Change of forum name

I cannot believe that every one has gone for one of Gerards wind ups. He must be loving it. Its a Forum and though i am all for it being a martial art the majority of the world understand it as Tai Chi. I call it Tai Chi but i still teach my students its martial side. Tai Chi is an easy base to start with cannot understand the fuss. Oh Gerard feel better now :bang:

 

All this nit picking sucks imo :bang: :woo:
Tai Chi OR Taiji in this context is short for Taijiquan OR T'ai Ch'i Ch'uan or whatever as well you know! The artificial distinction Syd makes between the two is his own concept as I have pointed out before and actually causes more confusion than it resolves as the vast majority of writers on the subject shorten Taijiquan (MY preferred term btw... ) to Taiji or Tai Chi. It is wholely eroneous imo.
If I refer to the Tiger (Chinese) or (alternatively) the Ego(western) causing an imbalance in a person (no names, no pack drill...) I am basically saying the same thing. It ain't brain surgery.
What I hate most about all this pointless bickering is the stereotyping and prejudiced language that gets used every time. :woo: ie 'hippies' 'new agers' 'wooses' etc etc I wonder how these people would react to being called 'meatheads' 'thugs' 'yobboes' etc etc Would you like those martial art stereotypes, I wonder? Can your Tiger take that? I doubt it...
The fact that someone chooses not to be violent or defensive in their outlook does not exclude them from this wonderful art, just as being 'Taoist' (big LOL - none such thing lol) does not make one superior - neither does being a 'Taiji Boxer' give you (or me) some high ground to dictate the tenets of the art.
Use of Pinyin or Wade Giles? Who cares? "Tai Chi Chuan was only coined a hundred years ago" - so what? The art we all practice comes from the same source - like it or lump it - it is internal boxing and whether we use it to combat stress and disease or to punch other people's lights out is a personal ( AND KARMIC HA HA HA ) choice that we each make. The one thing I think there is no room for in a good Taiji boxer is prejudice and mindless aggression. Shame on you! Let's all just Grow up - and talk about the art itself as equals and adults. Without Prejudice!
Peace
:Angel:

 

Sorry if I jump in again. But my purpose when posting this thread was on giving an internal art the respect it deserves.

WOULD YOU CALL BUDDHISM, BUDISM?

WOULD YOU CALL SHAKESPEARE, SAKESPEAR?

In addition, I don't want the people who don't know me when I tell them I practice Taijiquan to think that this is Taijiquan:

http://www.everyday-taichi.com/tai-chi-pictures.html

I rather this one:

http://www.taiji.net.cn/

So guys, what would you prefer:

1. Tai chi and being associated with forum highlighted in italics ( :woo: ), or

2. Taiji and being associated with forum highlighted in bold writing ( :love: )

THEREFORE AND REPLYING TO SILAT PUPIL:

NAME SHOULD CHANGE!


I have the feeling that this thread is a battle between EMA and IMA. But I can assure you that IMA are superior to any EMA. No doubt. I even would like to challenge anyone in person for a tournament to prove what I am saying.




Have a nice day.

 

Shakespeare is an English Name

Shakespeare is an English name and Buddhism has been an accepted part of the English language for a long time. The only way your analogy would be applicable would be if the forum was named two chinese characters, one of which was incorrect. Taiji/Tai Chi is a CHINESE word and there is no 100% standardized way to romanize the pronunciation of Chinese characters. For that matter, there isn't even a standard way to pronounce any Chinese character. I happen also to speak Taiwanese (Fujian-ese) and they would read the same characters in a way that could most closely be approximated in English letters as "Dai Gikk Ken." Therefore, there is NO "correct" way to spell Taiji using the Roman alphabet. The only way is to use the spelling that has become accepted by the majority of English speakers, which happens to be "Tai Chi." Any of us who really knows anything about Taiji-quan already knows the correct pronunciation in standard Mandarin, so changing the name of the forum would only confuse newcomers.

 

The problem is, the distinction is only in your mind. Not everyone that does it for health and fitness calls it Tai Chi, and not everyone who does it as a martial calls it Taiji.

edit: And Gerard, as for Shakespear, some members of his family spelled their name "Shakspear".

 

For a self styled intelligent fellow your really way behind the bell curve on plain understanding ... *L*

Let me explain one last time then ... Tai Chi is largely known and used conceptually by those members of the community who practise half the art, the purely soft internal or purely health oriented aspects with little or no concept of the correct balanced art, Taijiquan, which contains both martial and civil aspects as the classics state! Conceptually Taiji and Tai Chi are not the same thing therefore! Philosophically and linguistically they are but in reality of everday usage/conceptually and practise they are not!

