By: Robert Chuckrow
The Tai Chi Book
Refining and Enjoying a Lifetime of Practice
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by Robert Chuckrow
(YMAA Publication Center, 1998, 210 pages)
Review by Christopher Dow
Robert Chuckrow is the author of, as far as I can tell, four books on Tai Chi. The Tai Chi Book is, apparently, the second of these. I have a reason for saying “apparently.” His first book, released in 1995, was titled T’ai chi ch’uan: Embracing the pearl: Including the teachings of Cheng Man-ch’ing, William C.C. Chen, and Harvey I. Sober, and the sub-sub title to The Tai Chi Book is Including the Teachings of Cheng Man-ch’ing, William C.C. Chen, and Harvey I. Sober. So it’s unclear to me if The Tai Chi Book is an expansion of the earlier work, or if both just happen to include teachings from the Tai Chi experts named in both subtitles, all of whom Chuckrow learned from. I’d buy the earlier book to find out, but it is out of print and used copies go for $150, so for now, I’ll just have to accept my ignorance.
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The Tai Chi Book is a very good Category 1 book, intended for the beginner and intermediate student. In it, Chuckrow delves into various aspects of Tai Chi with, as can be guessed by the three experts named in the sub-sub title, an emphasis on the style developed by Cheng Man-ch’ing (Zheng Manquing). With a Ph.D. in physics, the author brings to bear a scientific approach to understanding the dynamics of Tai Chi, and with a background in teaching both physics and Tai Chi, he knows how to present his material well.
He opens the book with a few brief remarks before getting into the first chapter: “What is T’ai Chi Ch’uan?” The chapter begins with his discovery of Tai Chi—fortuitously that taught by Cheng Man-ch’ing, perhaps the art’s leading exponent in the United States at that time. He then delineates several aspects of what Tai Chi “is”: a spiritual teaching, a form of meditation, a system of health and healing, a physical expression of Taoist philosophy, and a system of self-defense. He spends several to many pages on each of these subjects, delving into some of the deeper aspects of each.
Chapter two is titled, simply, “Ch’i.” Elements he discusses here are chi kung, what chi is in broad terms, the benefits of strengthening one’s chi, how chi is experienced, a possible scientific basis for chi, why some people fail to experience chi, sensing and cultivating chi, sending chi, the effects of clothing on chi, chi possessed by inanimate objects, feng shui (geomancy), cautions about chi, and why the existence of chi is hard for some people to accept.
The next chapter covers a number of basic ideas, concepts and principles of Tai Chi. Early on, he quotes Cheng Man-ch’ing, who was master of the Five Excellences: painting, traditional Chinese medicine, Tai Chi, calligraphy, and poetry. When Cheng was asked which of the five was the most difficult, he replied, “T’ai Chi Ch’uan is the hardest because it has more principles than any of the others.” Chuckrow expands on this, writing, “Not only are the principles numerous, but they require consistent practice over an extended period of time.” He then proceeds to describe these principles in brief or longer subsections: air, balance, centering, chi, circles, concentration, continuity, double weighting, drawing silk (silk reeling), gravity, levelness of motion, leverage, macroscopic and microscopic movement, Newton’s First Law (which defines the inertia of motion and rest), Newton’s Third Law (which states that a force generates an equal and opposite force), opening and closing of the joints, peng, perpetual motion, precision, rotation, sensitivity, separation of yin and yang, sequence of motion, shape, spatial relationships, stepping, sticking, strength, sung (sinking/relaxation), suspension of the head, unity of movement, the body’s axis, vision, and visualization. If you think that’s a run-on sentence, then just consider it to be a long form, flowing like a river.
Breathing is the subject of chapter four. The author begins with everyday breathing and efficient or inefficient breathing. He then moves on to Tai Chi breathing, or more properly, abdominal breathing. Chapter five looks at body alignments, beginning with a definition of alignment and reasons why awareness of alignment is important, then moving on to obstacles to proper alignment. Chuckrow then provides details regarding the alignments of specific joints and linked joint groups in the arms, the legs, the torso, and the neck and head. Warm-ups and stretching are examined in the following chapter. The importance of flexibility are looked at first, followed by a number of important concepts about stretching.
