book whose author I wish I liked better than I do.  Josh Waitzkin was a world-class champion in both chess and competitive tai chi.  His book is not expressly about either chess or tai chi.  Rather, it’s about mastery of pretty much any skill.  It’s intensely biographical in nature, detailing Waitzkin’s journey of learning.  I found it very difficult to identify with him or to find him sympathetic or likeable – to say he had an unorthodox upbringing is an understatement.  It made him who he is, and “who he is” doesn’t come across well in his book.  He may be charming and likeable in person, but the book gives the image of a hyper-focused and challenging personality.  I say this because the things he has to say in the book are worth pushing past this difficulty.  Specific to tai chi, he doesn’t show us how to do it – he shows us how to get good at it.  I read it from the perspective of a teacher and as a student.  It’s improved both my performance of tai chi and my teaching.

This “suggested reading” list is less than half my library of just empty-hand tai chi.  I haven’t included books about qigong, qin-na, push-hands, weapons, teaching, etc.  As I said, some of these books are better than others.  There are bound to be some books I haven’t heard of which may be even better than the few I’ve listed.  But one of the advantages of having a knowledge of these and what they contain is that they’re the texts most others who know tai chi also know or have heard of.  Having a common “canon” for tai chi helps build the tai chi community I talked about earlier.  We become more easily understood if we’re all working from the same sources.

The Tai Chi Classics

 

I have serious students.

 

This is an incredible gift to any teacher.  Students who share the teacher’s passion for the art encourage the teacher to be better, to teach better, to take their questions, concerns and requirements seriously.  It means they’re an active part of the class, not simply passive, empty vessels. 

 

How lucky I am to have such students!

 

Tai chi is tailor-made for such serious students, and rewards their hard work and inquiry.  The first part of learning tai chi is the external – knowing where the hands and feet go, memorizing the form, grasping the Ten Essential Principles.  The next phase is exploration of its internal characteristics – how it’s supposed to feel inside; where qi comes from, where it resides and how it’s cultivated and manipulated; how to interact with others and so on.  The student is exposed to these internal characteristics early on of course, but it’s not until the first phase is mastered that we can really lay hold of their essence or value.  To try to grasp the second before mastering the first is like trying to master calligraphy before learning how to read.

 

When a student reaches this point, they’re ready to understand what the Grandmasters of the past have written about the art.  Quite a bit has been written about it and we are fortunate that the important parts have all been translated into English. 

 

The essential texts in tai chi – all family styles – are referred to as the The Tai Chi Classics.  This is a collection of short writings and full books written in the 19^th and 20^th centuries.  This link is an excellent resource and I encourage every student to save it and study it.  Even if some of the concepts in it seem mysterious, “airy-fairy” or even meaningless, they’re the kinds of things that reveal themselves once we’re ready to grasp them.  It’s just like the calligraphy example above – the most beautiful writing in the world is useless if you can’t make sense of it.

 

The earliest of the “Tai Chi Classics” are from relatively late in the Qing Dynasty (1644-1910), and are written in a scholarly, poetic style that benefits from some interpreting in addition to straight translation.  The first thing you need to know is that the link, and the commentaries that are embedded in the link, use the “Wade-Giles” spelling for Chinese words.  I’ve written and spoken before about this – review this blog post for a quick refresher.  I point this out because with a few exceptions, I tend to use pinyin spellings.  For your study, if a word written in Wade-Giles seems unfamiliar, it usually helps to sound it out.  This is because Wade-Giles is a phonetic approximation – what a native English speaker hears – whereas pinyin assigns some new “sound values” to letters that don’t correspond to how those same letters sound in English.  For example, the word 採 (“Pluck” or “Pull” or “Large Roll-back”) is spelled “Tsai” in Wade-Giles because that’s what it sounds like to English speakers; whereas in pinyin it’s spelled “cai” – the Chinese use the letter c to stand in for the TS sound in English.

 

The next bit of advice concerns the scholarly style of 19^th century Chinese writing.  I could spend the rest of this essay explaining why the Chinese had two different ways of writing and speaking.  For our purposes it’s enough to know that it’s related to the Imperial civil-service examinations that went back to the 1300s and went all the way up to 1908, and is similar (though not identical) to the difference between the poetic language in the Christian Bible, versus the everyday language the pastor uses in his sermon.  For example, the “Tai Chi Classic” attributed to Chang San-feng (pinyin: Zhang Sanfeng) says the following:

Peng, Lu, Ji, An,
Tsai, Lieh, Zhou, and Kao
are equated to the Eight Trigrams.

