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.

In recent years tai chi has been increasingly recommended by the medical community as a viable alternative to aerobic exercise as a means of improving and maintaining health.

In time bagua will very likely become part of this mix as the body of practitioners grows and clinical studies can demonstrate its many health benefits.

Western and Taoist Concepts of Exercise

Western paradigms mistakenly lead people to believe that the only way to improve health is through high-intensity, high-impact aerobic exercises. Many doctors and health websites advocate aerobics for strengthening your heart and lungs, using oxygen more efficiently, controlling blood glucose levels and boosting the immune system. Many doctors recommend jogging or bicycle riding for people that have suffered heart attacks.

These ideas persist despite the fact that many clinical studies show that low-impact, low-intensity exercises—such as tai chi—can have the same positive affects on physical health as aerobics or high-intensity sports. Tai chi and other low-impact exercises are equally effective as aerobics in improving circulation, decreasing blood pressure and increasing oxygen efficiency. Tai chi is extremely effective in improving physical balance in the elderly, a claim virtually no high-intensity aerobic exercise makes.

A website that provides tai chi case studies is www.taichiresearch.com.

One of the major values of low-impact exercises is that people of any body type and age can do them without jarring or damaging their joints. Tai chi can be done by people who are ill with chronic diseases, including asthma, arthritis or diabetes, which often limits the types of exercise they can do.

Health versus Fitness

Traditional Chinese medicine has long made a distinction between health and fitness. It defines health as having a state of wellness in which your mind is clear and emotionally balanced (mental health), your body is free from organic illness or injury, and you experience strong vitality and a sense of well-being.

Fitness is more commonly associated with the superior external performance of high-performance athletics. In the West, a person who is considered to be fit may be able to do 100 or more pushups, run a marathon, have a beautiful muscular physique and yet not be healthy under their tight abs. He or she may have a bad back, damaged joints, liver problems, unbalanced emotions, inability to handle stress, lack of libido and other sexual weaknesses. In China, that person would be considered fit, but not healthy.

Conversely, in the West someone would not be considered fit if they looked frail, dumpy or fat, were unable to run a few hundred meters, or did not have physically powerful muscles.

Yet that person may be quite healthy. He or she may have a strong back, good joints and blood circulation, be emotionally balanced, not have internal organ or central nervous system problems, engage in all of life’s normal activities comfortably and with stamina, have a fulfilling sex life and be able to handle immense stress in a relaxed way.

Thus, you could be considered to be fit and yet not healthy, or healthy and not fit. In China the goal is to be healthy and fit: Bagua and tai chi help you achieve both.

The Ideal Body

The Western ideal of a healthy person is the Olympian athlete, standing tall and fully muscled. The Taoists’ ideal is a baby.

Consider the differences in energy. Who has more life energy: An athlete or a baby? The answer is a baby. Research has shown that no athlete can continuously mimic a baby’s motions as it randomly moves and plays. It doesn’t take long before the athlete becomes exhausted.

Now consider the difference in body types. The Olympian athlete’s body is straight, tall and hard. Babies are round, soft and very relaxed. Yet babies are not weak: Pound for pound they have immense, but relaxed strength and stamina. If you’re a parent you know how fast they can wear you out. The more relaxed you are, the more energy you have.

Taoists developed qigong exercises to help people achieve the stamina, relaxation and flexibility of a baby. Qigong shares with Chinese medicine the perspective that health is not determined by the strength of your muscles, but by the strength of your chi. If your chi is abundant, balanced and flowing fully and evenly throughout your body—especially within and between your internal organs—then you will enjoy good health. Bagua and tai chi make these useful goals accessible to everyone.

Metaphors of Movement

Several analogies are commonly used to describe the types of movement, feeling and sense of the body that are particular to bagua and tai chi. Tai chi is fluid, like water, but rooted like the earth that is yin and receptive in its nature.

In contrast, bagua is like a tornado or whirlwind, yang and male in its nature. The bagua body is exceptionally strong and springy, like flexible steel. These are not metaphors routinely used to describe even the fittest of athletes.

A person trained in tai chi is exceptionally relaxed, but completely present and aware. Although bagua practitioners are not as super-relaxed, they are generally considered to be stronger than their counterparts in tai chi.