Persons who use Taijiquan are generally by and large students of the complete martial art who shorten the name to Taiji. Persons who generally have no concept of the martial aspects of Taijiquan call it Tai Chi ( Tai Chi Chuan ) and if going by the classics is not Taijiquan since it is not a balanced art and does not contain both the martial and the civil. The distinction has been made and must be made due to those who have abused the art and perpetuated the watered down version to the wider community. You are stuck on the pure linguistics of the paradigm whereas I am talking beyond that about the conceptual perception and usage of the terms which denote and connote the knowledge and practice of the participants therein!

Get it?



















Probably not ... *LMAO*

 

You make a good point and it's well taken but it's not just my own perception, there are many out there who read and see this distinction quite clearly. I would argue that the large majority of people doing it for health call it Tai Chi Chuan and not Taijiquan. You see thats just the way the marketing world has sold it to those members of the community. No Taiji magazines I know of are called Taiji ... they are all Tai Chi Chuan. But then again you are partially correct because some of those magazines called Tai Chi Chuan are very much involved in educating the full art in balance as it should be. It's a fine line in some cases but the distinction is clear to me but then again I've always been a hard liner.

 

Tai Chi Chuan (or more accurately T'ai Chi Ch'uan) is fine for me as it fully follows the Wade-Giles system. On the other hand, Tai chi is just the junk-food version of its culinary cousin:

Taijiquan (Tài jí quán with the accents to indicate tone) or 太極拳

Tai chi is not an art. It's rubbish, OK for those who want to have an initial touch with this Universal art, but later on they will (or will not) to the real thing. I have seen countless people who enrol in real Taijiquan classes and man I tell ya they last for about a month. they drop because they approached it as Tai chi, but my teacher as a good Chinese dude instructs it as Taijiquan, therefore the Tai chi seekers end up quitting.

Taijiquan is this:



and not this please:




Could you please change the name of this forum into something more appropriate?

 

But I don't have a nice set of steps to practice at the bottom of... :cry:

All I have to say is this;

Those people who want the name changed must have a serious self confidence issue. So what if someone with little/no understanding thinks Taijiquan is "hippie"? You know better,

GET OVER IT!

Just get on a practice Tai Chi however you want to, and leave others to do the same.

Surely if your so into Tai Chi, you should be away practicing instead of bickering over how to write the name.

 

Most people don't perform Taijiquan for an entire 24 hour period each day and so find time to type something for 20 mins once in a while ... we eat and sleep too! That old chestnut of "should be praciticing instead of typing" is a well used non starter ...

If you want to play that game, I haven't visited this forum since January and maybe had one post or two in between then at best. When was the last time you posted here? - yesterday?

Sheesh ....

 

So Gerard what you're saying is: If you don't dress up in pyjamas and/or a dressing gown and put your hair in a bun, you're not doing proper Taiji?
For a 'Taoist' (none such thing btw) you ain't arf argumentative btw Doesn't it say in the Tao Te Ching (oops sorry dao de jing ) 'the contentious are not worthy, the worthy are not contentious'?
Tai Chi
Taiji
Same thing. Spelling is nothing. The practice is everything. Get on with it.
Syd - drop the shovel, move away from the hole.....
:Angel:

 

You obviously can't read ... selective thinking is never clear though.

And there I was trying dig you out of the place you got your head stuck... tsk, tsk.

 

Okaaaaaay.

I always suspected that this thread would disintegrate into a pantomime....sadly it has. :bang: :bang:

I don't care what anyone calls it...taiji quan, tai chi chuan, hippy dancing, long boxing, supreme ultimate fist, the most deadly internal martial art on any planet in the universe.

I haven't spent the last eight years practicing because of a name .

I suspect that some people have ego issues and feel they have to let the world know that taiji quan can be a fullblown martial art and isn't just a way of getting the elderly to stir their stumps.

Me, I don't care what anyone else calls it, or whether others know it is a martial art or not.

I do it for myself, for everything it has done and will do for me in the future.


(I am just happy to have a forum to share views with people from around the world I would never get to communicate with otherwise)


Last word...we have to defend our ima from time to time to the practitioners of ema, surely we don't have to bicker among ourselves.

 

You may be right in some cases, I have no such problems ... I just seek to differentiate myself from the mass market health brigade is all and follow the tenets of the classics ... no ego in correct practice by association. I spend little or no time at forums anymore and this is the first time since january ... I've truly got better things to do. The topic came up and I voiced my opinion, end of story. I am more than happy to let sleeping dogs lie but I felt the need to set a few people straight on their ( mis ) interpretation of what it was/is I am saying. Having done that ... see ya.