Chapter seven takes on stances, which are the foundation of Tai Chi’s solidity and its ability to dissipate and expel energy. Here, Chuckrow introduces a number of terms linked with particular stances, such as parallel stance, empty stance, and double weighting. These concepts find further explication in descriptions of several key Tai Chi stances, such as 50/50, 70/30, and 0/100 percent. He also helpfully includes warnings about how certain faulty alignments not only adversely affect stances and their stability, but can inadvertently lead to injury.
The next chapter, “On Being a Student,” leads off with what has to be the most important idea in all of Tai Chi: a commitment to dedicated practice over a long period of time. He also discusses group vs individual practice, the length of practice sessions, practicing indoors vs outdoors, time of day to practice, self-discipline, how to deal with the fear of making mistakes, one’s mental state during practice, varying practice speed, mirror image practice (see below), practice in different locations, and several other aspects. He includes here some exercises for improving balance. He then goes into teachers of Tai Chi, from choosing a teacher to teaching methods, and how one should assess teachers. He finishes with a number of pages of advice to beginners, from understanding the learning process to measuring progress. Learning from books and videos also is covered here.
Health, healing, and sexuality are the subjects of chapter nine. He begins with several pages on injuries, learning from injuries, and treating various types of basic injuries such as bruises, sprains, tendonitis, and cuts. A section on massage follows, and after that, the author moves down to the feet, which often are neglected but which are the ultimate foundation for the body. Brief discussions of nutrition, sexuality, and sleep round out the chapter.
Chapter ten covers a number of miscellaneous matters, such as art and Tai Chi, science and Tai Chi, and comparisons of long and short forms. Variations in the forms of great masters, such as how much the rear leg is bent and using a straight or bent wrist, are examined next.
The final chapter takes on push hands, from basic one-handed forms through moving two-handed forms. Here, again, principles dominate, such as yielding, neutralization, correct force, rooting, receiving energy, sticking, listening, and non-action, among many others. The book closes with an appendix showing Chuckrow demonstrating Cheng Man-ch’ing’s thirty-seven posture short form.
While this is, to all extents and purposes, a book for the beginner and intermediate student—and it covers all the bases for those students—it is unusual in including a great deal more information on health and well-being than do most such books.
A lot of the material the author covers could be dry and uninterestingly stated, but Chuckrow is too good a writer and teacher for that. He continually livens things up with anecdotes and personal stories to give life to the concepts he writes about. This makes the book more interesting as well as sinking in the points he makes.
I do have to comment on one element. Early on, Chuckrow states that Cheng Man-ch’ing taught that one should not perform Tai Chi in left-handed, or, mirror-image forms. Cheng’s reasoning was that the two sides of the body are not symmetrical with regards to the placement of internal organs and that while the energies generated by doing the usual, right-handed form are beneficial, they can be detrimental when generated by doing the form in mirror image. I was taught nearly four decades ago to do the form on both sides to help balance the body, and I don’t appear to have suffered any adverse effects. Further, I’ve seen that doing the form in mirror image actually expands its martial repertoire. Some of the applications in the right-handed form can only deal with left-handed attacks, which are less likely than right-handed attacks, and doing the form on both sides enables the practitioner to utilize the full range of applications on either side. Chuckrow doesn’t go into this idea, in particular, though later in the book, he does discuss doing the form in mirror image in more positive terms.
Another thing I like about the book is that the author places the footnotes for each chapter at the end of the chapter instead of at the end of the book, making it easy for readers to flip to learn more if a particular footnote strikes a chord of interest.
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One final note: The Tai Chi Book was a 1999 Independent Publishers Award Finalist.
While there are a number of excellent Tai Chi books for the beginner on the market, this one easily stacks up.
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Tai Chi Dynamics
Principles of Natural Movement, Health, and Self-Development
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by Robert Chuckrow
(YMMA Publications Center, Inc., 2008, 252 pages)
Review by Christopher Dow
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Among books on Tai Chi, there are the good, bad, and those in the middle ground. Among the good ones, there are those that are pretty good, very good, and really, really good. I’d place Robert Chuckrow’s Tai Chi Dynamics near the top of the scale. This book occupies a space somewhere between Category II and Category III. It has a fair share of discussion of how Tai Chi functions on a practical level—which includes energy manipulations as well as physical movement—but it also delves deeply into principles and philosophical matters.
