On The Road

In this blog, we’ve examined Taiji mostly through the lens of Yang-style teaching, which is my primary experience and the most popular style in the United States. The slow and gentle movements of the Yang style are easily accessible to people of all ages for general health and balance. While it’s also a martial art, this aspect is not as obvious as in the other four styles – and particularly Chen, which features both the soft and the hard martial applications.

I got an up-close view of Chen-style Taiji recently in a Washington, DC, suburb, where Grandmaster Zhu Tiancai led a group of 40 Taiji enthusiasts through a series of vigorous exercises, including the Chen form, push hands and applications. We also benefited from the translation of Chen Master and author C.P. Ong, whose book, Taijiquan: Cultivating Inner Strength, is an authoritative source on the Chen style and an excellent primer on Taiji generally.

Chen was the first school of Taijiquan, dating to the 1600s, when Chen Wangting developed the martial arts form in his native Chen Village. For more than a century, the elders of Chen Village kept the Chen family secret until Yang Luchan, the father of Yang-style Taiji, was invited into the village to learn in the early 1800s. Today, Chen is chasing Yang for influence. Grandmaster Zhu is one of four “Jingangs” (Guardian/Warriors) from Chen Village who travel the world to preserve and expand the reach of Chen-style Taiji.

To demonstrate the movement of qi in his dantien, Grandmaster Zhu Tiancai invites Billy Greer of the Jing Ying Institute to place his fist on the area just below his navel while he pushes hands with Jing Ying student Mary Anna Cirlot.

Students attending the Washington-area workshop came from all across the country, some expressing concern that, at 75, Grandmaster Zhu might not be back this way again. My friend Ray Abeyta, who hosted Zhu many times at his Texas School of Tai-Chi and Healing in El Paso, skirted Hurricane Harvey to fly in to see his old friend.

“Grandmaster Zhu is a national treasurer in China,” said Abeyta, who has visited Chen Village and competed in push-hands tournaments in that country. “He is humble, grounded and generous with his family art, and he is deservedly well-loved and respected. I’ll be passing along greetings from all of my students who worked with him over the years.”

Indeed, Grandmaster Zhu’s face lit up when he saw Abeyta, and drew him to the front of the class several times to demonstrate different postures and moves. Zhu is a slight man with thinning jet-black hair who looks decades younger than he is. The vitality you see in his appearance is magnified when he is in motion, as he literally pulses with qi energy as he moves. “In …. Out … in …. Out …. In …. Out,” he commanded during drills, two of the few English words he uses, cuing the all-important breath, which is another word for qi.

Qi, the subtle breath, is the magic potion that stirs the inner cauldron. All Taiji is focused on the quest for inner strength (neijin), which is cultivated through qigong exercises and meditation, along with the Taiji form and push-hands practice. Throughout the exercises, Grandmaster Zhu constantly reminded the students to sink qi/energy to the “dantien,” a metaphysical position about three-fingers’ width below the navel, the “cauldron” from which internal strength is expressed, usually through the hands and fingers.

At one break in the workshop, Grandmaster Zhu gathered everyone around him, promising through his interpreter, Master Ong, to tell the “secret” of Taiji. “If you want to know the mystery of internal strength, just relax. That is the secret. If you relax and breathe, you can sink the qi to the dantien. And now you know, the mystery is gone.” The students laughed, as they all strained to relax. It is the first bit of instruction every Taiji student hears, to relax – fangsong – but actually achieving this essential first step to Taiji is not easy.

Many of Zhu’s Chen exercises include fast-motion repetitions of the slow-motion form movements – the expression of power through fajin, or explosive force. Yang stylists practice fajin without the fast strikes, again using the internal power to repel opponents with what appears to be little effort. The quick punches, strikes and stomps give Chen its martial character separate from the other styles.

The fast and slow synthesis of the Chen style can be seen in the following demonstration by Grandmaster Zhu. Unlike other styles, the internal energy is expressed directly as Zhu moves from one posture to the next, particularly on the fast strikes, which also are generated from the dantien:

I stumbled through the Chen form, which I’ve never practiced, and it was clear that Grandmaster Zhu was not happy with any of his students on the first round. He stopped the exercise to demonstrate the essential four cardinals jins, or power – peng (push up), lu (roll back), ji (press) and an (push down). Unless you are cultivating these jins when you do the form, you are just going through the motions, he suggested. As we worked through the second and third rounds of the form, we became more emphatic in using these jins.

As C.P. Ong notes in his book, one of the oldest verses about Taiji was written by Chen Wangting, preserved from the 17^th century. The first two lines of the poem, “Song of Boxing Canon,” reveal the distinctive feature of Chen style:

Charging, retreating, back and forth, all can plainly see,

I fully rely on coiling is the basis of all my combat techniques.