Training to Optimize and Maintain Health

As exercise systems that provide health and fitness, bagua and tai chi train you in ways that are not common to most other forms of exercise. There are two major reasons.

Firstly, the training methods of bagua and tai chi are designed to optimize all rather than only some of the body’s internal systems. In contrast, most forms of exercise focus almost exclusively on developing one’s muscles.

Secondly, a primary goal of both bagua and tai chi is to develop and strengthen energy flow in the body by relaxing the nerves and freeing any blocked or trapped energy within them. These methods are similar to those in qigong exercises.

The Primary Positive Effects of Training

1. Release and relax the nervous system

Anxiety and stress that leach onto most people are due to habits of tension that lie deeply within the nerves of the body. Tension not only defeats relaxation, but also when not released, perpetuates and exacerbates the inability to relax.

It’s a negative feedback loop. Bagua, tai chi and all energy arts train you to stop creating nervous tension in each part of your body and mind. You can work/play/interact with others from a deep sense of relaxation and awareness.

2. Exercise and tone all your small and large muscles, tendons and ligaments

The goal is to open up space in your body and exercise everything within those spaces. This makes sure that blood flow can reach all the nooks and crannies, particularly in and around all your internal organs. Blood is the portal that delivers the nutrients your body needs for healing and maintaining wellness. Where there is blood, there is life.

3. Move all your bodily fluids optimally

This included blood, lymph, sensorial fluid between your joints, spinal fluids, the fluids of the brain and those within and between your internal organs. The body works best when it has a constant interchange of fluids in and out of and between all its internal systems.

Since our bodies primarily consist of fluids, a fundamental principle of bagua and tai chi is getting these fluids to pump throughout the body with a very strong, regular and balanced flow. This allows the body to work optimally and prevents weaknesses, particularly in your internal organs.
Many exercises that contract your muscles move some fluids well but not others.

They may be great for your cardiovascular system, but may not be as effective for your liver, spleen and kidneys. Bagua and tai chi positively affect the fluid interchanges that occur throughout the body by creating direct internal pressures throughout the body, especially in and out of your internal organs.

Bagua and tai chi train you to move and turn from the kwa—or what we think of as the bikini fold—as well as moving your arms and shoulders while keeping back of your knees and armpits open. These are the areas where you find the majority of the lymph nodes in your body. Bagua and tai chi trains you to deliberately increase the flow of lymph, which helps strengthen your immune system.

Bagua and tai chi train you to contract and expand the spaces inside your joints, which strengthes the flow of synovial fluid and helps prevent arthritic conditions.

4. Twist the muscles and other soft tissues as you move

This facilitates the spiraling of chi and gives you a stronger flow of energy. The twisting of the tissues and muscles in bagua and tai chi simply means that the tissues of the body are constantly turning left and right. Most exercises work on the forward and backward longitudinal movement of bodily muscles and tissues. They don’t focus on the left and right lateral twisting movements as do bagua and tai chi.

Twisting of the tissues in the arms and the legs eventually twists and moves the ligaments attached to the spine. Such twisting provides a constant massage of the internal organs while relieving and preventing back problems. Back and neck adjustments are the number one reason for chiropractic visits.
Twisting facilitates the way that energy naturally spirals through your body. The spiral is the universal movement of all forms of organic life. Natural organisms don’t move or grow in straight lines, but rather in spirals. Chi also moves through your body in spirals.
When infants crawl, their arms and legs constantly twist, which is how they get moving. They flip around from their belly or back by twisting the insides of their hips and belly.
However, as children grow older and copy their stiffer, straighter adult role models, they lose this twisting action. This in turn causes them to lose the incredible abundant energy they had as infants. Bagua and tai chi emphasize twisting the tissues and spiraling chi to help you regain such energetic capacities.

5. Increase your body’s elasticity

The human body—contrary to popular opinion—is not held up by bones. It is held upright by a series of ligaments that are actually much stronger than bones. What connects your foot to your belly to your neck is either a series of interconnecting ligaments or fasciae that are connected to ligaments.

