first day, I took his short book home to read: “During actual fighting, a master of Tai Chi Chuan could make his body soft as cotton, but at the instant of delivering a punch, suddenly become as hard as steel. One moment he was motionless as a mountain, the next as swift as ocean tides.” Sounded good to me.
What became clear over the next month of studying with Master Chen was that he was an antimystic. He laughed about the farfetched claims of some tai chi masters, about moving people without touching them, throwing them over rivers. “I never seen it, maybe it’s true,” he would say, smiling and laughing in his passable English. He wasn’t debunking anything; he was just sticking to what he had seen and felt himself.
He was also a minor celebrity in the martial arts world; he’d been on the cover of Kung-Fu magazine, he’d taken a Chuck Norris punch to the stomach to show “how to take the shots.” I realized that Robert Smith had studied and written a book with Master Chen’s teacher, Cheng Man-ch’ing. With Chen, I was studying with a piece of history, a direct descendant of great tradition. And all he wanted to talk about was fighting.
His two children, Max and Tiffany (both in their twenties), were rising stars in the san shou world. San shou is an emerging Chinese kickboxing style, similar to muay Thai, except that it allows takedowns, but no ground fighting after the takedown. Master Chen was often the tai chi representative at martial arts seminars, and he traveled nearly every weekend, around the country and throughout the world.
Seminars are a big part of the martial arts business; they are traveling classes, put on by famous masters and fighters. For three hundred dollars you might get two classes with a well-known master, four hours each. Everyone does them, from the guys at Top Team (that’s why Murilo was traveling to Europe all the time) to tai chi and ninjutsu fighters. They are a way for professional martial artists to support themselves.
Seminars offer a valuable opportunity to see and learn from great fighters and martial artists, and Tony Fryklund, my friend from Pat’s place, had essentially educated himself in MMA in his twenties by chasing seminars. “I was a seminar rat,” he told me, meaning he would drive from Boston to New York or Maryland or wherever for a two-or three-day seminar by a fighter or instructor he wanted to learn from, and then come home and train on his own.
The seminar business is also full of hacks, martial artists who make money on gullibility and the myths that surround the field. Tony had a great story about a seminar he went to where the instructor was demonstrating a nerve strike. There they were, in a room of thirty people, and the guy called up a volunteer. The instructor talked about how he was going to hit the nerve in the neck and it would instantly KO his man. Then he had the volunteer stand next to him and cock his head away so that his neck was exposed and he couldn’t see what was coming. The instructor hit the volunteer with a “nerve strike” with his thumb, full force to the side of the neck, and the man collapsed. