January 1986

On Tai Ji Literature:

Miss Li said that to her knowledge there are not yet very many good books in English; though maybe it is a lack of understanding on her part in reading English, and maybe some better ones are now appearing, especially in America.

Nor are there actually many very good books in Chinese. Because under the Empire, you had to be very educated to write properly and the mandarin classes showed no serious interest in the internal martial arts - they adopted a snobbish attitude towards them. Then under the People’s Republic, Tai Ji started to be taken seriously by the governing classes and some authentic practitioners were drawn into writing some basic instructional literature. But the government’s basic emphasis was very external: Tai Ji simply as a form of exercise, without any of the emphasis on technique, breathing, mental attitude, etc. There was one interesting exception in the late Empire when Chen Weiming, who was something like the Imperial Archivist and was very scholarly and responsible for trying to preserve and organise records of Chinese history, became very interested in the internal martial arts. He went and studied with Sun Lu Tang in fact, and then studied the Yang Tai Ji and wrote a number of books about this, which are authentic, scholarly, and well-written.

On the whole, in Chinese books you get only very vague indications of the actual technique and a lot of philosophy, which is good as philosophy, but unhelpful for practice: it was expected that you would learn personally from a teacher. So Miss Li said her own emphasis and interest lies in pointers towards effective practice.

Our Tai Ji can be regarded as ‘authentic Yang’ with important additions from the Chen tradition.