Bagua and tai chi train you to release these ligaments and fasciae so that you have as much unrestricted movement as possible. In doing so, they become incredibly elastic, like a rubber band. This quality is found in babies. The next time you encounter a baby, pull their hands, arms and legs (gently now) and observe this rubber band quality; they’re soft and springy. Bagua and tai chi seek to recreate these qualities inside you.
Elasticity significantly increases range of motion in the joints, spine and internal organs. It allows optimum movement within the joints and between the vertebrae of the spine. Constant pulling and releasing of ligaments inside your body causes the natural and healthy movement of internal organs. It also massages them and makes them springier. Together these actions enhance blood and fluid flows, which are important factors in determining your health. Most people don’t even think about their fluids.

As elasticity increases, so too does the spiraling of energy. This movement causes the joints and spinal vertebrae to constantly pulse so that the spaces within them continually shrink and grow. Pulsing stimulates the flow of fluids inside the joints and between and within your vertebrae. Chinese call this pulsing action opening and closing. This rhythmic movement keeps the soft tissues of the joints flexible and elastic.

Arthritis and the loss of mobility and flexibility can make you prone to injury or harden the ligaments. In contrast, keeping the body elastic and the fluids moving strongly in your joints helps you avoid many of the problems associated with aging.

6. Teach your body to flow

Bagua and tai chi train the entire body to move in a flowing, coordinated and continuous manner without abrupt starts or stops. These two arts create a smooth continuum of unceasing flow, much like a pendulum. Both promote flow externally in your physical movements and internally within all the parts within your body—organs, ligaments, tendons, tissues, fluids and muscles. Most people start out being very clunky and jerky with their movements: starting, stopping, freezing and beginning again.

Bagua and tai chi training helps you to learn how to flow smoothly. Ultimately the ability to find the flow requires that all parts of your body—especially your nerves—be very relaxed. Relaxation is necessary so that the flow of your fluids can be fairly smooth and circulate in an unrestricted way throughout your body. Chi flow in the body must also be reasonably smooth and balanced. This flow rarely comes from pure physical athleticism.
7. Enable whole-body movement

Almost all athletes want to develop whole-body movement. However, what they’re usually after is having the arms, shoulders and torso move together. The whole-body movements of bagua and tai chi are primarily generated from deep inside your body—reaching from the tips of your toes and fingers to the crown of your head.

Tai chi movements are initiated from deep inside the hips and belly, and move through all of the systems from the toes to fingers to head. Bagua movements are initiated from the feet.

8. Make the body simultaneously soft and strong

Bagua and tai chi train your body to move in any direction completely unimpeded. Your body can become like a piece of silk that moves absolutely smoothly as it flutters in the wind.
Practicing bagua and tai chi can make your arms very heavy, literally with the strength of iron. Yet paradoxically when they move with almost lightning speed, they look and feel virtually weightless and light.

All these qualities become simultaneously trained inside you as you practice bagua and tai chi. Their positive, regenerating effects are like circles coming in and moving out of circles that increase in size and strength. As your nervous system relaxes, the other body systems connected to your nervous system are continually upgraded, which in turn helps relax the nerves even more.

Aerobic Benefits

Although tai chi can provide you with many of the same benefits as aerobic exercise, it is not normally any more aerobic than ordinary walking. Only when practiced as a martial art, where the training includes Push Hands, fast forms and sparring practices, does it becomes more aerobic.

Bagua, especially where you Walk the Circle at a fast pace, provides all the same aerobic benefits as speed walking or running without the high impact.

For those interested in fitness as well as health, bagua is exceptionally effective. Practicing with fast Circle Walking and frequent Single Palm Changes will strongly work your legs, hips and internal organs. It will also twist, lengthen and strongly exercise the muscles, tendons, ligaments and fascia of your arms and back. In this way bagua can make you exceptionally fit. You can even put light weights on your arms for resistance training.

However, before you train for fitness in bagua or tai chi, you must first become healthy. If you are exceptionally healthy and fit, then you may use the skills you acquire from fitness-orientated bagua or tai chi to excel in high performance, whether in business, athletics, energy arts or anything on which you focus your intent.

