Subject: Introduce a good book

I would like to introduce you a very good book about Taiji Chuan. The title of it is "Yang Family Secret Transmissions" (Tai-chi Touchstones).

I feel very proud that you are now good enough to read that book and I definitely feel that you will benefit a lot from it. Except for Chapter IV and Chapter V, all other chapters are suitable to you.

Subject: Listen To The Teacher

It seems difficult for me to explain what is in my mind clearly to you. It seems you did not really understand my last mail. I think I should first tell you my teaching experience in China.

I used to have two kinds of Taiji students. One consisted of undergraduate students from the university at which I worked. The other one consisted of my friends, most of them are my colleagues. Do you guess what happened to these two different kinds? All the undergraduate students learned and practiced very well and they really grasped the essentials. Some of them even became well-known in their counties, their large factories or large bureaus (you could imagine the populations by "large" in China). One girl got her Taiji championship in a well known city and she was better than a guy with whom she married later, who learned Taiji from a famous teacher in Nanjing. Another guy became famous in his big factory and found a very nice girl as wife just because of his skills in Chinese Martial Arts. What about the other kind, my friends? None of them had ever finished learning the whole series, not to mention which level they had reached. As my friends, they had never practiced by themselves and also they always gave me suggestions and showed me "better" ways for them to learn or for me to teach. They had never really paid attention to what I had told them.

We have a proverb "the essentials are no more than a sheet when written", which means the importance of practice.

Traditionally, one word from the teacher sometimes would cost several years of practice for the student to understand it. If the student does not practice by himself, he would never understand it.

Another proverb, "the teacher only guide the student into the gate, then the student does all the other things".

I still think the pace for you is around right. You do not want to learn it very fast, so I did not teach you many new forms. The real meaning behind this is that I hoped you could practice old forms by yourself, especially the first two sections. Please do not feel uneasy when you are practising alone. It does not mean I am not spending time on your studying. I am trying to give you my "words" according to your performance. At your level, there is not much meaning to follow the teacher to practise the series many times because your every form looks good if we do not consider the spirit behind it. What you really need is to have some progress in the spirit, I mean relaxation here.

There are or were two ways or methods in the teaching of Taiji, "words" and "demonstrations", which are both important. It is the time for me to give you the "words". I am not sure if you have noticed I have tried to give you my "words". Your situation is that if you could really understand the meaning of relaxation in one form, then you will be able to make progress in all the other forms and the whole series. I tried to ask you to practice the second form, "holding bird's tail", but you did not. I asked you to practice the first two sections in another time, and you did not.

Subject: Practise By Yourself

I think I should tell you something about traditional Chinese martial arts. Normally, it is not the right way for all the students to be in the same level. Every student has his own steps to reach some level. Maybe somebody grasps the forms faster while someone else slower. But that does not mean the person who learns faster is at higher level. We have to understand the number of forms a person has learned has nothing to do with the level he (or she) has reached. The level is not decided by the number of forms. It is decided by how the forms are performed.

Here is an example: Chang Zhengfang, first Chairman of National Association of Chinese Martial Arts, was the student who learned the forms most slowly among his classmates under the teacher Sun Lutang. When his classmates had learned different styles of series for three years, he was still asked by his teacher to do the standing form, which is quite similar to our first standing form which we practised every day. So only this single standing form took him three years, and he did not learn anything else. After three years, his teacher gave him a small test and then decided it was the time for him to learn new forms. He became the best student of his teacher later.

What I really mean here is that it is really important to practice by yourself, to really grasp the forms you have already learned. Not only know how to practice them, but also know their spirits. It is important to think and to imagine when you practice. Thus it is important for you to practice how to think and how to imagine. If that, then you have to practice by yourself. Actually, it is not a very good way to always follow the teacher. I am sorry for my ignoring to inform you this earlier. I thought I must have misled you.

The teacher can only teach you the correct forms and the steps to reach some level. The other things are left to the students themselves.

Please just ask me if you have any questions?

Regards,

Copyright 1998 Wan Yueting