Featured #1 – Similarities and Differences of Bagua and Tai Chi

When practiced as qigong exercise arts, bagua and tai chi are dramatically more similar than different. They essentially implement the same chi-cultivation techniques, even though they are practiced very differently. Each art involves distinctive body feelings, strategies of thought and philosophical approaches for accomplishing goals. Each has its relative strengths and weaknesses.

The Basic Underlying Principle: 70 and 80 Percent Rule

Common to bagua and tai chi, and all other Taoist water-method energetic practices, is the 70 or 80 percent rule—the rule of moderation. The idea is to neither do too much nor too little. This fundamental principle is also echoed in Confucianism where it is called the “Golden Mean.”

When training in all aspects of bagua and tai chi, this rule asks you to stay within 70 or 80 percent of your capacities. The rule of moderation applies to every aspect you could conceive of in your practice, such as:

• How you practice a certain physical or energetic movement.
• How far you stretch or bend your arms, legs and torso.
• The length of time you practice.
• The attention you place on creating movements or chi flow

In qigong and tai chi the 70 percent rule is applied as a more yin way of practice, whereas in bagua the 80 percent rule is applied as a more high-performance, yang way of practice. In bagua, 70 percent is applied when you are in average shape and 80 percent after you become very fit and are not suffering from any illness, injury or other physical limitation.

When you stay within 70 or 80 percent of your limits, your training will progress at a much faster pace, be more effective and enable your system to more easily integrate what you learn.

By using this rule, the absolute amount (100 percent) of what you were capable of doing when you first began your practice continues to improve and increase upwards—smoothly and without strain. As you reach each new pinnacle of health, strength and stamina, your 70 or 80 percent limit continuously trends upwards. Most importantly, you avoid the negative effects of overstraining.

This method of practice directly contrasts with many standard Western training methods, which train you to continuously push and go to extremes. Many modern exercise systems ask you to perform pushups, squats or run until you drop. Most professional athletic coaches scream and yell, demanding not 100 percent but 150 percent. This type of training revs the nerves and increases the general levels of tension that lock in your body even after the workout is over.

From the Taoist point of view, the moment you push past 100 percent, you generate resistance inside yourself. When your body and mind severely overstrain or excessively stress, they reach a tipping point. The system rebels and physical or psychological injuries lurk around the corner. The body’s defense mechanisms take effect so that it becomes less willing to physically move.

Keeping a 20 or 30 percent reserve will keep your body and mind from going into stress or overdrive. The rev drains, not increases, your capabilities. Keeping to the 70 or 80 percent rule helps you learn faster while increasing your strength and stamina more quickly than overtraining and overstraining. It insures that you maintain a margin of safety, preventing injuries and exhaustion.

The excitement in your mind might push you far past your natural physical limitations. In your mind you might move a lot more exceptionally than your body actually permits. So keeping in mind safety first will help you adhere to the 70 or 80 percent rule.

In terms of chi, staying within the rule of moderation helps you continuously increase rather than deplete your chi. Stress and tension diminish chi flow, which is the most important factor in your overall health and wellness.

Moderation helps you become healthy, not only in terms of your body, but also in your psychological disposition. Both attempt to foster good mental health as opposed to obsessive-compulsive disorders of which many athletes are prone.

When you stay within 70 or 80 percent of your limits, your training will progress at a much faster pace, be more effective and enable your system to more easily integrate what you learn.

By using this rule, the absolute amount (100 percent) of what you were capable of doing when you first began your practice continues to improve and increase upwards—smoothly and without strain. As you reach each new pinnacle of health, strength and stamina, your 70 or 80 percent limit continuously trends upwards. Most importantly, you avoid the negative effects of overstraining.

This method of practice directly contrasts with many standard Western training methods, which train you to continuously push and go to extremes. Many modern exercise systems ask you to perform pushups, squats or run until you drop. Most professional athletic coaches scream and yell, demanding not 100 percent but 150 percent. This type of training revs the nerves and increases the general levels of tension that lock in your body even after the workout is over.