Those readers who are interested in his background can refer to T’ai Chi from Wayfarer Publications (October 86, December 86, and February 87 issues) Inside Kung Fu (August 90), and Internal Arts Magazine (Spring 91). Frantzis has studied the martial arts in the United States, Japan, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Mainland China for 30 years. He is fluent in Japanese and Chinese and has a broad range of experience in martial arts and meditation practice. This interview was conducted at the United States National Chinese Martial Arts Competition in Houston, Texas in September 1990.

Could you talk a little bit about Pa Kua as a fighting art?

There are hundreds of martial arts and a million ways to rip a human being apart. If you really want to get down to what are the more effective martial arts, then the only conclusive test is all-out combat, with maiming and killing allowed. Forget about sport point tournaments. The Pa Kua schools became very well known, just like the T’ai Chi schools, through success in combat. The T’ai Chi school originally achieved notoriety because Yang Lu-Ch’an was the teacher of the Emperor’s guards. In Beijing that was the most coveted martial arts position. In order to get that position you had to be able to fight and win. You were always on call and the rules were “touch, maim, or kill.” Pa Kua became really famous inside the martial arts community in Beijing because during the Boxer Rebellion the Empress Dowager fled Beijing with a single bodyguard, Yin Fu. The bodyguard who protected the Empress was universally considered the best professional martial artist around. That added a lot of credence to Pa Kua, in addition to the fact that Pa Kua practitioners had just defeated almost all the other martial artists in Beijing during their rabble rousing stage.

The most important thing in martial arts is not what style you study (the brand name), but what level of fighting skill the individual has. A world-class racing driver in a so-so car will beat a poor driver in the world’s best car. Only when two drivers are of equal skill will the technology of the car be the determining factor in who wins the race.

Each martial arts school has its special Kung Fu or “skill technology.” The lineage of Tung Hai-Ch’uan became famous for its special Kung Fu techniques. All students could learn the movements, but only a few learned Kung Fu techniques which had Pa Kua’s unique flavor and power. This Kung Fu is genuinely internal and is a subject of doing, not talking. Many people today, even “famous teachers” in China and the U.S., cannot apply traditional Pa Kua techniques to unrehearsed fighting. Either they perform “movement arts” (the prime example being Wu Shu Pa Kua which is a performing art like dance and not a realistic martial art) or they do Pa Kua movements but use the power, flavor and Kung Fu techniques of Shaolin. Make no bones about it, an excellent external martial artist will beat a poor or so-so Pa Kua person. There are monastic forms of Pa Kua which are purely about Ch’i cultivation and meditation, making no claims to be martial arts, despite the fact that some say they are.

Even within the internal martial arts family, it takes years of training to clearly separate the Kung Fu’s of T’ai Chi, Hsing-I and Pa Kua so each retains its own separate characteristics, and they don’t become Chop Suey (left overs) instead of distinct Chinese dishes. Each of my three Pa Kua teachers was always after me to separate the three, and it took me almost 20 years of study and practice to do so. Learning the movements alone took two to three years; learning the Kung Fu was much more difficult and satisfying.

However, fighting is only one part of the art. Pa Kua is also a purely Taoist art. T’ai Chi is different – it may or may not be Taoist, but its movements without question came from Shaolin which is Buddhist. T’ai Chi as it came from the Chen Village was not used as a meditation technique; it was simply a method of destroying your fellow man with extreme efficiency. Only at higher levels could it become meditation. Most people aren’t capable of practicing T’ai Chi as meditation at the beginning or intermediate level. Chen style T’ai Chi was more the equivalent of an AK-47; it was essentially a military weapon.

The early people in Chen Village were not talking about T’ai Chi as meditation, and certainly the Yang family never taught or even emphasized it. Of course now there is Taoist T’ai Chi, which does emphasize meditation, and it is different. All T’ai Chi has the Taoist internal energy mechanics which can make you very healthy and powerful, but T’ai Chi never really had that meditation thrust in the Chen Village, and much of T’ai Chi taught today does not.