You’ve seen and heard me talk before about how this is an aid-to-memory, and how “peng-jin” (“warding off energy”) isn’t exactly like the Bagua trigram that refers simultaneously to “South,” “Heaven,” “Summer,” “Father” and so on.  In the same way, the steps don’t correspond exactly-and-literally to the Five Elements of Chinese Alchemy.  They are simply cultural references meant to connect tai chi to the world around us.

 

Of course the authors of the Classics were all Chinese; with the exception of Cheng Man-Ching, none ever left his native land, and they were every bit as immersed in their own culture as we are in ours.  For this reason, it’s important as a general rule – not merely with the Classics but with everything written in a foreign language – to distinguish between translation and interpretation.  Translation is the “simple” substitution of a word in one language for the closest meaningful equivalent in another language.  Interpretation, on the other hand, is the more challenging task of determining what an author means when he or she writes something and it’s been faithfully translated.  Every one of us has no doubt run across this difference when we attempt to make sense of an instruction leaflet that was originally written in a foreign language and carelessly translated into English.  It’s why the task of technical writing (and writing about tai chi IS “technical”) is best performed by people who are experts on the topic, and not merely fluent.

 

Peng is an excellent example of the need for technical fluency in addition to facility with the language.  It may seem hard to believe, but you and I as tai chi players probably understand this word better than a native Chinese speaker!  This is because peng the way we mean it is a jargon-word within tai chi that does not exist in ordinary conversational Chinese.  If you input the character for peng (掤) in Google Translate, it will return the pronunciation “bing” and translate it as “arrow quiver.”  No amount of mental gymnastics can get you from “arrow quiver” to “Warding-off Energy” and since it’s “tai chi jargon,” it’s pointless to try.  This character means something extremely specific in the context of tai chi; someone who is fluent in Chinese and English but not a tai chi player won’t have this understanding.

 

In the case of the Tai Chi Classics, both translation and interpretation are going on at the same time.  We have to read sympathetically; that is, we have to read not only the words as they’re transmitted to us, but also search for what the original authors really meant.  Sometimes they’re speaking in idioms – “Tai chi is born of Wuji and is the mother of Yin & Yang” is a re-stating of a part of the Tao Te Ching.  It means something in Taoism, but in tai chi it means little without an understanding of “Yin-Yang Theory” as we discuss it but more importantly, as we feel it.  You might also detect a hint as to why it’s taken me so long to write about this:  There’s a fundamental understanding that’s necessary to even make sense of what you’re reading, and this understanding can only be taught and felt – it can’t be communicated through reading or watching videos or just thinking about it hard enough.

 

The commentary in the link is valuable and worth the time to read, with a caveat, which is this:  Like any commentary on any topic, it is an expression of the author’s opinion.  This is not to devalue his opinion – I don’t hold to the old shopworn saying about what opinions are like and what they’re full of.  Some opinions are worth more than others, and in the case of a real expert, they should be carefully listened to.  But it’s important to differentiate between “expert” and “authority.” 

 

I’ll use an example with which I’m very familiar:  in the Masonic fraternity, we go to considerable trouble to point out to the newly-made Mason that while there are experts on Masonic history, philosophy etc., there is no such thing as an authority on Masonry, in the sense that no one man can speak on behalf of the whole Fraternity.  It is up to each Mason to determine what Masonry means to himself.  In the same way, this author presents a valuable insight into what the Classics are and what they mean.  But it is up to each of us to understand, as we read, that he is writing through his lens, based on his unique experiences and perspective. 

 

The author of the commentaries is without doubt an expert; but the text on which he’s commenting is authoritative.  We therefore need to read his commentary – as well as the source material he translates – sympathetically, but guided by this understanding.

 

As to the author’s commentary, I have no meaningful disagreement with him – you can read what he has to say in confidence.  The only things I can add are small and trivial, and my few disagreements are truly matters of interpretation; e.g., he and I see shen differently, but not enough for me to say he’s wrong.