Chapter

12

Introducing the Kuang Ping Yang Style

In This Chapter

The Kuang Ping Yang style of T’ai Chi has a rich and colorful history, as do all the ancient styles. (See Chapter 1’s “Styles of T’ai Chi” for background on the other wonderful T’ai Chi styles.) The history of T’ai Chi is a great way to better understand its benefits and why it is so perfect for our modern, harried lives.

This chapter discusses the roots of all T’ai Chi and explains how Kuang Ping Yang and the more extant Yang style became different. You also learn why some styles offer shortened versions and why Chapter 13 offers a long form. Understanding some of T’ai Chi’s historical or ancient tenets may actually help you get many more and endlessly richer benefits from its practice. The more your mind believes in your therapy, the more powerfully it heals.

The Origin of T’ai Chi: The Snake and the Crane

According to legend, T’ai Chi was born from an observation of nature. A martial arts master observed how a snake slowly evaded a crane’s attack by moving away each time the bird’s sharp beak struck. What may have been mortal combat became a gentle exercise that left the exhausted crane flying off for easier prey.

This example of yielding to the brute force of the world has created not only a powerful martial art, but also an extremely healthful philosophy for surviving the stressful onslaught of an accelerating future. If this crane’s attacks are compared with today’s rapid changes, we may be much smarter to bend, yield, and flow with that change than to dig in our heels and fight it. The snake’s yielding was much less stressful than a head-to-head fight with the larger, sharp-beaked crane. See Web Video Support’s Liquid Yielding Nature of T’ai Chi for a few visual examples of this quality of T’ai Chi (www.idiotsguides.com/taichi).

OUCH!

The Shao-Lin Temple: Where It All Began

The Shao-Lin Temple that was featured on the famous television series Kung Fu is actually where T’ai Chi began. Around 400 C.E., an 18-movement stretching exercise that eventually grew into T’ai Chi was taught to the monks by a man known as Ta Mo. The purported founder of modern T’ai Chi, however, was a monk named Chang San-feng, who lived about 1000 years later. It was Chang San-feng who is said to have watched the snake yield and avoid the crane’s harsh attacks.

From the Temple to the West

The Chen family, founders of the Chen style of T’ai Chi, created one of the earliest family styles. The Chen style was taught to a young martial artist named Yang Lu-chan, who was the founder of today’s Yang style.

KNOW YOUR CHINESE

The Yang family taught a style of T’ai Chi while residing in the city of Kuang Ping. Here, the founding master Yang Lu-chan’s eldest son, Yang Pan-hou, was made an offer he couldn’t refuse: to teach T’ai Chi at the imperial court and become the emperor’s personal teacher. Yang could not refuse the emperor, so he decided to create another version of the family style to teach him, one that was different from the Kuang Ping Yang style. It’s worth stating here that all the various Yang styles (and other styles) can be powerful health and wellness techniques.

This Kuang Ping Yang style was passed down from Yang Pan-hou to his student Wong Jao-yu, who taught master Kuo Lien Ying. Kuo Lien Ying eventually migrated to the United States and taught this to students, who have since spread this style all across the United States, just as other masters spread the other wonderful styles of T’ai Chi throughout the world.

This can be about as difficult to sort out as the cast of a soap opera, so don’t worry about these details. It’s just important to remember that the tools you are about to enjoy are the fruits of centuries of study. I include these stories not to confuse, but to acknowledge and to thank these people for making available all that T’ai Chi has to offer in its various forms and styles.

Again, the basic principles are universal to all styles, such as Kuang Ping Style master Henry Look’s Seven Important Principles. Master Look was one of Master Kuo’s original students, and his Seven Important Principles were: centering; quiet smile; quiet movement; quiet mind; quiet breathing; coordination; and focus, which can be applied to all styles of T’ai Chi and QiGong.

T’ai Chi Becomes a Philosophy

Around 1500 C.E., the Taoist philosopher Wan Yang-ming began to blend the gentle centering philosophical concepts of Taoism into the equally centering physical concepts of T’ai Chi. This gave practitioners a real way to live a more healing, nonviolent life—not just preaching it or thinking about it, but actually training their mind and body how to live that way through T’ai Chi’s gentle mind/body fitness program.

The modern styles now widely practiced—Yang, Chen, Wu, Mulan Quan, Sun, and others—all incorporate the beautiful personal-growth concepts of Taoist philosophy. This book is not meant to favor any one style, but to celebrate all T’ai Chi styles. As mentioned earlier, when the six grandmasters of the major family styles traveled from China to speak at the International Tai Chi Symposium at Vanderbilt University, all six agreed that all styles of T’ai Chi provide similar benefits when practiced correctly.

Taoism is not a religion, but an observation of the dynamics of life and consciousness. Anyone of any religion can enjoy the Taoist aspects of T’ai Chi and QiGong and benefit from them. Taoism is about understanding that we are connected to all of life, and thereby that what nurtures all life in the end nurtures us. Taoism is a philosophy designed to foster compassion, not through intellectual edicts and rules, but rather through immersing ourselves in the field of Qi, or life energy, which permeates all existence. Any T’ai Chi or QiGong player knows that when she lets go of her grip on the world and relaxes open to the Qi or energy field that she is made of, she feels more connected to the world. When we do this we feel a kinship to the world, and feel more welcome in our world, which thereby makes us more welcoming to those around us.