Pa Kua is a different matter; it is completely Taoist. The whole method of Pa Kua is manifesting the eight energies of the I-Ching inside your body and finding the place which does not change. It is about meditation, but Tung Hai-Ch’uan didn’t teach that to everyone, because not all of his students had the capacity to understand it. From this meditation base, the real function of Pa Kua is to make Heaven and Earth actually reside inside your own body. Eventually what is inside of you and what is outside of you will come together, and that is when you have joined with nature – the Tao.

A picture of a tree is not a tree. The I-Ching represents in written form the energies from which the universe is constructed. However, Pa Kua people are not concerned with these intellectual symbolic representations. They are concerned with directly experiencing these universal energies within their own bodies and minds. If you get these energies inside your own body and mind, you are going to personally understand the realities behind these symbols. The goal of the pre-birth physical exercises and sitting meditations of Pa Kua is to directly experience the energies of the eight trigrams.

One of the things that makes Pa Kua very unique is the fact that it starts off from that meditation basis. Fighting is nothing more than manipulating those energies for a purpose. Using Pa Kua to really develop a person’s capacity for meditation -to develop the ability to be simultaneously multi-dimensional, to be able to simultaneously manipulate things inside your body and inside your mind as you are practicing—these are things the average human being doesn’t even know exists. Usually only formal disciples were taught these inner meditational aspects of Pa Kua. My teacher, Liu Hung-Chieh, learned it from Ma Shih-Ching (also known as Ma Kuei) who learned it from Tung Hai-Ch’uan, and he taught it to me. When I was studying in Taiwan and Hong Kong I was doing all kinds of energy practices, but I never really learned the real meditation stuff of Pa Kua, and thought I never would because it is a very hard thing to learn and very few people are teaching it. I’m being fairly open with my teaching because I think this aspect of Pa Kua is incredibly valuable and few know about it. It is a real problem that nobody knows about it, since the art could be lost and is currently in its death throes. Future generations would lose its benefits, and the world would lose some of its cultural heritage. Universal peace and brotherhood will ultimately be found through spiritual means like meditation and not through war.

What are some of the differences you noted between the Pa Kua you saw in Southern China compared to what you saw in Beijing?

All the people who held the real lineages in Pa Kua were from North China. They studied in Beijing, they studied with Tung, they studied with Tung’s students. Many of the people who left Beijing were not senior students, nor were they formal disciples. The best Pa Kua practitioners in China have always been Northern. The reason is very simple -that was where the army was. The Southerners were not military people, the Northerners were. They had revolutionaries in the South, but professional soldiers came from the North. Military professionals generally have more realistic attitudes towards combat than civilians do.

When Pa Kua spread from Beijing, many of the people who left Beijing only had a limited amount of Pa Kua training. As a result, Pa Kua was diluted with other martial arts. They may have said, “I really don’t know Pa Kua throwing techniques, but I studied some Shuai Chiao so I’ll throw some of that in there.” I saw it happening a lot. Pa Kua has an incredible technical range, it has thousands of applications and in that sense it is an extremely rich martial art. I’ve never seen another martial art that has Pa Kua’s technical range. But some people would just go and add things. Sometimes the stuff they added made sense and other times it didn’t.

What did you find in Taiwan?

In Taiwan it was very difficult to learn the art because most of the people from North China that were very good did not teach publicly and only had four or five students. The internal energy system of Pa Kua was not being taught much in Taiwan. You could see all of these different styles, but you could never see a thread running through them. When I went to Beijing, I saw Pa Kua in its pure form, and I could see its origin and exactly how the other things were mixed into it. Some of the people in the South did get very good, but the vast majority of them, in terms of Pa Kua, did not.

When you start tracing Pa Kua back to the original teachers who taught Pa Kua in the South, usually you find that they didn’t train that long and that they also specialized in a lot of other arts. In the original Pa Kua school in Beijing, no beginning martial art was taught. You had to already be accomplished in some other martial art. Pa Kua is not a beginning martial art. It is a graduate level of study in the martial art world, it is not primary or elementary school.

I was a conservative for years and would require that my students learn Hsing-I first because I wanted them to experience the reality of having the power to knock someone out before teaching something that can get more esoteric. As a result, the individuals I required to do that are still some of the best Pa Kua students I have. However, I am trying to adjust my teaching, since I want to bring the art to the general public.

