What Tai Chi is
On the opening ceremony of the Eleventh Asian Games in 1990 1,500 Tai Chi Boxing practitioners from China and Japan gave a grand performance of Tai Chi Boxing (tai ji quan), creating a stir worldwide. This slow, graceful Chinese exercise is attracting more and more friends from various countries these days. We would like to introduce Tai Chi Boxing, with its precious heritage of Chinese culture, to those foreign friends who may not know about Tai Chi.
The Chinese characters for Tai Chi Chuan can be translated as the “Supreme Ultimate Force”. The notion of “supreme ultimate” is often associated with the Chinese concept of Yin-Yang, the notion that one can see a dynamic duality (male/female, active/passive, dark/light, forceful/yielding, etc.) in all things. “Force” (or, more literally, “fist”) can be thought of here as the means or way of achieving this Yin-Yang, or “supreme-ultimate” discipline.
Tai Chi, as it is practiced in the West today, can perhaps be best thought of as a moving form of yoga and meditation combined. There are a number of so-called forms (sometimes also called “sets”) which consist of a sequence of movements. Many of these movements are originally derived from the martial arts (and perhaps even more ancestrally than that, from the natural movements of animals and birds) although the way they are performed in Tai Chi is slowly, softly and gracefully, having smooth and even transitions between them.