By: Richard Clear
Submitted: 2012-01-08 21:06:05 | Word Count: 627
Martial Tai Chi may sound like some kind of a specific and strange kind of Tai Chi that is unlike most of the rest of Tai Chi that can be found in the world today. However, it is important to note that Tai Chi began as a martial art and that when you translate the name of Tai Chi which is actually Tai Chi Chuan that it means Grand Ultimate Fist.
A lot of people today try to claim that martial Tai Chi is a perversion of Tai Chi and not the same as (by which they mean inferior to) the Tai Chi for health. They state that Tai Chi and Tai Chi Chuan are somehow from different roots and that they are a different art created for entirely different purposes and not at all related. I have even had several different folks with lots of letters like PHD behind their name try to tell me that Tai Chi was never a fighting art and that I made it up because I like teaching martial arts. I was mostly astounded because I thought having an advanced degree of any kind meant that you did your homework before making crazy statements that were / are easily disproven by anyone who cares to get publicly and readily available facts.
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Grand Ultimate Fist meant the best martial tai Chi fighting art available. If Tai Chi was not originally Tai Chi Chuan then what were they talking about when they named it? Grand Ultimate what? If they were stating that this was the grand ultimate health method then they would have named it that. This would not have been difficult as the Chinese language has specific words for health and method and any other aspect of these words that they would care to use.
What I ask you the reader to consider for a moment is what could be the reason for naming an art form the Grand Ultimate Fist. That is quite a moniker and one that would draw a lot of questions and challenges in mainland China. The name of the art frankly states that not only is it a fighting style but by those who named it and put it forth it was considered the best fighting method in existence. That is quite a statement to make in China the land of the Shaolin fighting monks and Kung Fu which dates back to at least 500A.D..
Of course as most people are well aware there is quite a bit of Tai Chi that is practiced today that is not martial Tai Chi. However, any legitimate art that can be called Tai Chi started with the martial Tai Chi and can be traced back to a family style that used it martially within the last 100 years. So, there is Tai Chi that started out as martial Tai Chi but that can not be considered martial Tai Chi anymore but unfortunately as much as so called teachers of this often claim it is somehow better than the martial Tai Chi it has been my experience that the non-martial Tai Chi has been watered down and stripped of its amazing health properties as well if only because those who are teaching it do not understand the art they are bastardizing at all let alone the martial aspect of it.
What is it about martial Tai Chi that makes it able to carry the name grand ultimate fist? I will be going into this a bit in my next few posts where I am writing about the family styles and then at some point I will do a follow up to this post where I specifically write about the specific high level fighting techniques that are found in all martial Tai Chi.
