The Taiji Form (quantao)

Ch'eng Man-Ch'ing performing a Taiji movement

The great 19th century martial arts master Yang Lu-chan created modern Taijiquan, by synthesizing and improving various existing styles of Chinese boxing and health practices. Master Yang's "form" was a long series of combative-looking postures, performed  slowly and calmly from beginning to end in a pre-arranged sequence. Yang founded a teaching dynasty of great Yang family masters that ended with his grandson Yang Cheng-Fu, a famous teacher of Taiji in pre-revolutionary China.

Professor Cheng Man-Ch'ing learned Yang Ch'eng-Fu's style of Taiji, and then streamlined it to perfect concision and brevity for  modern practitioners. Cheng also sharpened the emphasis within the form on certain fundamental Principles, which his modified  37-step short Yang version is designed to reinforce. Many of the posture names and basic shapes, as well as the core idea of slow, relaxed practice, were carried over directly from the original Yang version.

Taiji is no longer seen as quite so "exotic" today in the West as it was forty years ago when Prof. Cheng was the first great Master to openly teach Taiji in America. It has become part of the cultural background noise, similar to Yoga. Now interest at the cutting edge has moved on to more elaborate and exotic forms of Asian energy disciplines, such as the various Qi-gong and Nei-gong  systems e.g. Liuhebafa, Baduanjin, all kinds of internal Daoist alchemical and sexual transformation practices, Qilel Qigong,  Falun Gong - overall, a fantastic bestiary of competing schools of thought and practice. All these methods work to cultivate the  student's Qi (internal energy) - the basis of health, youth, strength, and immortality.

In such an environment, the Cheng type of "old-fashioned" plain vanilla Taiji can easily be overlooked. 'Been there done that got the t-shirt'. But, have we really understood taiji's potential, and the CMC version in particular ? In my experience, having pursued  many of the practices listed above and a variety of others,  the Cheng form is seriously under-valued as a Qi cultivation practice. Despite its surface simplicity, it is an incredibly powerful engine of Qi generation - second to none, perhaps the very best such practice that exists. But, perhaps because most teachers of Cheng Man-ch'ing style (CMC) do not explicitly refer to Qi cultivation practices,  students sometimes fail to appreciate its profundity. And, it can only function for maximal Qi cultivation when practiced in accordance with Benjamin Lo's Principles. The good thing is that these Principles, while difficult to achieve in practice, are simple to grasp mentally - unlike the incredibly abstruse theories of ren and mai and xue, the complex circulations, and the  other arcana of classical Taoist internal alchemy. In effect, Prof. Cheng and Benjamin Lo have "called out" the key internal factors and represented them in a simple vocabulary of easily understandable and readily self-checkable properties.

The form practice in a Ben Lo class is very rigorous work! We work through the entire form or a sub-sequence at a slow pace, checking our conformity to the 5 deceptively simple Principles at each step. But you feel great at the end! Meanwhile, over  the sessions, you are building a connection to the earth (root), and a tenacious internal strength that yields a working understanding of Qi.

The CMC form is an expression of Professor Cheng's authentic genius.