2005 - Meridian Taijiquan

In 1991 when I was hired as the assistant instructor to Master Wang for the first time, he taught a practice of people with people, in one case, when the two persons got into trance, they started spontaneous movement with their eyes closed, it looked as though they were sparring with other. Each movement was as precise as if their eyes were opened. I thought at that time: maybe that's how Taijiquan was invented.

From my own experience of helping other to archive Channel SHO, those who has practiced Taiji before usually have a much easier time of attaining it and once spontaneous movements appear, the movements are elegant and nice to look at. I thought: perhaps Taijiquan is the external part of dandao. Henceforth, I paid particular attention to the progress of students who practiced taijiquan after they had attained Channel SHO, three of them had revealed partial answers to this puzzle.

The first person had practiced Taijiquan for more than 40 years, he was 80 years old. I taught him the methods and things to watch out for when trying to open up the Channel SHO. He had a very good foundation. He could sit in full-lotus for three hours or more. The first day we went up to Taoyuan, he sat on his own in the morning and his abdomen vibrated strongly. He used the method taught by me to open his own SHO. Absolutely amazing for an 80-year-old man. I was amazed by his achievements and this showed me that Taijiquan is definitely one of dandao's foundational practice.

The seond person has practiced a different lineage of Taijiquan for more than 10 years. After he had attained Channel SHO, his progress was rapid, he had 36 mudras spontaneously appeared. Master Wang had said before that there are 36 mudras associated with Ling Bao Bi Fa and he had publicly taught only 4 of them! We analyzed and concluded that these mudras appears when the qi move in and connecting the 12 regular meridians.

The third person has also practiced various forms of Taiji for 10 years or more. After she had attained Channel SHO, she can clearly felt that qi was moving in her various meridians. We used one year to investigate and conclude that in Yang's Style Taiji, when doing each external form, there is a corresponding internal movement in the channel. We took it one step further and inverted the problem: for each of the 12 regular meridians, we extracted all the forms that stimulate that meridian and reorganize and modify them. We took out the 12 restructured and modified forms that stimulate and most accurately correspond to the 12 regular channels and created the "Twelve Forms of Meridian Taijiquan". We recorded it and sent the video to Master Wang for appraisal. After Master Wang had seen it he said, "There are many people who are currently researching on this topic but none of them had a result that's comparable to yours. Also in these form, you are missing *****. You should publish this as your own work." Actually we already knew that ***** is missing but we didn't have any way to overcome it at that time. This is another example of the amazing depth of knowledge that Master Wang possess. If one does not completely understand the structure of the 12 meridians, one can not know that which parts of our taijiquan are correct and which parts are missing. A Great Teacher! A true Master!