From the Taoist point of view, the moment you push past 100 percent, you generate resistance inside yourself. When your body and mind severely overstrain or excessively stress, they reach a tipping point. The system rebels and physical or psychological injuries lurk around the corner. The body’s defense mechanisms take effect so that it becomes less willing to physically move.

Keeping a 20 or 30 percent reserve will keep your body and mind from going into stress or overdrive. The rev drains, not increases, your capabilities. Keeping to the 70 or 80 percent rule helps you learn faster while increasing your strength and stamina more quickly than overtraining and overstraining. It insures that you maintain a margin of safety, preventing injuries and exhaustion.

The excitement in your mind might push you far past your natural physical limitations. In your mind you might move a lot more exceptionally than your body actually permits. So keeping in mind safety first will help you adhere to the 70 or 80 percent rule.

In terms of chi, staying within the rule of moderation helps you continuously increase rather than deplete your chi. Stress and tension diminish chi flow, which is the most important factor in your overall health and wellness.

Moderation helps you become healthy, not only in terms of your body, but also in your psychological disposition. Both attempt to foster good mental health as opposed to obsessive-compulsive disorders of which many athletes are prone.

Injured or Out of Shape?

If you are injured, continuously in pain or severely out of shape, drop your training back to 30-40 percent or less of your capabilities. Your goal is to drop back from 70 percent to a point before your pain level escalates to the next higher dramatic level. In worst case scenarios you want to consider applying the 40 or even 30 percent rule.

A common injury is to the shoulder. If your shoulder or arm is hurt and you feel pain when your hand reaches your nose, your hand should go no higher than your chest. Once your body softens and the pain goes away, you can increase your range of motion a bit more—maybe to your chin. As your hand can go higher without strain, you have a new measure for your 70 percent. You may find that eventually you can even painlessly move your arm vertically over your head or have enough looseness to actually put your hand behind your head.

If you try to push past your pain, as many do, you will not provide your arm with the means to regenerate and completely heal. Instead, you will build tension and resistance, which can result in further injury and more pain. By maintaining a slow, steady progression you actually increase your rate of recovery.

Yin and Yang

Bagua and tai chi complement each other as arts within the same family. A powerful synergy is created in the body by combining the strength that bagua’s yang energy develops with the extreme softness of tai chi’s yin energy.

Bagua starts out with an emphasis on becoming yang, open, full and outwardly directed. In tai chi the emphasis (at least in the beginning) is to become yin—very soft, round and yielding. At some point, however, both endeavor to manifest and combine each other’s yin and yang aspects seamlessly.

Bagua initially seeks to produce a lot of yang energy within you. Yet it is incredibly relaxed yang energy that lacks the aggression and anger commonly associated with its martial aspects. Likewise, in tai chi, even though you are initially seeking to produce yin energy, this very relaxed yin energy is not collapsed. It is very full, vibrant and eventually creates a core of steel inside it.

My teacher Liu practiced bagua and tai chi until the day he died in his eighties. He said that on those days when his body or mind felt relatively hard and stiff, he practiced tai chi more. On those days when he felt relatively soft or weak, he practiced bagua more.

Differing Speeds of Movement

One of the more important differences between bagua and tai chi is the speed at which you normally move when you practice.

Tai chi is commonly done with two kinds of speed. 99 percent of all tai chi movements are done very slowly, smoothly and evenly. However, even though you move smoothly and evenly, you can move from slow, to very slow, to super-slow almost like molasses dripping from a spoon. Reaching an absolute pinnacle of slowness allows your central nervous system to fully release and become balanced. This allows you, if you so choose, to move with lightning speed at will. That’s one basic method of how real speed in tai chi as a martial art is trained. Sufficiently releasing the nervous system makes it possible for your body to move at any speed with virtually no internal resistance.

