I recently attended a three day silent t’ai chi ch’uan retreat. I spent much of my time there thinking about my practice and what I want to get out of it. One night, I sat down and wrote this before I went to bed.
I practice Yang style t’ai chi: specifically the short form developed by Professor Cheng Man-ch’ing. Yang style seeks relaxation, the release of tension, strength through softness and expansion. This type of strength is referred to as sung. Most martial arts—from Shaolin gung fu to Western-style boxing—use the opposite type of strength: contraction, hardness, tension. This is called li. Yang style only seeks sung, never li.
There are other styles of t’ai chi, most of which are notably older than Yang style. Chen style, for instance, has been practiced for centuries and remains the most popular style in China (Yang is the most popular in the West).
Musician Lou Reed practiced Chen style t’ai chi for decades and he wrote a book about his experience. I read it last year. The way he describes his style is markedly different than how we describe Yang. He talks about balancing softness with hardness, expansion with contraction, relaxation with tension, slow with fast, sung with li, and the ability to move from one to the other. This is so different from Yang practice, in which all tension is released and none allowed to build up, that it’s difficult to think of these as both being t’ai chi.
(Indeed, many Chen style practitioners even to this day don’t acknowledge that Yang style is t’ai chi at all.)
But Reed’s description of Chen style makes so much sense to me. T’ai chi is a Taoist practice, a physical manifestation of Taoist principles. The core tenets of Taoism are built to balance yin and yang. A physical practice that actively embodies opposing principles and develops your ability to move between them, seems very much in keeping with the philosophy of balancing opposites. Yang style, by contrast, doesn’t balance opposites, it only embodies one set of principles.
I think of the apocryphal story of t’ai chi’s origin: a monk observed a bird attacking a snake. The bird struck and the snake yielded. The bird struck again, again the snake yielded. Finally, the bird struck and over-extended itself, and only then did the snake strike and kill the bird. All of the core ideas of t’ai chi are here: yielding and adherence, staying inside your frame, allowing your opponent to cause your actions.
I’ve seen snakes do this in real life. The yielding is sung: relaxed, soft, expansive. But the snake’s strike is li, fast and hard and muscular. The snake prevails because of its ability to use both to best effect. So, again, it makes sense to me that t’ai chi should embody and balance both.
After I read Lou Reed’s book, I found myself wondering if I should try Chen style. Maybe it would suit me better.
During one of the later practice sessions at the retreat, as I focused on relaxing, I felt a load of stress slip away and a melting of tension in my body. I asked myself where this stress and tension comes from: it comes from the world, from life. Simply existing in the world right now is the most stressful it’s ever been in my half-century on this planet (for me, at least, fully recognizing that things have been very bad for certain demographics of our society for a long, long time already). I’ve never been this frightened, and I’m frightened all the time now: the rise of fascism in the West, the empowerment of hate and intolerance, the renewed threat of nuclear Armageddon, the growing existential danger of accelerating climate change… This a genuinely terrifying time.
As I felt some of my stress and tension ease, I realized:
I don’t need my t’ai chi practice to embody both yin and yang, sung and li. I need it to counterbalance the world.
This seems a bit naive, I know. How can this small personal practice accomplish such a heavy task? But as the wisdom teaches us:
Sometimes it only takes a force of four ounces to redirect one thousand pounds. I figure even this little bit helps, and it’s a hell of lot better than nothing.
John the Librarian 