I understand that Hung I-Hsiang’s teacher, Chang Chun-Feng, also taught his students Hsing-I before they studied Pa Kua. Is this true?

Chang Chun-Feng taught Hsing-I along with Pa Kua. In Hung I-Hsiang’s system, you learned Hsing-I first and then Pa Kua. I think Chang Chun-Feng was very good; he was actually the head of a large martial arts group in Tianjin, a port city near Beijing. To be the head of a martial arts group in Beijing or Tianjin, with Pa Kua as your specialty, you had to know your stuff. You couldn’t fake it, there were too many people around who would take umbrage and cause you great bodily harm.

Has your knowledge of Chinese language and Chinese culture helped your ability to understand Chinese martial arts?

Most western people do not know much about Chinese culture. Even most of our China experts in the West have not lived in China a long time, usually not more than a year or two. Very few American people speak Chinese. So, what a lot of Western people may tell you about Chinese culture is what they have inferred, not what they have actually experienced by being involved in Chinese culture. This doesn’t mean that their observations are necessarily correct or incorrect; it does mean however that they are not based on direct experience.

There is a lot in Chinese culture which I think is misunderstood over here. One problem is being able to take the intended meaning out of the Chinese metaphor. No one really understands what the Chinese are talking about. Their explanations don’t make any sense if you don’t have the cultural background to understand their analogies. I think the main problem in the transmission of the internal arts has been communication.

Most Chinese teachers don’t speak English well. Some can explain simple concepts in English, but once it starts getting complicated, they are out of their depth. As an analogy, I can use simple language in Chinese to convey anything I want to convey. However, I don’t know if I’d want to teach nuclear physics to a room full of college graduates in China, due to my limited scientific vocabulary which would cause me to be significantly less precise than I would be in my native language English. Pa Kua is a subject requiring just such precise language. What metaphors people use and their meanings vary from culture to culture, and they may not make sense transculturally. By misunderstanding the nuances of a metaphor, you could waste years of practice time. And learning just by watching without explanation can lead to gross misunderstandings, or, worse yet, one can learn only form without any content. This would be like buying a beautiful champagne bottle with no champagne inside.

I’m doing what I can to act as a cultural bridge. I don’t think my Chinese is flawless, but I am fluent enough and can communicate and learn in it. The language was a tool to learn the things that I was interested in, i.e. martial arts, Ch’i Kung, Chinese medicine and meditation.

What makes Pa Kua different from the other martial arts in China?

Everything in it, from beginning to end -philosophy, methodology, practice -is completely Taoist and nothing else. So it is an ideal way or key to learn about Taoism in a practical way. Taoism isn’t merely an academic subject; Taoism is the relationship between energies that actually exist and their relationship to human beings.

An excellent place to begin your studies is to research the relationship between your own personal body/mind/spirit and the energies and natural forces that compose the Universe. Joining Heaven and Earth and the Universe inside a human being is the major goal of Pa Kua. That is above and beyond fighting. Pa Kua is very heavy on reality. Since the universe is a real place, there has to be a tremendous sense of practicality -that is how the Chinese are and how Taoism is.

The first question a Chinese will ask is, “How do you do it?” They don’t ask what you are doing, they don’t ask why you are doing it. They ask how you are doing it, what are you going to get out of it, and do you think that is really a useful idea. The word “useful”, that is the whole thing. Is it useful spending time on that? If it is useful spending time on it, then you go and do it. In martial arts the Chinese are practically-minded people. If you’ve got to hit a person more than three or four times to finish them, that’s ridiculous – once or twice is usually quite sufficient.

I am really interested in seeing Pa Kua grow. A lot of the Pa Kua in the United States is at an extremely low level. I know a lot of the American teachers, and I know what they are going through. Why do you think I went to China? Pa Kua has its own very specific system, and I spent 10 years learning it. That is what I did seven days a week for ten years. So there really is a lot to it.