One percent of tai chi is done alternating between moving exceedingly slow or fast as is common in the Chen style and in the fast movement practices of the Yang and Wu styles. The fast parts can be very dramatic, especially when they result in strong, fast and explosive releases of energy.

Bagua moves differently. As a general rule, bagua practice is at an easy-going and smooth normal walking pace. Even though you might move with the same sort of fluidity as tai chi, most bagua—at least past the beginning stage—is also practiced between moving fairly quickly to lightning fast.

Thus once you advance to practicing at fast or super-fast walking speeds, seldom would you practice your movements in super-slow motion. If you do move very slowly, it is only for temporary transition periods. For example, you might need time to assimilate a specific, physical coordination aspect, or learn a new movement that you find particularly challenging.

Bagua seeks to release the nervous system, but in a very different manner from tai chi. Most of its movements are deliberately done faster and faster over time and as smoothly as possible. The movement, internal chi and mind internally fuse to release the nerves to the same degree that is done in tai chi by moving in exceedingly slow motion.

Physical Size or Frame of Movements

Generally, in most tai chi styles, the physical size of their movements is determined by whether the specific tai chi style is called a small, medium or large frame style. The sizes mentioned here are metaphors for the relative, but not necessarily the absolute physical size of the movements.

All tai chi movements are supposed to be circular or at least made up of arcing motions, which define the size of their movements. In a small style, a move might be done with circles that are one to three inches in diameter. In a medium style, the same move might be done in a circle five to seven inches in diameter. In a large style, the circle for that move might be ten to twelve inches in diameter. In general, the bigger the typical circles of a specific style’s movements, the larger the frame of the style.

In general the smaller a bagua circle or tai chi style’s frame, the more complex are its internal movements. Small frame movements have more extremely subtle and refined turns, circles and spirals hidden within their physical movements. Although the principles of movement are the same, they are condensed into a smaller space. The vast majority—80 percent or more—of all tai chi movements taught throughout the West are composed of medium frame movements. Small frame movements are the least prevalent.

Bagua doesn’t distinguish as sharply as tai chi between big and small because virtually every movement in bagua can be done big, medium or small—regardless of the style. However, it is more common for teachers to initially teach bagua movements as large frame movements. Later they typically shrink them to smaller and smaller frames until students can easily flow between each in a seamless manner. Eventually they learn to change the size of their motions can easily and naturally at will.

Bagua and tai chi strongly emphasize fully articulating the joints in every possible direction. Bagua generally gets the joints to articulate a little more fully than Yang or Wu style tai chi. However, the Chen style of tai chi comes close to bagua’s degree of working with the movement of the joints.

When to Start Learning

Almost anyone can start and keep practicing tai chi at any age—even the elderly. Tai chi has virtually no limitations on who can begin or continue to practice because it is easy on the joints.

With bagua, 70 years is about as old as you could begin, unless you are very healthy and fit or you have practiced qigong or tai chi for a long time. Your joints (especially in the lower body) and spine must be relatively healthy. If this is not the case, the twisting movements of bagua have the distinct potential to make your joints worse—especially in the knees or spine—when overdone. Nevertheless, if your joints are in good shape to start with, bagua can make them exceedingly strong, much more so than tai chi.

Choosing Your Art by Personality Type

Bagua suits people who like to be challenged. Its vigorous motions tend to attract people who prefer moving fast, have a strong sense of accomplishment, like the internal focus and dislike slow motion. Since bagua places a greater emphasis on faster movement, it appeals to those who are slightly more naturally athletic. As soon as you start bagua, the challenges become very obvious even to the casual observer.

Bagua is particularly useful for people who have a very passive, slow manner. Bagua can get them to speed up and become much more active and vibrant. Bagua is also particularly valuable for helping people flow smoothly during periods of high, almost unbearable pressure and unpredictable situations. It provides a powerful antidote to the fast pace of change in modern life.

