Waysun Liao - “T’ai Chi Classics”

I really wanted to like this. But the useful information within is drowned in new-age woo-woo.

Some 20 years ago I had a kung-fu phase and a tai chi class was the closest thing I had locally to try it in practice. I ended up liking it and spent a year training the form. A ton of materials and teaching around tai chi talks about the power of the mind, and the invisible and undetectable internal energy “chi” that everybody’s supposedly got within. While I found the exercise beneficial, this sort of talk was making me like it less.

I no longer remember how I discovered Waysun Liao but in early 2006 I bought “T’ai Chi Classics” alongside “Chi: how to feel your LIFE ENERGY” to finally study the matter closer and decide once and for all whether the “chi” talk is real. Back then I only read “Chi: how to feel your LIFE ENERGY” and quit tai chi, deciding it’s fantasy. I must have given the book away or thrown it out since it seems like I no longer have it. For whatever reason, I kept “T’a Chi Classics”.

What if it works anyway?

In "Buddhism Without Beliefs", Stephen Batchelor gives a convincing argument that buddhist practice and philosophy can be worthwhile even without religious dogma, and maybe even closer to truth without it (as the Buddha was not a mystic). Similarly, I got curious whether tai chi and qigong can be useful despite the “chi” mysticism.

The ulterior motive there is that after a shoulder arthroscopy in November, recovery’s been slow and stubborn. When a home renovation randomly resurfaced “T’ai Chi Classics”, I decided to give it a go.

Book structure

The book was first released all the way back in 1977. Before widespread Internet connectivity and the ability for anybody to record high-definition video at any time. The edition I have is from 2000, and there’s apparently a yet newer one released in 2023.

The first third of the book are Waysun Liao’s own musings about “chi” (the internal energy) and “jing” (the internal power). I powered through those in the interest of writing down this review to have my thoughts in written form once and for all. But the further I read, the more spooky and unbelievable it got. We’ll discuss this in detail in the next section.

The actual “classics” are three very short treatises, also available online:

The first two authors are legendary figures. Zhang Sanfeng is said to be the founder of a Taoist temple in the Wudang Mountains, where he apparently invented tai chi. Wang Zongyue was supposedly his student, which is doubtful given that Zongyue’s treatise is dated in Liao’s book at “circa 1600 C.E.”. The third person is a relatively contemporary person having lived in the 19th century.

Liao provides copious commentary to the classics, otherwise the three documents would only span a few pages combined. To an extent this makes the title of the book misleading as an overwhelming majority of the content is original work and not the “classics” from the title. While it’s understandable that the brief nature of the included treatises invites interpretation and expanding upon the ideas within, Wikipedia lists nine writings considered classics, so Liao’s book only covered a third of those.

The final third of the book is a summary of Liao’s form, based on Chen Man-ch’ing’s 37-movement form but extended. In total there’s 68 movements. Text is sparse, lots of illustrations.

Red flags

There is a number of claims and phrasings throughout the book, which are clear red flags to me.

The one true form

Liao draws a straight line from the Shaolin Temple through Wudang Mountains to his own training in Taiwan by an unnamed “wandering Taoist monk”. He claims to have been exposed to the secret true version of tai chi that was hidden from the masses for centuries. He says the tai chi that gained popularity in China is a crippled form, intentionally modified by Yang Luchan, an influential tai chi practitioner from the 19th century, who was unwilling to teach Manchurian rulers the real form of the martial art. Form that he himself learned from Chen Changxing and subsequently taught to the father of Wu Yuxiang. Or maybe Wu Yuxiang himself. It’s not clear to me. Apparently, somehow the genuine lineage of tai chi traveled to Taiwan, probably after the Chinese Revolution of 1949?

In any case, the theme of secrecy and the one true form is the first major red flag. Waysun Liao dismisses any other form of tai chi as “devoid of meaning”. From my own research, it seems that the main character who brought tai chi to Taiwan is Wang Shujin, who originally learned and taught the clearly non-"family” fusion form of tai chi promoted by the Nationalist government of 1925-1948 China. This goes right against the claim that the genuine form of tai chi is Liao’s heritage.

More importantly, Liao doesn’t name his teacher, so there’s no way to verify his teacher’s lineage. That’s not something that I would focus on myself or be very inclined to pursue, if it weren’t for Liao’s own focus on how distinct the true “family-style” form of tai chi is from the “Chinese ballet” taught to the public. He keeps saying things like “understand the secrets of jing theory, which have been guarded by T’ai Chi masters for hundreds of years”.

So everybody else has it wrong, but it’s your lucky day. The teacher in front of you just happens to be the one with the strictly guarded truth. It’s what a cult leader would say. That’s a major red flag.

If all of that were true, a natural question to ask would be why Liao decided to break the secrecy and open a school in Illinois, as well as publish books and videos on the one true form of tai chi? He addresses this by saying:

I have chosen to reveal this so-called exclusive knowledge and to share it with others because I am assuming that those who care enough to read this book thoroughly and with understanding are sincere, decent people who are looking for the type of discipline that T’ai Chi can offer.