Taoism is much less ornate that many other religions. When you see a really good Taoist temple, the walls are simple, everything is functional. When you see some Christian cathedrals they are frequently extremely ornate. A Buddhist temple has hundreds or thousands of icons, the exception being Zen temples, which are heavily influenced by Taoism. A Muslim temple has 10,000 square feet of fine filigree. In Taoism, they don’t care about external image, the temples are very plain and basic. Image is not their subject, their concern is essence, only what is inside the individual. And the fact is that Pa Kua is essentially an internal practice.

The basic Nei Kung of Pa Kua is the walking. Do they have static postures? Very little; that is not real Pa Kua. When you see a person holding this posture and holding that posture, he is getting this methodology from Hsing-I. They don’t have that method in Pa Kua. Pa Kua moves. Every Pa Kua school has a least one or two Ch’i Kung sets, such as the “Ten Heavenly Stems” or the “Gods Playing in the Clouds”, and those Ch’i Kung sets are always moving. The Nei Kung is done in the moving practice or it is done sitting. This is a very, very big thing in Pa Kua, the whole sitting meditation process. To go to the higher levels in Pa Kua, you have to do the sitting practices. At least that is what I was taught. That is what Tung himself and some of his students practiced.

What is your approach to teaching Pa Kua?

In both on-going weekly classes in Marin County, California, and three workshops a year in New York City, I emphasize four aspects of Pa Kua: how the internal connections of the body work, how Ch’i is developed, how to use the movements for self-defense, and how to bring to fruition the meditation aspects of Pa Kua while walking the circle and sitting.

In regular weekly classes, people begin very simply, and that is when some people, those who are looking for dance-like forms and not internal content, end up going out the door. Students first learn how to walk. First they learn how to put one foot in front of the other and walk in a straight line. Next they learn how to walk in a circle. Each class is fairly spontaneous: I adjust my teaching to the ch’i that is happening that night. Pa Kua is taught as an energy system, it’s internal. The movements are not as important as the ch’i. Most nights we spend some period of time on fighting applications. I want people to start using the palm changes. That is the first really big step.

The class starts with 5 minutes of standing with ch’i crossovers to open up the right and left energy channels of the body. Then we walk a lot: slow, fast, high stances, low stances, up on our tip-toes, etc. emphasize stability, the hand and foot in balance, and how to turn. Beginners learn some leg movements and some hand movements when the legs are stationary, just to get the hand, waist and the leg twisting coordinated. I teach Pa Kua more from the point of view of developing the Hsien Tien ch’i, or what they call “pre-birth” Pa Kua. The Hou Tien are just applications, and we do a lot of fighting applications. Once people have built up enough energy, they learn applications so the circle walking becomes more real.

The first thing that everyone has to get through is the single palm change. This can take years. My point of view is that once the student has accessed the energy of the single palm change, then I can start teaching him or her more movements and changes. Then movements start coming fast, but they can be absorbed easily. If you already have that root, the power of the single palm change becomes part of any subsequent movements.

We also have Taoist meditation. In the beginning everyone wants to meditate, but the first phase of meditation in Pa Kua concerns the body. The first thing you have to do is make your body energetically capable of making the jump from ch’i to spirit. From my point of view, T’ai Chi (even Chen style) is easy compared to Pa Kua. Pa Kua works you very hard. It works your insides very hard, and it works your outsides very hard. Pa Kua is not easy, but it allows people to scale the heights and go as far as a human possibly can in the martial arts world.

Practices that are easy in the beginning enable you to get somewhere quicker, but create a glass ceiling which limits your potential. However, to open up the body and ch’i of a human being which has become essentially contracted will take a lot of time. It takes a lot of time to turn a bonsai back into a normal tree. It can be done, but it requires some effort. T’ai Chi is for everybody. Anybody can do T’ai Chi, not everybody can do Pa Kua. It is not something that you could give any man, woman or child. I would say that 10% of the population is capable of doing it. How much of that 10% would want to do it? That’s hard to say.

My students are trained extensively in Ch’i Kung, done in a five-part workshop series. The Ch’i Kung I teach was spread through out China in the 1950’s, 60’s, and 70’s as a national health system. All the Ch’i Kung systems I teach are over 3000 years old and successfully survived through every generation because they worked well. After Ch’i Kung, I teach Pa Kua, but I don’t hide things. Anybody can come to learn with me. There is an easier modified way of circle walking which is not the complete traditional way of building all of the root, but you can teach it to anybody, even people who are sick, damaged and all of that. My first teacher, Wang Shu-Chin, used this method with great success on many senior citizens and people with severe health problems.