Tai chi tends to present its challenges in its meticulousness, requiring attention to many details. Those who reach a very high level in tai chi tend to like focusing on fine detail very deeply inside their being. Tai chi doesn’t look as challenging as bagua because its challenges are not visible to the naked eye.

Tai chi is particularly valuable for someone who is over-stressed, such as the classic Type-A personality who really needs to slow down and become calmer. Such individuals greatly benefit from letting go, relaxing and yielding in the many situations where there is no way to exert control. Tai chi is the most popular stress-reduction program used by the successful business and professional classes in the booming economies of East Asia.

Tai chi is soft, round and feminine in approach. Tai chi would be psychologically valuable for any individual who wants to be able to successfully join together the yin elements of receptivity and sensitivity with the yang elements of strength and the capacity to accomplish goals.

However, because of the very yin or passive nature of tai chi, it can produce passive-aggressive individuals if the energy it generates goes to its negative aspect. In contrast, if the energy created from bagua goes to its very negative aspect, it tends to produce actively aggressive personalities.

Learning Curves

Many beginning tai chi students have problems with the coordination and sheer number of movements. Tai chi short forms are practiced by many more practitioners than long forms for two basic reasons. In a busy time-starved world, it takes less time to learn the movements of short forms and then fewer minutes to practice them.

Having taught more than 15,000 people tai chi, it’s been my experience that the physical coordination and memory required to learn and remember the large volume of movements are the main reasons why most people quit tai chi. Many who start don’t stay with tai chi long enough to reap its plethora of health benefits or learn its meditation practices.

From this perspective bagua has real advantages because there are fewer movements to learn. People with busy lives may find it much more doable, especially as beginners. You can choose to focus more on its health and meditative qualities and bypass many difficult physical coordination issues that are inherent in tai chi.

Space Requirements

Tai chi forms take up a lot of practice space, particularly its long forms. You can’t practice the long form in a small living room without running into a wall or some piece of furniture. If you try, you have to keep on stepping backwards or sideways, which breaks the form’s natural movement structures. Shorter forms can generally be practiced in smaller spaces.

When first learning bagua, you need even more room than tai chi. This is because you will need to walk in a fairly large circle so as this is easier on your knees. Over time, however, the relative space requirements shift. As your skill in bagua grows you can walk a smaller and smaller circle. When practicing bagua as meditation, you only need to perform the movements of the Single Palm Change. Once your circle gets smaller this can be practiced in a smaller living room than even shortest forms of tai chi require.

Improving Health

Neither bagua nor tai chi is intrinsically better or worse for improving health. Both can:

• Balance and strengthen your chi.
• Heal your internal organs.
• Optimal flow and circulation of all the fluids of your body, especially blood and interstitial fluid.

These are the healing capacities for which qigong is universally respected in Chinese medicine.

However, bagua and tai chi have their unique comparative advantages. Tai chi primarily heals through the yin nourishing principles of Chinese medicine while bagua heals through yang strengthening and tonifying principles.

If you are in good shape and you want to become super-healthy—as strong as humanly possible—bagua will help you accomplish this more easily than tai chi.

The low-impact nature of tai chi allows you to practice when you are injured or recovering from illness. You can, as I did, use tai chi to heal yourself even straight out of the hospital. In general, if you are ill, in poor health, or constitutionally weak, tai chi will help heal your body and get your health and stamina back more easily and quickly. If you have fairly average overall health, but your major problem is stress that shreds your nervous system, then tai chi rather than bagua is best to help you slow down and calm your nervous system.

Dealing with Specific Health Problems

Bagua and tai chi are each suited to dealing with different kinds of health problems. As a general rule, tai chi is better at healing diseases where nourishing the body’s chi will help it heal. In Chinese medicine this is classified as being yin deficient. Bagua is better at healing diseases where the body’s chi needs to be strengthened. In Chinese medicine this is classified as tonifying the yang.

Tai chi is more effective at healing in cases where you need to balance your chi and build up extremely depleted chi. Severe diseases tend to cause this. Bagua works better if the cause of your health problems is that the baseline strength of your chi is insufficient to spark powerful body regeneration.