Yeah, right. Another red flag. This kind of compliment is psychological manipulation meant to encourage credulity. You believe the guy, because you’re sincere and decent.

Chi

The practical step-by-step explanation of “condensing breathing”, said to convert “chi” into “jing”, is interesting early in the book. But it’s there where the pseudoscience starts raising more red flags. There’s plenty of sentences like:

As you use your mind to squeeze the chi toward your bone marrow, a strong wave-like current of energy similar to electricity is produced.

“Similar to electricity” in what way exactly? Liao admits himself that it’s an energy impossible to detect scientifically. But he phrases it like it’s the scientists’ fault. He says “Western scientists are at a loss to come up with a testing device that would either verify or disprove the existence of chi”. My man, can you disprove that there is a teapot orbiting the Sun between the Earth and Mars?

He also contradicts himself elsewhere by saying:

A high degree of sensitivity will be developed which can, through physical contact, determine the magnitude, wavelength, and direction of another person’s chi.

Wavelength, huh? Such scientific. Much advanced. So physics. Many intelligence. There’s many examples of that throughout the book, like:

Sticking Power, for instance, is a magnetic type of power which is derived from the reversal of the chi flow.

Over the course of “T’ai Chi Classics” Liao gets less and less shy about such phrases.

Shoong

The book briefly discusses another unattainable goal, which is to be “shoong” (also spelled “song"). Liao says it means “to relax”, “to lose”, “to give up”. He quotes Chen Man Ch’ing 1 to say that “if you are even just a little bit not shoong, you will be defeated”. This sounds like a trap set up to make practitioners feel like the failure to achieve results is their own. The best explanation Liao has to give in the subject is that to be shoong is like to lose both arms, to “yield to the infinite”.

Jing

This is where things properly get off the rails. The core idea is that with jing you can attack things without physical force. You don’t need to bring back the arm to punch, you don’t need pivot points for leverage, and so on. Just listen to this:

Legends of martial artists “flying” over several-story buildings, of applying a “touch” that can kill or paralyze, or of “bouncing” two-hundred-pound bruisers into walls thirty feet away without pushing them seem to be improbable claims. However, if one understands the unique theories of ancient T’ai Chi, one may come to believe in the possibility of such feats.

Yeah, right.

Suppose that one can hit a dart with a hammer using 1.44 pounds of force each time and with a speed that is faster than the speed of light. If this is assumed, all that is needed is to hit the dart one time: such a “vibrated” strike will include the seven physical blows within it. It may seem unfortunate that there is no apparent way of accomplishing such a “vibrated” strike, since we are limited by the bonds of time and space. The Chinese, however, discovered that there is something that is able to transcend these limits: the human mind.

I think you meant human imagination.

There is an almost instantaneous transfer of energy. Imagination, or imaging power, is the only limit to the speed.

Ah, very well, we’re in agreement then.

Interesting bits, regardless

The breath control exercises [p. 32-39] that are part of qigong are well explained. There’s some commentary on concentration development that warns against repeating movements mechanically without paying attention. That’s good advice. There’s a very concrete benchmark of physical discomfort: it should only be there, if at all, for the first few weeks of the practice.

There’s a five-step sitting meditation procedure [p. 44] that’s meant to “increase the awareness of chi”. There’s six “T’ai Chi principles” of stance listed [p. 82] that are consistent with physical practice between various forms of tai chi.

The text of the classics in the middle part of the book is an interesting and quick read.

The step-by-step form in the final third of the book isn’t enough to learn the form without an instructor, and you’re likely to find an instructor teaching a different variant of the form. That said, the list of motions is tidy and easy to follow, so might be a good reminder for you.

What if he’s right about the life energy?

There is a non-zero chance that “chi” and “jing” are actual phenomena and are part of the natural world. We’re constantly learning new things about how the universe works. In this case, let’s consider both sides of the coin then. There is a non-zero chance that neither “chi” nor “jing” are real. I’m willing to bet the likelihood of the latter is much higher than the former. To the extent that I’m now actively pursuing qigong and tai chi lessons that are devoid of this mystical pretense.

The practice itself, treating the Chinese word “chi” literally ("air”, “breath”, “vapor"), is empirically useful. Who knows, it’s likely the techniques themselves that talk about stuff like “power transfer” or “increasing the frequency of internal vibrations”, are actually useful for visualizing and applying complex concepts to allow better balance, conscious heart rate control, and other physical effects useful in both fitness and martial arts scenarios. I’m not denying that. But I am calling bullshit on accelerating beyond the speed of light with your mind. It would have been much more sincere to talk about those things as figures of speech, vehicles to drive meaning and help with physical practice. As it stands though, I cannot recommend the book even if I’m not binning mine.

  1. Another martial tai chi artist who moved to Taiwan in 1949 and taught his own modified form, a much shortened version of the Yang form. ↺

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