The urge to understand Taijiquan as part of TCM...

We are slowly becoming aware that Chinese scholars and practitioners of Medicine and Gongfu are digging in the past to unearth what got lost in the savage times of the Cultural Revolution. They are way ahead of anything western scholars as yet can talk about, but there is no idea yet to let the old cultural science stand on its own two feet, that is: without the use of western science as an explanatory vehicle. But they are still caught in the conflict cased by the dogmatics of Hegelian dialectics and the fact that there are as yet too few Daoist scholars of proper repute to compare practice and theory. Much got lost in the last 200 years of Cultural Revolution under the influence of western science and military pressure.

The influence of the restoration movement is huge. And China’s economic and political successes will only contribute to reinforce that movement. It is therefore important to try to keep pace and cooperate in developing that understanding, because it will enrich the possibilities for all science.
As part of my attempts to understand Chinese cultural theoretical science I have come up with three essential branches of knowledge that need to be interlinked in the way old fashioned Daoists did:

- Chinese medicine anatomy and physiology
- Daoist Inernalized Gongfu
- Huanglao thinking based Neidan practice

Why? Well simple:

1) Chinese medicine provides the map of the human body, such as that the muscle channels are the foundation of the body and that from there the channel system builds itself in denser and denser components to end up eventually with the most yin part, the bones. It also says that building the body is a continuous process that when guided consciously makes one immortal and when left to itself causes one to die.
2) The internalized Gongfu内功夫 is intended to make one see two things: Taiji太极 and yin yang阴阳 interchange in the production of force, and how the pieces of the body hold together to produce strength.
3) Neidan内丹 or ‘internalized medicine’ practice is to help one gain control over the exchanges and timeliness of exchanges inside the body, the mind and so on.
 

We can see from these three that they form a unity that requires to be an inseparable whole to understand Chinese cultural biology as different from so called Western cultural biology that sees the body as a machine inhibited by a (divine) soul to make it Human: Chinese cultural biology sees person and body as a united living whole, there is no Soul required, and hence being Human is a matter of civilization!

In all these Taijiquan and Qigong play a specific role. Taijiquan is as much a behavioral science Chinese style as it is a theory of movement. Taijiquan practice knows several limbs, each illustrating a particular aspect of Taijiquan. ZhanZhuang is one of these limbs. It is in current PRC Tiyu (sports) dogma overemphasized at the expense of actual training and understanding. The different limbs represented in our fasttrack program represents the historical record of practice the best. Also what we do in our BA-MA program is outline the foundations of Chinese Cultural Biology as to properly understand and guide the practices. So you can see these skills can be practiced on a basic level, but if one aims to be a master one does need the original theories. The same goes for medicine. Why were famous Chinese doctors all daoists? Why were they practicing their body and neidan skills? Yes, that was to understand Chinese medicine theory fully. No book can replace that, while many books at the same time need to be read too. Now more then before.

If you see this as a challenge: namely to learn how to become a science instead practicing it, you are welcome to enter our program!
 

If you like, look at another side of this article at: www.youliou.com