The Way of Least Resistance

My good friend Jorge Morales-Santo Domingo recently posed the following question to me: "Watching your Taijiquan videos it occurred to me to ask how you avoid "contaminating" your internal arts practice with your former karate experience, or vise versa. This was always a problem for me as I inadvertently "slipped" into Goju intent at the slightest similarity of movement. This was the prime reason why I returned fully to karate. Although a lot of what I experienced during that time has surfaced in my Goju practice." This was an interesting question. I couldn't think how to answer it, so I decided to pour myself a (very big) glass of red wine and "mull" it over. Me performing the second section of Chen Pan-Ling's taijiquan form The red wine didn't help. I stood in the kitchen feeling progressively more and more inebriated but none the wiser. So I decided (as I often do) that it was probably best to write down the first thoughts that...

Further to my article: "The naming of sanchin" ... I have heard it said in crane circles that there is a different sanchin for every student, or words to that effect. I don't know if that is true, but every variant of crane seems to have a sanjan/sanzhan/saamchien. Ngo cho kun (5 ancestor fist) is based on 5 shaolin styles of which crane is one, hence they have sanchin. While Kanbun Uechi's art seems to have been a compilation of his all his various studies, I think it was most heavily influenced by white crane. Uechi certainly looks a lot like Fujian white crane (in my view much more than goju). For downloadable videos check out my friend Martin Watt's site: http://www.fujianbaihe.com/ . He does Yong Chun white crane. His site has links to his Chinese school's site (which has more videos). Also have a look at Eric Ling's sanjin on http://www.goju-ryu.info/ (Fuzhou Ancestral Crane - said to be the crane form that lead to all the crane variants - calling c...

Further to my article on the numeric names of kata : In Chinese schools (eg. ngo cho kun) the kata is called "saam chien / sanzhan" while the stance is called "chien be / zhan bu" (battle stance) . The latter is probably the more "correct" description/name of the stance. By comparison, in karate we could perhaps call sanchin dachi "chin dachi". The kata name "sanchin" means "3 battles" and my theory is that the "battles" referred to are not "mind/body/spirit" or some other elaborate philosophical concept. Rather, I think the explanation is more straightforward: The kata is named after 3 sanchin dachi steps:Given my thoughts on the pragmatic kata naming conventions in Fujian in the 1800s (again, see my article Numeric names of kata ) I think the present kata name is shortened from the full Chinese name of the kata: "san zhan bu / saam chien be" — ie. “3 battle steps”. In this regard, bear in mind t...