If people’s knees, ankles or back are injured, they can’t do traditional Pa Kua mud walking because they’ll rip their bodies apart internally. So I teach them the short 16-move Wu T’ai Chi form, which heals the body. Wu T’ai Chi is wonderful for healing. Once their body is healed, people can go on to Pa Kua, or else they can be taught Wang Shu-Chin’s modified method. Your body has got to be all right. I’m not trying to hurt people, I’m trying to help them. Once I’m sure Pa Kua’s vigorous training isn’t going to hurt someone, I’ll teach him what he wants to know. I have an open door policy right now. At times, though, I consider going back to the traditional requirement that the prospective students have an extensive martial arts or meditation background if they wish to learn the I-Ching meditational or fighting aspect of Pa Kua.

Usually I’ll teach in New York City three times a year, teaching Pa Kua there twice a year and the other time teaching Ch’i Kung, which directly develops the ch’i of Pa Kua. New York is right now designated Pa Kua area on the East Coast. I live in Marin County, in the San Francisco Bay Area, but some of my original students are in New York, such as Frank Allen who teaches there. I went back to teach Pa Kua there because I’m from the town, and I know the people. The physical realities of self-defense are more appreciated in New York City than in laid back California!

In Pa Kua, you don’t care about visual externals, you care about what you are doing inside. Some people concentrate on movements. Movements alone will make you a good dancer or a good Wu Shu performer, but that is all they will do. If movement alone could cut it, if that were it, modern dance or ballet could be the spiritual and healing art of the century. But they are not. It doesn’t mean what they do isn’t great, it simply means healing and spirituality are not their focus. Pa Kua, on the other hand, is a subject of meditation, a subject of ch’i development and a subject of realistic physical and psychic combat.

Some of Pa Kua’s literature talks about the different types of ching that are developed in the different palms and whether it is the tendon type or the bone type. Can you explain this?

Let me explain how I learned the system. In beginning Pa Kua the ways in which you mold your palm and fingers, as well as the palm changes, are about developing and lengthening the tendons. It involves getting what is contracted to expand. This occurs first when the tendons start to stretch, allowing the joints to open. Then in the middle palms you start working on the fascia. Once you open the fascia, the shoulders, back and knees start to open up. Generally all these areas are compacted, and your small muscles are about 40% shorter than they ought to be.

The next stage in the Pa Kua palms is that they start to open up the internal organs, next opening up the spine, then opening the central channel of energy in the body (which includes the bone marrow), and then eventually opening the energy centers inside the brain. After this, all ching derives purely from spirit. Some other of the Pa Kua palms are directly concerned with opening up all of the different energy channels inside the body, and you’ve got a lot of them. Rather than just the 14 meridians and collateral channels, you’ve got thousands of them. Every time you think you’ve got them all, one will pop up somewhere. After that starts occurring, some of the palms result in your body becoming empty, and some result in your body expanding out forever. It just keeps going on.

In T’ai Chi all movement comes from the waist: your arms and your legs basically follow the waist. In Hsing-I movement starts from the hand, and the waist and legs follow. In Pa Kua the foot starts it all and the waist and arms follow the foot. The way the internal components link up is different in each of these three arts. Hsing-I is the easiest one because it starts from the hand. Pa Kua is a little trickier because starting from the feet is more difficult.

As you go through the Pa Kua palms you will find that each does different things to you. They work with your body differently; they work with your mind differently. Some directly effect the psychic state, some your physical state, some your emotional state. There are about 200 separate palms, i.e. the way the palm itself is positioned, such as the dragon claw palm, the willow leaf palm, etc. My teacher taught me the final palm the day before he died.

I’m willing to share what was passed down to me because it is a transmission: it isn’t mine, it’s part of the human cultural inheritance. I’ll hold it for a while until someone else gets it, then they’ll hold it for a while and give it to someone else.

Article Originally Published in Pa Kua Chang Newsletter, Vol. 1, No. 6 Sept/Oct 1991