 

Well, well, Syd lol... To quote my all-time hero Mohammed Ali "Is that all you got?" :woo: Allow me to reply... lol :woo:
Syd, I can read very well, thank you. However, unlike you I have the ability (intelligence?) to understand that Pinyin and Wade Giles are just two systems for translating oriental ideograms into Roman text AND ABSOLUTELY NOTHING ELSE IN ANY WAY WHATSOEVER lol. Why this is so difficult for you (and Gerard apparently [how dissapointing btw ]) to understand, I have no idea.
Once more, with feeling, everybody...
Taiji = pinyin
Tai Chi = wage-giles
SAME WORD when rendered in Chinese characters This is correct. You can wriggle and twist all you want, but the only reality you can change is your own.
Your arbitrary differentiation of identical terms into differing ideas is nothing more than a statement about yourself and your own prejudices imho.
It appears to me that this serves to perpetuate your ego-driven agenda and bolster your own insecurities and deep-down lack of self-esteem. I do not condemn you for this, it is an easy trap to fall into and many martial artists start practice to deal with this issue - unfortunately the arts often serve to maintain the underlying paranoia rather than resolve it. I have met many highly skilled and charming martial arts experts who have not managed to resolve this issue - I have been there myself, I freely admit. Perhaps it is part of being human... One of my best teachers had skills bordering on magical and yet could be reduced to a raging child if the right buttons got pushed. I have learnt from this... but I still struggle to overcome it... :Angel:
So. The real question for me becomes: whether to settle into an institutionalised conflict model based on prejudices and inner fears, fooling yourself with the lies and the illusions of a fearful ego, lashing out at anything that threatens your fragile comfort zone...
...or whether to keep getting up and challenging again and again...taking every blow, every defeat, overcoming every obstacle and bloody-mindedly progress along the warrior's path until the issues are resolved and we are free... or die trying lol
The choice is always yours.
To (mis)quote Castaneda: The only important question is "Does your path have a heart?" Who cares what paths others follow? Let them. It's so simple - it's almost painful lol

Bwahahahahahahaha The only person you are kidding is yourself m8

OMG how pretentious is that one?? What an unbelievably arrogant attitude to take?? Why not just post "I'm better than all of you" and have done with it? Utter snobbery imo Is it all about YOU and what YOU want in here then, Syd? The world is a very big place with room for everyone lol

Apparently not true or you wouldn't be here... (feel free not to be here btw no one is forcing you... ) And "JANUARY??" didn't you start a thread on "snake creeps down to water" more recently than that? Such porky pies (cockney rhyming slang for little lies just in case you didn't know) are very common in the insecure martial artist lol (seriously! I'd like a fiver for every example of that I've heard from Martial artists - I'd take a long holiday lol)

Bwahahahahahahaha Apparently not again, or you'd be doing them methinks

Apparently not as you are still posting in the thread (and boy, how defensively? )

See last comment. Who ya tryin ta kid, Syd?

Syd! Syd! Oo ya tryin' ta kid? Lala! Lalaaa! lol

I don't believe in God, but.. "please, God, let that last statement be true" (somehow I doubt it tho'...)
Regarding the "shovel" comment. You began with the premise that Tai Chi and Tai Chi Chuan were the differentiation between martial artists and new age health practitioners then switched to saying pinyin meant martial art and wade giles meant health only practice. You got caught m8 - if you're such a great boxer take the hit and hold your hands up - getting personal just shows you up and loses face
Get over it
:Angel:

 

Seems I hit a nerve ... there's so much self deluding in your previous tirade I couldn't be bothered setting you straight ... much mirth to be had for certain. If any of the above even remotely came close to addressing me I might reply, it seems however your talking to yourself.

Enjoy ...

 

Hey - keep on kidding yourself m8...
Others can judge whatever and however they will whether you are right and whether I am truly talking to myself (philosophically you are right, but that's another forum...lol. In the ultimate dark night we all face only ourselves. I'm more than ready for that. I don't think you are though )
May you live in interesting times and may your path give you everything you truly need...
Good luck to you.
La... Laaa....
La... Laaa....
:Angel:

 

This is idiotic

All Syd and Gerard are trying to do is elevate themselves above other Taiji practitioners by using a spelling that is more phoenetically correct. I agree that the majority of Taiji as practiced around the world (including in China, BTW) is a pale shadow of the martial art it is intended to be, but this is like saying "I don't drink TEA, I drink CHA. Tea is a word for stupid Americans who drink Celestial Seasons and have no idea what really good tea is." Of course, the majority of tea you'll find in America is of poor quality and I am very picky about my tea. That doesn't mean that I'm going to insist on calling the tea I drink "Cha" as a way of differentiating my good tea from grocery-store teabag tea. It's still TEA. And Taiji, like tea, comes in a large range of qualities from calisthenics old people do in the park to a profoundly deep martial art. That doesn't mean we have to call it something different in order to tout our selves as doing "high quality" Taiji.

 

Or you could start your own taiji forum if you are so bothered about it? Now there's a thought.

 

*Popcorn* ... *munch, munch*; empty vessels make the most noise, keep clanging away butch.