Tai Chi, without a doubt, is a form of martial art, originally developed as a technique for combat. However, it is also a perfect combination of the dialectical thinking of the Chinese nation with martial arts, arts, and guiding techniques. It represents a high-level human culture and serves as a martial exercise for strengthening the body and cultivating the mind. With the passage of time, Tai Chi has shifted from its initial focus on combat techniques to emphasizing health, wellness, and serving as a representative of excellent traditional Chinese culture, especially in recent years, which is evident to all!
Tai Chi has three main functions
1. Combat
Tai Chi is unique in combat, with distinct characteristics. It requires using stillness to control movement, softness to overcome hardness, avoiding the solid and targeting the void, and borrowing strength to generate power. It advocates starting from objective reality, adapting to others’ movements, and being flexible. Therefore, Tai Chi emphasizes “listening to strength,” which means accurately sensing and judging the opponent’s force to respond appropriately. Before the opponent strikes, one should not rush in but rather use techniques to provoke the opponent, testing their strengths and weaknesses, a term known as “leading hand”.
Once the opponent strikes, one must quickly take the initiative, “before they move, I move first,” and “the later strike arrives first,” leading the opponent into a position of imbalance, or diverting their strength to create an opening for a counterattack.
The principles of combat in Tai Chi are reflected in push hands training and the essentials of forms, which not only train a person’s reaction ability, strength, and speed but also hold significant importance in combat training.
The combat techniques of Tai Chi follow the principles of Yin and Yang, with “leading, transforming, and generating” as the main combat process. In combat, one perceives the size and direction of the opponent’s force through listening, “following its momentum to change its path,” leading and dissipating the incoming force, and then borrowing strength to counterattack.
2. Health Preservation
Although Tai Chi belongs to the category of Chinese martial arts, it can also be considered a part of Chinese medicine. Practicing Tai Chi can achieve the goals of disease prevention, fitness, health preservation, and longevity.
In one of the earliest medical texts in China, the “Huangdi Neijing” (Yellow Emperor’s Inner Canon), it is recorded: “In ancient times, those who understood the way followed the principles of Yin and Yang, harmonized with the techniques of numbers, had moderation in food and drink, maintained regularity in daily activities, did not engage in excessive labor, thus their body and spirit were complete, living to a full old age, reaching a hundred years before departing. Today’s people are different; they use alcohol as a beverage, indulge in excess, and engage in reckless behavior, exhausting their essence and dissipating their true nature, unaware of moderation, neglecting their spirit, hastening their hearts, going against the joy of life, and lacking regularity in their daily activities, hence they decline by fifty.” This emphasizes the principles of disease prevention and maintaining health, where righteousness prevents evil, and a strong body prevents illness. The practice of Tai Chi embodies these principles.
The health benefits of Tai Chi can only be realized through long-term practice. Like other sports, the effects of training are a gradual process. Practical experience has shown that the benefits of Tai Chi for health and wellness come from consistent practice. Every individual aspiring to practice Tai Chi for health should understand the importance of perseverance.
3. Culture
Tai Chi has developed over generations and has been passed down to the present day. It emphasizes the opening and closing of Yin and Yang, the balance of hardness and softness, the intention guiding the Qi, and the intention shaping the form. It is not only a treasure of traditional Chinese culture but also a unique flower in the garden of martial arts, representing the outstanding contribution of the Chinese nation to human civilization.
Tai Chi is a small part of the splendid traditional cultural treasure of our country, yet it is a dazzling pearl that embodies traditional culture.
Its roots are deeply embedded in the vast and profound fields of traditional Chinese philosophy, traditional health preservation, traditional medicine, and traditional aesthetics. Therefore, Tai Chi can be regarded as a historical product of thousands of years of brilliant Chinese culture. Over its long development, people have imbued it with rich traditional cultural significance, establishing a solid theoretical foundation that reveals a noble cultural temperament.
As times change, people in the new century live in peace and increasingly value health and wellness, thus the health benefits of Tai Chi have gradually become more prominent and are being praised by more and more people. Nowadays, not only is the practice of Tai Chi flourishing domestically, but Tai Chi masters have also gone abroad, spreading this cultural treasure to over 100 countries and regions. To date, Tai Chi has become the most participated martial art, with over 300 million practitioners worldwide.
Tai Chi has become a representative of traditional Chinese culture, exported overseas, and has long surpassed the expectations of the Chinese people for their national culture to reach the world. The advantages of modern media have also played a significant role in promoting Tai Chi globally.
The exchange and dissemination of Eastern and Western cultures have allowed people worldwide to gain a deeper understanding of Chinese culture, leading more international friends to accept, experience, and learn it. This is also an inevitable trend for Tai Chi culture under the conditions of the new era.
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What is true Tai Chi?
In recent years, the party and government have advocated Tai Chi for health and the treatment of chronic diseases. Many chronic disease patients and rehabilitators mistakenly believe that Tai Chi is merely a form of health exercise, which is a one-sided view of Tai Chi.
In fact, Tai Chi is not only capable of combat but also possesses higher-level combat functions. Tai Chi can fight; it is not that it cannot, but rather it does not need to. Tai Chi is martial arts that, after years of evolution, development, and improvement, has reached a perfect stage from the Tang Dynasty to the late Qing Dynasty. The theoretical treasury of Tai Chi contains a wealth of literature on Tai Chi theory, such as treatises, classics, formulas, explanations, methods, essentials, and key phrases, among which the “Tai Chi Treatise” has guided generations in their practice. If Tai Chi did not possess combat functions, it would not have survived to this day.
True Tai Chi understands combat techniques, the way of health preservation, and the profound culture of Tai Chi, recognizing the importance of self-cultivation and mental training. Merely pursuing the ability to fight is a view held by the unrefined and is not in demand by society.
The relationship between Tai Chi’s combat and health preservation is one of balance. If you pursue combat more, health preservation will inevitably weaken; if you pursue health preservation more, combat progress will inevitably diminish. This is the balance of Yin and Yang. Your goals differ, thus requiring different training methods.
Tai Chi is not just a set of movements.
Tai Chi is martial arts because it contains the essence of martial arts where “intention precedes action”; it is sports because it holds the health strategies for strengthening the body (as Mao Zedong said: “Sports is the way of health”); it is medicine because it encompasses the knowledge of “the best doctor treats the unillness”; it is art because it communicates the harmony of heaven and earth (as the ancient Tai Chi texts say: “Heaven and earth unite to form the primordial Qi”); it is science because it embodies the spirit of exploring mysteries (the essence lies in timing); it is philosophy because it builds the path of life wisdom (the philosophy of transformation, flow, and interaction).