If you have chronic fatigue syndrome, tai chi likely will be more helpful, especially if practiced in a very yin manner. In this case, your chi is not only depleted, but out of balance. Bagua might make you feel worse. However, when the more severe symptoms of chronic fatigue fade, bagua is more effective because it helps return your body to its previous full-operating capacity.

If you have carpal tunnel syndrome, bagua has an edge over tai chi because of the specialized ways it works the arms, hands and fingers.

If you have low blood pressure, you would be much better off practicing bagua than tai chi. However, if you have extremely high blood pressure, tai chi will help you bring it down much faster than bagua.

If you have back problems, you should generally practice tai chi rather than bagua to heal. However, if you have weak kidneys, but not a bad back, practicing bagua is best.

Bagua and tai chi address different emotional health issues. In many cases of low-grade depression, getting your internal systems moving considerably faster can pull you out of it. In this case, bagua would be more useful than tai chi that might slow down your system. However, if the nature of your depression is combined with anger that frequently makes you flip out, then you would be better off practicing tai chi as it could cool your temper and calm you down.

Choreography and Spontaneity

Tai chi strongly emphasizes the choreography of its many movements. Although it has unique and specific chi techniques or principles for individual external movements, the basic program is distinctly choreographed. So the second move follows the first move, the third move follows the second move and so on. The core of a tai chi form is very much about having very deliberate movements that allow you to release your nervous system progressively and systematically. This sets the stage for the innate capacities of the mind and body to release all blockages and flourish.

Like tai chi, bagua also has choreography in the sense that it has specific movements. In bagua’s martial art tradition, some of the movements are very similar to those practiced in tai chi long forms.

Unlike tai chi, however, bagua’s changes of direction and one movement to the next is not predetermined. In Circle Walking although movement two follows one, it may not happen immediately.

Bagua’s emphasis is less on performing precise external movements. Instead the focus is on being able to change fluidly within any specific movement from one state into another. This is true for physical, energetic, emotional, mental and spiritual changes. The ability to spontaneously and fluidly change an external movement, such as a Circle Walking direction, with a change in hand or foot postures, or an internal movement such as shifting from one energetic state to another in one of your eight energy bodies—is at the core of bagua. It is the way you can completely shift your central nervous system and mind.

In tai chi, the specific ways the arms and legs coordinate with the turning of the waist is its main emphasis. Footwork and changing direction is the main emphasis in bagua Circle Walking. Although the hand movements are coordinated with foot movements, that coordination is nowhere as critical in terms of precise choreography as they are in tai chi. As a general rule, bagua footwork is more complex and complete than that found in tai chi, and requires much more training.

Although both bagua and tai chi emphasize spontaneity in their martial sparring techniques, when it comes to solo practice, bagua has a much greater emphasis on spontaneity than tai chi. Tai chi places a much greater emphasis on regulated, rhythmic movement.

Circular and Spiral Movements Facilitate Fluidity

Bagua and tai chi are based upon seamless continuity and fluidity—first in your body, next your chi, then your mind and eventually your spirit.

Both arts are based on circular movement. Your body becomes a bit like a squid in the manner that you fold and articulate different parts of your torso, arms and legs. The body is trained until it seems boneless, so it can change and move in countless ways. Tai chi tends to do this in a circular manner, whereas bagua uses more obvious spiraling movement patterns.

Generally, most tai chi styles do not emphasize spiraling movement to the degree that bagua does, although the Chen style of tai chi comes close. Tai chi’s overarching emphasis is on circular movement, which tends to only be in a single directional plane at any given moment. Conversely, bagua’s main focus is on spiraling movement, which can simultaneously involve multiple planes of movement at any given moment.

Fluidity must always occur while three critical movement qualities are simultaneously present:

1. Constant turning of the waist.
2. Bending (retraction) and stretching (extension) of the arms and legs toward and away from the torso.
3. Moving the limbs inward toward and outward away from the torso’s centerline.