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Chuckrow, who has a Ph.D. in experimental physics and taught that subject at a private school for most of his career, studied with Cheng Man-ch’ing, William C. C. Chen, and Harvey I Sober, among others. His Tai Chi credentials are as solid as his knowledge of physics, and both inform and lend a great deal of credibility to what he has to say. Maybe that’s why this is just the most recent of his several books on Tai Chi.
Chuckrow opens with a chapter titled, “Muscular Action in Taiji Movement,” which discusses the need for strength in the martial arts as well as the different kinds of strength possible for one to employ. Tai Chi’s “tenacious strength,” jin, is contrasted to muscular strength, or li, following which, Chuckrow writes: “This chapter attempts to analyze muscular action in a way that should reduce the time for practitioners to understand the distinction between jin and li.” This “attempt” runs through several subsections titled, “Force,” “Muscular Action: Contraction and Extension,” “A Reconsideration of Zheng’s [Cheng Man-ch’ing] Distinction Between the Two Types of Strength,” “Implied Strength,” “Peng,” Muscular Action and Yin and Yang,” and Sympathetic Muscular Tension.”
Throughout, the information is solid and practical, and one of the main takeaways from this excellent parsing of strength and muscular action is the linking of jin with muscular extension rather than muscular contraction. Chuckrow learned the concept of muscular extension from Elaine Summers, and while I’d never heard the concept given a name, I immediately recognized the validity of this way of looking at—and experiencing—Tai Chi movements. I’ll leave the details to Chuckrow, but in short, muscular extension asks you to execute movements by elongating muscles rather than by contracting them. In other words, if you hold your arm out in front of you, palm up, there are two ways you can make your forearm pivot on your elbow to cause your palm to move toward your face. The first is to contract your bicep, and the second is to extend your triceps. Tai Chi employs the latter.
The next chapter is on breathing and covers natural breathing and reverse breathing and presents a few exercises to help the practitioner engage in diaphragmatic—or, abdominal—breathing. The author spends time on a number of aspects involved in breathing that most Tai Chi books either gloss over or do not cover at all. This is a shame because proper breathing is essential to generate and propel chi through the meridians, so thanks go to Chuckrow for his insights on this subject.
The chapter that follows, which occupies a little more than twenty pages, is where Chuckrow’s science background comes to the fore. Titled, “Relationships of Conditions, Shape, Timing, Muscular Action, and Yin and Yang in Taiji Movements,” it is a far-ranging examination of Tai Chi dynamics that begins by defining relative body motion before defining movement along three principal planes. He includes concepts such as parallax, which he defines as “the apparent relative movement of two objects at different distances from an observer, resulting from movement of the observer.” Parallax, he writes, “can also be useful in a self-defense situation if properly utilized in conjunction with the myriad other ways of processing information.”
He discusses the circularity of Tai Chi movements next, which includes footwork as well as arm and hand movements. Next he delves into how the body displays both convexity and concavity and how those bows can be employed to make the body’s movements more subtle as well as more powerful. The way that many Tai Chi movements begin and end with various parts moving simultaneously is discussed next, which segues naturally into a section on stepping. Muscular extension plays a role here, as do the natural swing of the leg when stepping and the idea of solid/empty stances. Other elements, such as concentration and practicing on rough surfaces finish out the chapter.
“Dynamics of Movement” is the title of the next chapter, which, in thirty pages, delivers more solid information on how Tai Chi functions than a whole shelf of average Tai Chi books do. The concepts are almost too numerous to enumerate here, and certainly I’ll have to leave it to Chuckrow’s own words to add detail. He starts with the idea that movement is either yin or yang, and uses that to explain how movement is affected by, uses, or produces inertia, equal and opposite action and reaction, gravity, leverage, centrifugal force, linear and angular momentum, peng, torque, hydraulic pressure, kinetic energy, potential energy, spring energy, periodic motion, vibration, wave motion, and intention. This is fascinating reading, containing a number of excellent concepts that are all well explained. He then goes on to show how Tai Chi movements can transform one type of mechanical energy into another. Shifting of weight and turning the body correctly wind up this chapter. I really appreciate it when a Tai Chi author brings a wide range of knowledge to bear on the subject, since, indeed, Tai Chi finds significant connections and parallels throughout reality.
