Push hands is not fighting

One of the early pioneers of Tai Chi Chuan in the West was the noteable Cheng-Man-Ching. Like many modern day Tai Chi mavericks he divides opinion, people in the Tai Chi world seem to either love him or hate him. He looked like the stereotypical "Tai chi master" - a small, elderly Chinese gentleman who could push around much bigger, younger and stronger opponents with ease. True to his image as the Taoist sage he extolled the vrtues of Chi over using muscular strength, the soft over the hard and yielding over force. He was also a cultured man, a master of the "5 excellences": poetry, calligraphy, painting, herbal medicine and Tai Chi. Chengs reputation is based on many things - but his legacy is his innovative 37-posture short form, which he based on the traditional long form of his teacher, Yang Cheng-Fu. A shorter form meant that it was easier for people to learn and this helped him popularise the art.

Image via Wikipedia

Cheng was originally from the mainland. He moved to Taiwan when the nationalist government of Chiang Kai-Shek was ousted by the communists and eventually was invited to New York where he opened one of the first Tai Chi schools to appear in the West. He taught a lot of people, many of whom went on to teach others perhaps before they were really ready, but he also taught a lot of people who went on to become well respected teachers in their own right.

In many ways he was a staunch traditionist, yet his talk of 'chi' and his seemingly impossible demonstrations of softness overoming hardness managed to capture the zeitgeist of a nation at a time that the hippy ethos was taking off. In actually fact he had little in common with the hippy generation.

The purpose of this post is not to present a biography of Cheng - there are much better sources for that, such as www.chengmanching.com and his Wikipedia article. Wolf Lauentrhal's books on Cheng are also a good source. What I want to look at instead is his push hands technique.

There seems to be recurring debate amongst Tai Chi practitioners about whether or not Cheng Man-Ching was actually any good or not. His detractors maintain that he was simply a practitioner of average ability who was lucky enough to be in the right place at the right time; a small fish in a very big pond. Overly enthusiastic students of Cheng Man-Ching stylists tend to take the opposite view that he represented the pinnacle of achievement in Tai Chi Chuan. He was, they claim, the "softest of the soft" (a phrase used by Robert W Smith http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W6e01Gb-2h4). A frequent criticism you hear levelled at Cheng was that he was a scholar, not a fighter. It's true he was a cultured man and "master of the five excellencies", but does that automatically mean he couldn't fight? If you look at his history he seems to have had impressive record of accepting challenges from other well-skilled martial artists and coming off best. Many of his challengers went on to become his students after crossing hands with him.

To me it always seems a bit silly to speculate about Cheng's skill level, especially as (thanks to the Internet) it's now possible to watch the man himself in action. Why take other people's word for it when you can judge for yourself?

Push hands:

Form:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FqNYHZEaUvw

If you watch this clip you can see him pushing hands with Stan Israel, who as well as being one of his students was a Judoka

What do you think? To me he looks like pretty darn skilled at push hands. In that clip he's moving much bigger and heavier men with ease. That's impressive. There was certainly something captivating about his movement in Tai Chi forms as well. It looks to me that he had really mastered the Peng force of Tai Chi Chuan - you can see that full, 'internal', quality to his movements. They look soft on the outside, but with something really solid on the inside.

Does this mean he could fight? Who knows. Push hands is not fighting. It's a limited type of sparring in which Tai Chi practitioners can practice the skills they would use in a real fight in a relatively safer environment. Contact is already made in push hands, so there's no opportunity to cover one of the most important things in real fighting - the ability to 'bridge', that is to connect with your opponent from a distance. Kicks are also ignored in push hands training because of the range you start at. There's nothing wrong with push hands as such, but it itsn't the same as fighting. It's an excellent exercise for learning how to yield to force, which is the strategy of Tai Chi as a fighting art (according to the Tai Chi classics at least, your millage may vary). I find it's often the case that people observe somebody who is highly skilled in push hands practice and then assume that this means they can fight equally well in other environments. It doesn't. It's a good indication, but to know if somebody can actually fight you need to see them sparring in a less restrictive environment. In Cheng's case there are no videos of that, so it's perhaps best not to speculate either way.