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Dr Michael Moseley is well known as a TV presenter and more recently for his radio programme “Just One Thing”, which suggests simple things we can do to improve our health. In a recent episode, The surprising health benefits of Tai Chi, he explored Tai Chi! Dr Moseley looks at scientific evidence for the health benefits of Tai Chi and concludes that “Tai Chi can significantly enhance the activity of our immune system… [and] was as effective as conventional exercise for reducing body weight and visceral fat!”

The programmes are just 15 minutes long – which was also how long he asked his volunteer to practice for every day (students please note!). Listen to it on BBC sounds.

Chinese characters

Chinese characters are not symbols like our letters, but pictograms – line drawings. Here for example is a person, rén, which shows a person standing (on two legs): 人

And here is the character for a king or emperor, wáng – the three lines representing him joining heaven (the upper line), earth (the lower line) and the human world (the middle line): 王

Being pictures, these characters (unlike words in Western languages) don’t tell you how to say them. You just have to learn them, character by character.

Mandarin and Cantonese

China is a huge country with a population in excess of one billion people. Whilst everyone uses the same characters, different peoples within China say these words differently. Sometimes it’s just a small change in pronunciation – a dialect – but sometimes the difference is so great that the word can’t be recognised. In other words: China has different languages, and there’s no such thing as “Chinese”.

The language of government, spoken in the capital Beijing (in the North), is Mandarin, although it only became the official language in 1930. But our teacher Mr Moy came from the south of China; he mostly spoke Cantonese. His most important teacher, Liang Tzu-peng, lived in Hong Kong and also spoke Cantonese. Most of the words they used when teaching were Cantonese and not Mandarin.

So how do we write down Cantonese pronunciation in English? Cantonese has some different sounds to Mandarin, and pinyin doesn’t even work. The Cantonese have therefore developed their own Cantonese Pinyin but most people use an older system called Yale (because of a link to Yale university in the US).

Here’s an example, a word Mr Moy used a lot: 腰 – yao in pinyin but pronounced yiu in Cantonese. Normally translated waist, the closest word in English is midriff – it refers to the whole area of the body at waist level, including all the insides, especially the kidneys and the lumbar spine. How did Mr Moy write it? He didn’t. His students wrote it down the way it sounded to them; they wrote yu. We’ll talk about the yiu more when we discuss the two most important foundation exercises of Mr Moy’s Tai Chi, 蹲 腰 the don-yu, and 拖 蹲, the tor-yu.

Resources:

• Zhendic Chinese (Mandarin) dictionary
• CC-Canto Cantonese dictionary

There’s no simple way to write Chinese sounds in the characters we use in the west (a process called “romanization”, a reference to latin and the Roman Empire).

For a long time the most widespread system in the English-speaking world was one created in the 19th Century by two British diplomats, Thomas Francis Wade and Herbert Giles – the Wade-Giles system. This relied on a mark resembling an apostrophe called an asper to show whether or not a sound was aspirated (made with a breath, like the beginning of the word ‘happy’).

The big problem of this system is that some people were too lazy to use the asper. For example, 太 極 T’ai Chi, has become Tai Chi. What could be wrong with that?

The problem is that we now can’t tell the difference between 極 chi, and an even more important character for Tai Chi players: 氣 c’hi, which means energy or vital breath – the Chinese equivalent of the sanskrit prana, the greek pneuma or the hebrew ruach.

These problems were overcome in the 1950s by a system developed by the Chinese themselves called pinyin. The new system re-purposed the letters q, x and z, which hadn’t been needed in the Wade-Giles system, to represent some of the different sounds. T’ai chi became Tai ji, and c’hi became qi. (On this blog, words written in pinyin are coloured teal).

It’s a brilliant solution, but it was too late for us: 太 極 is still written (and pronounced) Tai chi in English, rather than Tai ji, meaning that the confusion with qi (氣, energy) may last forever. Personally I try to pronounce it Tai ji, when I remember.

This isn’t even the only confusion that we face: there is actually no such language as Chinese – the country has many different languages. We’ll talk about this in the next post.

Resources:

• 太 on Zhendic, an online Chinese (Mandarin) dictionary

In the Far East, cherry and plum blossoms are highly appreciated not just for their beauty but as harbingers of spring. Japan is known for its special appreciation for cherry blossom (sakura). The viewing of cherry blossom has such importance in Japanese culture that there is a special word for it: hanami. Emperor Saga held the first cherry blossom viewing party in 812, over a thousand years ago. For the common people, the appearance of the blossom was a sign that the god of rice had come down from the mountain and that it was time to plant rice.

Of course, the blossoms soon fall and for the Japanese cherry blossom is a symbol of the transience of all things. The viewing of the blossoms is thus bittersweet, evoking a feeling they call Mono no aware, the “pathos of things”.

Before Emperor Saga’s hanami the Japanese used to view plum blossom (ume), which bloomed earlier – a custom they are thought to have adopted from China. Unlike cherry blossoms, the plum blooms whilst it is still winter. Plum blossoms are thus a symbol of hope.

This is all very well, but what does it have to do with Tai Chi? Take a look at the photographs below.

Like cherry blossoms, plum blossoms have five petals but the petals have a rounder shape. For Tai Chi players the shape of a plum petal reminds them of the end of a finger, viewed end on, and the plum blossom is thus the image of the whipping hand in the move Whip to one side. The five petals are arranged evenly around a centre, presenting a model for the shape of the hand. For Taoists, being in harmony means being in harmony with nature and the movements are full of references to animals, birds and plants. Tigers, lions, dragons, snakes, eagles, cranes, swallows, water lilies and blossoms all make their appearance, together with the sun, moon, and stars, inviting us to draw inspiration for our practice from nature.

What does 太 極 ,Tai Chi, actually mean?

The second character, 極 (chi), originally depicted the ridgepole of the roof of a simple house. The two ends of the ridgepole are opposites: the implication is that we are separating opposite energies, which in Chinese are called yin and yang, like the plus and minus on a battery.

太 (tai) means the greatest – the most extreme. In other words, Tai Chi literally means the maximum separation of yin and yang: the condition of the highest possible energy, like a battery with the highest possible voltage, or the tallest possible waterfall. However Tai Chi is more than this: it’s a philosophical idea about the proper harmony and relationship between such opposites.

This idea is depicted in the Tai Chi diagram or taiji tu which shows the harmony of yin (dark) and yang (light) energies which nestle against one another like a pair of fish (note that Chinese culture doesn’t apply a pejorative connotation to darkness or to the colour black). The diagram shows this relationship as a cyclic alternation (imagine the image rotating), yin changing endlessly into yang, and yang into yin.

For the Taoists (a philosophical school associated with Tai Chi), such cyclic change was the nature of the universe and this harmonious relation between opposites was the great ideal, hence the phrase Tai Chi: The Supreme Ultimate.