• Re: Origins of silk reeling Qigong in Chen style taijiquan
• (RSF) Post by charles on Wed Apr 26, 2023 10:28 am

Although Taijiquan is based upon a set of principles, there are many variations in interpretations of how to physically implement those principles. This gives rise to variations in how movements are performed between styles, within styles and from one teacher to another within the same style. Add into the mix differences in purposes or goals of practice – for example, for health versus martial efficacy - and one sees even greater variation in how movements are performed. In addition, it is not uncommon for some teachers to alter what and/or how they perform their movements as they age as their focus changes towards practice for health and longevity.

In the case of Chen style Taijiquan, Hong Junsheng, Chen Fake’s (CFK) longest-standing disciple, observed that CFK performed his movements one way in solo practice and another during application. With CFK’s approval, Hong altered how movements were performed in solo practice to be the same as how they were performed in application. Hong observed that to be effective, the movements needed to be performed in a specific way, a way more strict than commonly required for solo practice: practicing for health has less stringent requirements. Hong called his resulting approach “Practical Method”.

In my experience, it isn’t uncommon in many styles of Taijiquan that the solo movements are performed one way and when required to be martially effective (i.e., applied) are performed a different way. For example, many students are unable to get form movements to work as applications, while their teachers can: the teacher is doing something different than the students, often without explicitly telling the student what the difference is.

In Chen Village solo practice, the elbows are often raised, and is a basic element of most solo practice, including foundational silk reeling circles. Chen Xiaowang (CXW), for example, explicitly teaches that during an “outgoing” portion of a circle “qi” travels from the dantian to the mingmen, up the back to the shoulder, to the elbow and then to the hand. Feng Zhiqiang’s training doesn’t explicitly teach this pathway but performs the circle similarly. By contrast, in Hong’s Practical Method, it is taught from the onset that raising the elbows is an error in any part of practice and is to be avoided from day one. In application, regardless of sub-style, the elbows are rarely raised since a raised elbow is a liability easily taken advantage of by an opponent or partner. One of the distinguishing characteristics between Hong’s “silk reeling” and that of Village/Feng is the use/non-use of the elbow.

This leads to a second distinguishing characteristic. With Village/Feng solo silk reeling circles, and the dantian/mingmen/shoulder/elbow/hand sequence, the movement of the elbow precedes the movement of the hand. In Hong’s style, the hand precedes the elbow. In long weapons training – and some shorter weapons training, such as saber – the hand must precede the elbow: the weapon won’t work if the elbow leads. For example, if thrusting a spear outwards, the forward hand leads the action, not the elbow. Similarly, when withdrawing the spear, the opposite occurs: the elbow leads the hand, pulling back with the elbow as the hand follows. In Village/Feng solo (empty hand) work, the elbow leads in outward-going movements while the hand leads on inward-going movements, the exact opposite of Practical Method. This has huge implications in how the solo movements – including the basic “silk reeling” circles – are performed and trained.

Another significant difference between Hong and Village/Feng methods was already mentioned by Richard: one cannot move the fulcrum during application since doing so reduces it efficacy. In practice, this means that one does not shift weight back and forth during application. In Village/Feng solo practice, there is a constant shifting of weight back and forth. (It is interesting to see video of Feng pushing hands where he does very little weight shift.)

In the 1990’s, when CXW was travelling the world to give seminars, he explicitly taught that there is one foundational principle and three techniques for achieving that principle. The First Principle is that when one part of the body moves, the entire body moves, or, put another way, when the dantian moves, the whole body moves. He taught that there are three techniques for achieving that. The first technique is to move the dantian left and right, that is, in a plane parallel to the front of the torso, i.e., the Coronal/Frontal plane. The second technique is to move the dantian forward and back, i.e., in the Sagittal plane. The third technique is any combination of the previous two, that is, movement of the dantian on any arbitrary plane.

[image showing what the Sagittal plane, Coronal plane, and transverse plane is. The sagittal bisects the body front to back, the coronal left to right and the transverse into top and bottom.]

CXW teaches movement of the dantian left and right using the common “arm circle” silk reeling exercise and its immediate variations. The arm circle exercise can be performed in two directions of rotation that he does not explicitly label. CXW teaches movement of the dantian forward and back using a single circling-of-the-wrists-against-the-abdomen exercise. That is the entirety of the silk reeling exercises he teaches, at least publicly: the arm circle, its variations, with and without stepping, and the wrist exercise.

I have not encountered any other teacher who presents the material in the terms CXW uses. Zhu Tiancai, for example, does not explicitly teach it this way. He does, however, present something that CXW does not, the most common ways in which the arm circles can be combined, as seen in forms. Zhu presents these in his 13-posture neigong set.

By contrast, Hong does not present or conceptualize movement this way: he does not breakdown three-dimensional movement into 2D (i.e., planar) motions. What he does do is present two – and only two – “3D circles” that form the basis for the entirety of the style, its solo work and applications. He explicitly distinguishes each direction of the circle, calling one “positive” and the other “negative”, terminology not used in other Chen variants. The entirety of forms are comprised of these two circles and/or portions thereof. (This is vaguely implied in Village presentations but left to the student to figure out, or not.) In Hong’s method, if one cannot identify at any place in any form or application which of the two circles are being performed, the action is being performed incorrectly. As in Zhu’s neigong set, there are eight most-common combinations of two circles with two arms.

In Feng’s teachings, none of the above is explicitly taught or stated: he, generally, did not break movement into 2D components, did not assign specific movements or actions to movement of the dantian (i.e., the basic arm circle being dantian moving left and right), did not teach that there are two and only two basic arm circles or that they could be combined to become the basis for all form and application movements.

One of the biggest differences between Feng’s silk reeling set and CXW’s silk reeling set is that Feng included many different actions with a wide variety of body parts, while CXW’s is almost entirely a presentation of the two basic circles with their variations. Feng included much more general training that includes things like striking with shoulders, elbows, back, chest, knees, forearm rubbing, grabbing, wrapping, punching, kicking, foot sweeps, and so on: its focus is much more along the lines of developing “the whole body is a fist”. In my opinion, Feng’s silk reeling set, along with his Hunyuan qigong set, are his primary contribution to Taijiquan. However, as Feng aged, he dramatically changed how he performed his solo work, including the silk reeling exercises, with much greater emphasis on health and longevity. He added more circles to movements, made the circles looser and less well-defined and introduced a lot of swaying back and forth and bending at the waist. Feng would turn on and off martial effectiveness at will, switching between loose, ill-defined movements to suddenly focused effective application, demonstrating the difference between how it was practiced solo and how it was effectively used.

The above only scratches the surface of what is similar and what is different between Village, Feng and Hong styles. There are some significant differences and some similarities.