How Qi Jiguang Shaped Tai Chi
Qi Jiguang is the Ming dynasty collation of folk boxing outstanding figure, he summed up and collation of the Ming dynasty sixteen folk famous boxing, and absorbed one of the thirty-two potential compiled into a boxing glove, called ‘boxing scripture thirty-two potential’, income ‘ji xingxinshu’, known as the source of soldiers practice martial arts.
Chi’s ‘boxing doctrine’ has the role of the beginning and the end, he is far and Song Taizu Zhao Kuangyin’s long boxing thirty-two potential, long boxing short fights, to remove and store the essence of the use of rigid and soft, eclectic. His boxing ‘potential potential to inherit, meet the enemy to win, endless changes’, greatly corrected the then popular full of flowers and grass, the evils of the flower punch, but not the actual fist became a new school of boxing.
Qi Jiguang was separated from Chen Wangting for about half a century, which had a great influence on Chen Wangting’s creation of taijiquan, and Qi’s ‘Boxing Classic Thirty-two Positions’ was absorbed by Chen Wangting and compiled into taijiquan routines with twenty-nine positions, such as the ‘Boxing Classic’ with the ‘Lazy Za Yi’ as the starting position, and Chen Wangting’s seven routes of taijiquan routines were all based on this as the starting position. Even the text of Chen’s ‘Boxing Spectrum’ and ‘Boxing General Song’ is modelled on Chi’s ‘Boxing Jing’), which shows the depth of influence.
However, this is only about inheritance and influence, not that Chen Wangting’s Taijiquan was copied from Qi Jiguang’s. The merit of Chen Wangting lies in his inheritance and influence. The merit of Chen Wangting is that he inherited the legacy of Qi Jiguang’s kungfu and pushed the boundaries to create a new school of kungfu, which is Taijiquan. As an example, the Chen’s Taijiquan method of two-person push hands and two-person sticking spears, which specialise in the sensitivity of the peripheral skin touch and internal body sensation, were not available in Qi Jiguang, Yu Dayou, or Tang Shun, but were unique to Chen’s Taijiquan as a competitive method. He solved the problem which was not recorded in the boxing works of No Use Zhi, Cheng Chong Dou, He Liangchen and Mao Yuan Yi.