It is this coiling, spiraling power cultivated in Chen-style Taiji that makes it unique. Chen stylists enhance this technique by practicing chansi, or “silk-reeling,” referring to the motion of pulling silk from a cocoon without breaking it. Grandmaster Zhu demonstrates the Chen silk-reeling exercises here:

Editor’s Note — Throughout this blog, I’ve been using different romanization systems — the Wade-Giles system I learned many years ago, and the Pinyin system that is the most prevalent today — based on the literature I’ve been reading. As a result, I’ve been mixing the two systems — Tai Chi (Wade-Giles) and qigong (Pinyin), for example. From now on, I intend to use Pinyin, the official system. Thus, you will learn more about taiji and luoxuan (coiling) in future blogs.

Neal Cassady was a magnetic character in Jack Kerouac’s books — a wild West antihero who was ultra-cool and ultra-hot, a walking contradiction. He was also an object of affection for many Beats and their followers, the model for the charismatic Dean Moriarty in Kerouac’s On The Road, and known as Cody Pomeray in his later works. Besides the many women he loved and left, Cassady for many years had an on-again, off-again romantic relationship with Allen Ginsberg. He went back and forth, from coast to coast.

For all his babbling bop poetry, a muse for Kerouac, Ginsberg and latter-day Beats, Cassady never published anything. He inspired Kerouac to write like the wind, in a stream-of-consciousness style, with his constant patter, and no doubt induced Ginsberg to “Howl” and make other poetic sounds, but Cassady’s own writings were little more than notes left here and there.

Neal Cassady in the driver’s seat of “Further,” Ken Kesey’s psychedelic bus. Pulled over many times, Cassady was able to talk his way out of every situation, distracting officers as he directed video crews filming the officers — as seen in the 2011 movie, Magic Trip.

Still, before his sudden death in Mexico in 1968, Cassady played a major role in the evolution of the Beat culture as it was transformed in the psychedelic brew of California. That’s where he was in 1963, falling in with Ken Kesey and his Merry Pranksters as they prepared a cross-country trip to the East Coast to meet Kerouac, Timothy Leary and their East Coast countercultural counterparts, whoever they were.

As shown in Alex Gibney’s 2011 film, Magic Trip, which integrated original clips from the trip, Cassady was the self-proclaimed “protector” of the Pranksters, and sole driver of the well-painted bus, “Further.” He was the hyper engine of a bus that seemed to be careening wildly across the countryside, a speed freak leading wacky meditations on LSD and other psychedelic drugs.

The trip and “graduation ceremonies” are chronicled by Tom Wolfe in The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, a New Journalism classic that I am rereading for context for my own trip in search of the new Dharma bums. Here’s how Wolfe described Cassady, when Wolfe first approaches the Pranksters working on the psychedelic bus:

“Off to one side is a guy about 40 with a lot of muscles, as you can see because he has no shirt on – just a pair of khakis and some red leather boots on and his hell of a build – and he seems to be in a kinetic trance, flipping a small sledge hammer up in the air over and over, always managing to catching the handle on the way down with his arms and legs kicking out the whole time and his shoulders rolling and his head bobbing, all in a jerky beat as if somewhere Joe Cuba is playing ‘Bang Bang’ …”:

Then later, when he learns the kinetic superman is THE Dean Moriarty, he is amused that “Cassady never stops talking. … (He) is a monologist, only he doesn’t seem to care whether anyone is listening or not. He just goes off on the monologue, by himself if necessary, although anyone is welcome aboard. He will answer all questions, although not exactly in that order, because we can’t stop here, next rest area 40 miles, you understand, spinning off memories, metaphors, literary, Oriental, hip allusions, all punctuated by the unlikely expression, ‘you understand …’”

Ken Kesey and his Merry Pranksters named their psychedelic bus “Further.” Neal Cassady drove it from San Francisco to New York, but didn’t return with the group.

Dabney’s movie, available on YouTube at one hour, 47 minutes, follows the trip in all its creative chaos, with interviews with Kesey and other easy riders while also depicting the denouement of Neal Cassady and Jack Kerouac, who had already begun to slip into an alcoholic stupor when he met Kesey, Cassady and the Pranksters. Everyone was in a bit of a stupor, though:

When Kesey mounted his cross-country journey, he had finished up his second novel, Sometimes a Great Notion, which would be panned by media along with his psychedelic adventure. But Kesey already had his masterpiece, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, hailed as a great American novel, which had opened on Broadway with Kirk Douglas in the role of the all-American rascal Randle McMurphy, later immortalized by Jack Nicholson in the great American movie.

Kesey also had a suitor in Tom Wolfe, the dapper Journalist (Big “J”) from New York City, seemingly always decked out in a white suit. Wolfe was in the midst of pioneering the New Journalism form, along with Norman Mailer, Hunter Thompson and a few others. The idea is to tell real-life stories in the form of a novel, injecting yourself into the narrative. Wolfe tracks down Kesey in 1965, as he is getting out of jail, having served three months for marijuana possession. That’s where we’ll pick up the thread in a future blog.

the new dharma bums

On the Road in Search of the Taiji Revolution

A Chen Warrior Tells All

The Round Trip