Fluidity also must derive from a very strong emphasis on total relaxation, softness or lack of rigidity within the body. In the beginning practices, tai chi emphasizes softening the body. Bagua emphasizes twisting and internally strengthening the body until it becomes capable of relaxed fluid movement in any direction that the body’s structure and anatomy safely allows. Both bagua and Chen style tai chi also make undulating motions that are extremely rhythmic and include arm whipping actions.

Hidden versus Obvious Power

Tai chi’s power isn’t easy to observe. It tends to be hidden right from the very beginning, which is consistent with tai chi’s yin nature. Over time, as the student develops significant internal power, the specific goal of tai chi is to make it invisible—much like that of a stealth bomber. In Yang style tai chi, this is referred to as “steel wrapped in cotton.” If people look at a tai chi practitioner they won’t see how much internal power he or she has and will only feel it if the practitioner chooses to exhibit it. The exception is the Chen style of tai chi, whose explosive shaking and discharge movements make power quite noticeable.

Even in the earlier stages of practice, bagua’s power is significantly more obvious, which is consistent with its yang nature. The sheer flow and speed make it obvious to any observer that power lies behind the movement. However, even if some overt power remains visible, as a bagua practitioner grows more proficient, more of the internal power becomes seamless and invisible. Eventually it becomes impossible to figure out from where the practitioner’s power is generated.

Waist Movement and Footwork

Bagua and tai chi turn and reverse direction with waist turning. In tai chi, the main focal point is on waist movement with footwork as a subcategory. The feet are less emphasized because much of the time you are not moving your feet. Instead you assume a position and shift your weight back and forth while turning your waist.

In bagua, the primary emphasis is on footwork. Waist turning is a subcategory of footwork. The first and foremost objective is to originate your motion in the feet rather than the waist. Your hand or waist never moves by itself. Instead the movements are generated by your feet moving either in space or at least by changing pressures against the ground. At all practice levels, your feet must never stand still in one place for more than a fraction of a second.

As you turn or reverse direction in bagua and tai chi, it is extremely important to maintain your root at all times. This is true whatever the speed or direction of the movement and whether you are standing still or moving. There is no vertical up and down hopping from step to step in a rigid, stop-start manner. The motion of your feet and the shifting of the weight should maintain a smooth continuum from one position to the next.

Working With the Chi of the Environment

For millennia Taoists have worked with the Five Elemental Energies: Metal, Water, Wood, Fire and Earth. All are present in the external environment. These elemental energies are brought into the practitioner’s body and then in opposite manner projected outward to affect what is in the external environment outside of the practitioner’s physical body. Bagua and tai chi, especially in their more intact Taoist spiritual traditions, still practice this work.

At the level of internal energy work, bagua rather than tai chi practitioners have a much greater tendency to play with the energies of manifestation. They can develop a path for drawing energy from the environment into their bodies and minds, and then projecting that chi externally.

Most of the energetic work in tai chi is self-contained. However, you may move the energy out to the end of your etheric body a distance of five to six feet or even ten feet away from your body. In tai chi your chi is confined in a more defined space. In bagua there is a tendency for the mind to roam greater distances and play with the energies of the environment around you in a much larger and more fluid way. The exception is at the much more advanced spiritual levels of tai chi, where as meditation one of its goals is to directly link the practitioner’s body and mind with energies of earth and heaven to the stars.

At higher levels, especially in Taoist meditation practices, ba gua tends toward activity, which reflects its emphasis on yang. Tai chi tends to be much more passive or yin. Tai chi is passive in the sense that it follows the flow or pressure of the air surrounding you. The way the chi flows inside your body that is influenced by the chi flowing in the air around you then causes, or at least significantly influences, your external movements. Bagua tends to be much more proactive in terms of initially creating chi flows inside your body to in turn create both external movements and chi flows in your etheric field. This further activates your internal chi flows and external movements.