TAIJI QUAN – NOT TAICHI CHUAN

by Ethan Murchie – August 2025

It is very common, even among senior practitioners of the older generation, to hear taiji or taiji quan referred to as taichi or taichi chuan. Sometimes you also come across the term taiqi.

This is a seemingly small thing, which is really the tip of an iceberg in looking at the arts we are dedicated too. It has to do with transmission and information.

Up to very recently, we have had very patchy and poor quality real information about what we are doing. We have relied on the genius of our teachers and their very high levels of personal dedication and skill. Through their efforts, we have been able to progress despite the challenges of language, culture and distance.

Nevertheless, we need to acknowledge how patchy our information has been, mainly due to language barriers and very wide gaps in cultural foundations. There is no judgement in this statement; it is completely about how hard it is to communicate in a foreign language about subtle concepts and skills that are rooted in a foreign culture.

Our chances of long term success go up dramatically when we have better information to work with. This information is technical and quite straightforward, once we can translate and understand it thoroughly. We are very lucky that at the moment this is happening. We are getting a better grasp on things and need not rely as heavily on personal inspiration to make sense of the arts. Of course, the arts are always going to be based on personal inspiration, but a good technical foundation helps a lot.

So, to return to taiji or taichi or taiqi. This is a perfect example of the language and cultural issues.

The art we practice is called 太極拳 which in pinyin is written tàijí quán. To have its proper meaning, the pinyin needs to be written with the tone marks. I am not going to bother writing them every time, but even if I simply change the tone marks, it changes the meaning of the words, let alone changing taiji to taichi or taiqi; what ever these might mean it is something totally different.

The term taiji has deep historical foundations. It relates to the yin yang school of natural science and philosophy that began 2500 years ago. It is an important concept in the Yi Jing the Classic of Changes. It plays an important role in Chinese medicine.

In Chinese, it can be problematic to call the art we are doing “taiji”, because the term has so many important connections. We would have to say “taiji quan” to make it clear we are talking about the martial art.

The term “ji” in taiji quan means ridge pole, standard, principle, summit, zenith, pinnacle, culmination, end point, extreme.

Coupled with “tai”, which means great, greatest, extreme, maximum we have “taiji”, which is the term for the beginning point of everything that exists in the biggest sense and, in a more limited sense, means the point in any process where the yin momentum of contraction converts to the yang momentum of expansion or vice versa. The still point around which any process pivots.

Yin Yang theory tells us that all things are repeating fractal patterns and that we can study the greatest mysteries in looking at the simplest things.  When we are practicing taiji quan, we are using a martial framework to study yin yang. We learn to stop seeing the world from our individual limited perspective and to apply ourselves to universal truth. This is grandiose, but that’s what it is about.

So the name of the art is important, it is about the study of this concept of taiji and how it is a still point in the ever turning movement of existence from which all things stem. Without this, we are just studying how to fight. Boxing is fun and useful in many ways, on many levels, and is not to be belittled, but if we want to use our boxing to access higher things, we need to start in the right way and the name of our art is such a starting point. So we should not get it wrong.

Our art is called Taiji Quan 太極拳.

Specifically it is the taiji quan of the Yang family as transmitted by Yang Shaohou and Yang Chengfu and passed on to Gu Lisheng, Chi Qingsheng and Liang Dehua.