User talk:Realtaichi
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[edit] Wu Quanyou
Greetings! Good job on the Wu Quanyou article! I've been looking for a photo, so far, no luck. I'm not sure that the material in question actually was a copyvio, only that it possibly was. The magazine that it came from may be out of business, or the article could be old enough to put it in the public domain. We definitely could use more info about all of these teachers, though. If the material is sourced, then it should be fine, you could say about the rewritten facts: "from Wang Pei-sheng" or "from Douglas Wile" or whatever in the article or even just in the edit summary if it is short enough. The very "dry" Wikipedia style takes some getting used to. If you have any doubts, just post the material on the talk page and people can give their opinions. Regards, --Fire Star 21:20, 9 January 2006 (UTC)
[edit] Dim Mak
Greetings again. The reason that I removed the dim mak reference and replaced it with a more generic term was that I have been told by Wu family teachers that it isn't part of t'ai chi in the traditional sense. There is pressure point fighting in t'ai chi, but what they told me was that dim mak is something specifically from the criminal underworld and was considered dishonourable (along the lines of ninjutsu) by "righteous" martial artists. Since the info was personally delivered to me (no original research), and the old-timers had a tendency not to discuss "distasteful" subjects in detail in the classics, I can't put it in the article, but I thought you'd find the concept that it was considered to be evil interesting. Maybe we could have some qualifying language in there? Cheers, --Fire Star 17:56, 7 February 2006 (UTC)
- Hello, thanks for the reply. Since we both contribute so much to the T'ai Chi articles, I see our discussions as fruitful aids to better articles. I was quite happy to see the Yang Shao-hou article started, BTW. I was intending to, but I'm afraid I was procrastinating about starting it.
- Your (and your wife's) observations on the triads and martial arts fit with my experience, as well. Even some famous contemporary T'ai Chi masters (some of whom are quite fierce, martially, IME) are also associated with triad members. Formerly, this wasn't the case, most of the older masters that we have written up were (as near as I can tell) truly "superior persons" and wouldn't have tolerated such, but they are all gone now. Interestingly, these contemporary people I know of seem to have no interest themselves in the healing aspects you mention, which has become an informal rule of thumb for me to be able to decide which "side" someone is on. In the classics at one point Zhang Sanfeng is supposed to have said: "What a shame it is that there are still criminals in the martial arts." For myself and my colleagues, healing is the most interesting part of the study, and T'ai Chi Ch'uan itself was presented to me as a full branch of traditional Chinese medicine, and only incidentally as a martial art, however effective. Protecting oneself martially is a logical extension of health maintenance, of course.
- What I was taught about the Dim Mak was that it used to be a hard style term, and in the old days the technique was used to kill, exclusively. I was also taught that the Dim Mak used for that purpose was now extinct, that it didn't survive into the modern era, or only survived in a severely truncated form (being from an underworld ethic, Jianghu, that went out of fashion after the communist takeover), so what your school is doing is very likely not the same thing, but rather technique inherited from the former masters unrelated to the triads. In the 40 Yang family chapters, they speak of "life and death acupoints" as part of T'ai Chi and I have been shown many lethal points and the angles, jin and times (points in the pulse cycle) necessary to hit them to a lethal end. At the same time, this was done mostly in order that we wouldn't ourselves be vulnerable to these sorts of strikes, and they stressed to me that there were more effective and merciful ways to incapacitate an attacker. The students most likely to benefit martially from knowing the life and death points were smaller women, who wouldn't be likely to have the size to stop an attack any other way (unless they were extraordinarily talented), so they are the students I teach this information to first, and only if they are "superior persons", of course. I will reword the article slightly, just to make it more generic, but not to actually remove much info, I hope. Regards, --Fire Star 21:43, 7 February 2006 (UTC)
[edit] T'ai Chi gong
Greetings. The subject is a very interesting one to me. Unfortunately, the Wu 24 forms aren't to my knowledge documented (until some of them were very recently videotaped by Eddie Wu Sifu), as they were secret "family-disciple" teachings, and I have even been told when I first started to learn them that their existence was expected to be publicly denied by those who were taught them. Since then, it was decided that secrecy was no longer necessary, and the simpler ones started to even be shown to non-disciples. That being said, while they were being taught, I would be told things like: "This is very old training, originally from Shaolin", or "This one is from the Founder (Zhang Sanfeng) himself, and it is based on yielding in the face of strength" or "this one is from Wudang", etc. So, the impression I get is that they predate the Chens and the Yangs, although we may never know for sure... --Fire Star 22:58, 15 February 2006 (UTC)
[edit] Zhaobao Taijiquan
Greetings. I've moved the article over to a more common romanisation, created some redirects and linked some terms. It's a good start. --Fire Star 火星 17:15, 10 August 2006 (UTC)
[edit] New articles
Hello. I got your message about the new articles. They look alright, with one or two little fixes and some expansion they will be very good. I will get to contributing to them ASAP, but I am moving this month and unfortunately most of my reference materials are packed away. Cheers, --Fire Star 火星 18:46, 16 August 2006 (UTC)
