We don’t usually associate self-cultivation with martial arts. Yet two distinguished Tai chi reformers placed great store in self-cultivation through Tai chi. The first was the creator of Sun style Tai chi Sun LuTang. He appears to have taken his skills and knowledge to a level were he found it possible to use Tai chi and other internal arts as a means towards enlightenment. I shall not deal with Sun Lu Tang in this post. However the other reformer is very widely known for an emphasis on self-cultivation.
Read more: Don’t be greedyCheng Man-Ch’ing, in response to the many letters he received from people who did not have a class they could attend in their locality, wrote a manual of Tai chi instruction titled The New Method of Self-Cultivation. The basis of all self-cultivation is self-understanding and this is universally understood to be the chief benefit of learning the single person forms of Tai chi. Whereas the push-hands sets enable the development of understanding of others.
Such is the depth of the single person hand forms that it is entirely possible for those of us taking up Tai chi after our thirties, to keep mining this practice for wisdom and connection to the cosmos for the rest of our lives.
Be that as it may, we must still wrestle with one of the great faults Cheng Man-Ch’ing identified – greediness. We must take our time developing our Tai chi because the foundations remain incredibly important. The first time I started Tai chi we had not even advanced to the second Ward off at the start of the Yang long-form. In another engagement with the Yang system, after 20 weeks we had only completed the repulse monkey. Recently I started in another Yang long-form class which advanced to the first brush knee in the first class. The last time I started with this mob the first class taught through to single whip, and that felt supper quick. Whatever the pedagogical imperative may be in this latest class, it’s hard to see it above all else giving in to Western greediness.
I will continue with this class until I have been through the whole Yang long-form. But it is really challenging, how do I manage to build a foundation while proceeding at this pace? Curiously, this class is probably the least damaging to my many problematic bits because it does go so fast. This means significantly less repetitions are done in each class on small sections of the set. And yet wrestling with greediness will remain central to my priorities in this class, along with protecting my spine. No more pain from Tai chi for me, there was far too much of that from 2000 – 2014.
One of Cheng Man-Ch’ing’s key principles for self-cultivation is keep the coccyx straight throughout. This enables the spirit to go through to the top of your head. The notion of spirit is a key element of self-cultivation and Tai chi more generally.