A T’AI CHI PUNCH LINE

The philosophy of T’ai Chi is based on the idea of the balance of nature, both internally in our health systems and externally in our relationships with the natural world. Therefore, you will see nature imitated in many of the following Kuang Ping Yang T’ai Chi long form names, but also in other styles’ form names as well:

• Wave Hands Like Clouds

• Wind Blowing Lotus Leaves

• White Crane Cools Its Wings

• Retreat to Ride the Tiger

See Web Video Support’s Nature’s Flow in T’ai Chi, containing excerpts of “Wave Hands Like Clouds” and “Wind Blowing Lotus Leaves.”

The poetic quality of these names does more than just remind us how to perform the movements. On a subliminal level, they make us feel more at home in the natural world, somehow more attuned to our connection to the whole of life.

T’ai Chi movement names can also help us remember our multidimensional nature. We are all physical and mental beings, of course, and T’ai Chi integrates these aspects of ourselves well, but it connects our minds and bodies with our spirit or energy nature, too. This connection is reflected in movement names:

• Strike Palm to Ask Blessing

• Focus Mind Toward the Temple

T’ai Chi reminds us that we are part of the universe and that, in fact, we are made of the same energy stars and everything else are made of. T’ai Chi is meant to open us to the limitless supply of energy within us, in the earth we walk upon, and from the universe our world hurtles through. That universal connection is also reflected in movement names:

• Step Up to Form Seven Stars

• Grand Terminus

Grand Terminus, the final movement, opens us to the limitless energy of the universe around us. See Web Video Support’s Grand Radiance, containing an excerpt of Grand Terminus with special effects added to help you visualize the energetic nature of this movement.

Short Forms vs. Long Forms

Today several short versions of the original long forms of T’ai Chi exist. These shortened versions can provide extensive benefits, such as enabling a student to acquire a practice system more quickly. But why stop there, when there is added value in taking the time to eventually learn a 20-minute long form as well?

SAGE SIFU SAYS

We now know the original ancient forms, which usually took about 20 minutes to complete, were that length for a good reason. In his groundbreaking book The Relaxation Response, Dr. Herbert Benson notes that a 20-minute relaxation response exercise seemed to evoke the optimum benefits. Apparently, the mind uses the first few minutes of a relaxation therapy to just wind down; the remaining time truly allows the deep alpha state relaxation these therapies are known for. So it’s advisable to take the time to eventually learn a long form of T’ai Chi.

T’AI SCI

Why Sixty-Four Movements?

The more extensive Yang form names 108 movements, and the Kuang Ping Yang style long form claims 64 movements, yet they both average around 20 minutes to perform.

There may be more to the Kuang Ping’s 64 movements than just chance. The number 64 has profound philosophical meaning. The Chinese classic I Ching, or The Book of Changes, is an ancient text of divination and philosophy that attempts to explain how the universal forces of yin and yang ebb and flow, combine and disintegrate, and rise and fall to create the dance of existence. The central premise is that all things are in a constant state of change, including our lives and us. T’ai Chi’s goal is to help us flow with the change and not be compulsively attached to the old or the new, using what works and discarding what is no longer useful. As if you were a surfer riding the changing waves of life, let go of old waves as they recede, to ease onto the mounting power of the new wave.

The I Ching uses Trigrams, or figures with three lines (shown in the following figure) to symbolize the changes in life. When two Tri-grams are combined, 64 possible combinations are obtained. These 64 hexagrams are said to represent all possible states of change in the universe. Therefore, Kuang Ping Yang’s 64 flowing movements symbolize—and in some ways physically help us to flow through—all the possible changes and challenges of life those changes entail.

OUCH!

The fact that Kuang Ping Yang-style T’ai Chi forms involve 64 movements may have deeper reasons than we know. The complexity and powerful healing qualities that T’ai Chi offers are only now beginning to be discovered by modern science. Perhaps many other details of how and why T’ai Chi does what it does will be uncovered in years to come.

Trigrams are combinations of three lines, which can be broken in half or remain whole, making eight possible combinations.

T’ai Chi and Chinese Medicine

As I discussed in Chapter 2, Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) uses the Zang Fu system of understanding how organs interact. Each of these organ systems is represented by one of the five elements of the earth, according to ancient Chinese physics:

T’ai Chi movements are described with this same system, and the motion of the body that T’ai Chi promotes may have a healing effect on those systems. The directions of movement each correlate to one of the earth elements:

Elements Correlate to Directions of Movement

The 64 postures of the Kuang Ping Yang style can take anywhere from about 15 to 20 minutes to complete. The movements flow in an unending progression from one to the next until the final movement, the Grand Terminus. The movements move the body outward and backward in all the directions previously described. There is also a meditative quality to that motion that cannot be described or conveyed in print.

Chapter 13 provides detailed sketches of each of the 64 Kuang Ping Yang-style movements, numbered in sequence. It also explains many of the benefits of each movement, complete with pointers, directional arrows, left-leg/right-leg labels, and energy-flow indicators to help you precisely perform them, as well as cautionary notes to help your T’ai Chi experience be both healthful and profound. There are Web Video Support examples of each of the 64 postures to augment the deeply detailed figure and text instructions.