A chapter titled “Seemingly Paradoxical Admonitions” is next. This consists, in essence, of maxims from the Tai Chi Classics recast as simple statements that the author then explicates at some length within the framework of Tai Chi. This is followed by a chapter on stretching, focusing on muscular extension.
Push hands and applications occupy the next two chapters. Most of the chapter on push hands is not specifically practical but more concerned with motivation, principles, connection between partners, balance, and leverage. Helpful is a list of push-hands errors. The chapter on applications is, in a sense, obligatory, and it’s probably the weakest chapter in the book. The dozen or so applications are basic, and while they are adequately discussed in text and two to three photos each, this section isn’t any different or better than similar sections in scores of Tai Chi books. But I suppose the applications do illustrate certain concepts of which beginners might not be aware, even if this book seems geared more for the intermediate and advanced student. The photos are somewhat fuzzy or murky, which tends to be the case with the photography throughout the book, though it’s not especially distracting.
A far-ranging look at Tai Chi as a martial art follows. It includes subsections on modern self-protection tools, chin na, falling and rolling, deception, distancing, laws pertaining to the use of weapons and deadly force, throwing objects, striking, anatomy, grappling, taking punches, hiding and evading, knots, survival in extreme conditions, crime, and creativity in utilizing self-defense. Most of these are very short and don’t really contain specific information or advice but serve more as reminders to consider these elements at greater length on one’s own.
Cheng Man-ch’ing is the subject of the book’s next chapter. It’s a short but pithy chapter that drops a lot of names and relates several anecdotes about Cheng, all of which is fun as well as interesting. Of note is a digression on Cheng’s teachings on the use of strength and yielding, and how his ideas might have been erroneously fastened on by some practitioners.
The author then devotes a long chapter to health, including the effects of muscular action, external influences, sexual activity, pain, self-massage, and fasting. He includes a list of more than thirty famous Tai Chi masters, along with the dates of their births and deaths and their life spans in years. One of the promotional words used to advertise tai chi is “longevity,” and this chart goes a long way to dispelling the myth that Tai Chi, alone, will make you live longer. Yang Cheng-fu, for example, was only fifty-three when he died. T. T. Liang, though, reached 102.
Self-development occupies the next chapter. This material is primarily philosophical in tone rather than instructional, but there is a lot of practical advice, too. A great deal of the material in this chapter isn’t directly related to Tai Chi, but as Tai Chi practitioners come to realize, everything about you affects your Tai Chi, and your Tai Chi affects everything about you. It becomes easy, after a time, to draw parallels between your Tai Chi practice and other elements of your life and environment. In subsections like “Laughter,” “Negativity,” “Regret,” and “Criticism,” Chuckrow gives the reader a quiet rendition of a prescription for better living, and through that, a way to develop the self in accord with not only what should be, but what is. Included is a Q&A section in which he gives answers to questions about life that he was asked by his physics students.
The chapter after primarily concerns teaching Tai Chi, from practical suggestions to where to teach, how to teach, how much to charge, how to deal with class administration, and other related matters. This chapter has information useful to beginners seeking a teacher, but it is obviously geared more toward those thinking of teaching Tai Chi on their own, which isn't an activity for beginners.
A chapter on miscellaneous items winds up the book. It talks about, among other things, the Romanization of Chinese words, sweating, skeletal relationships, persistence, content vs. outer appearance, and studying with teachers who interpret Tai Chi matters differently. Included are instructions for making your own Tai Chi slippers, complete with a pattern.
Chuckrow has an easy, comfortable style of writing that makes it seem like you’re just sitting there, listening to him. The pages are seasoned with anecdotes and personal stories that help illustrate his points with examples from a variety of life-learning experiences. But that easy style manages to convey a great deal of substance. The book is loaded with diagrams, illustrations, and photos to supplement the text. No Tai Chi book is perfect, but Tai Chi Dynamics is as good as it gets and surveys a lot of important territory.
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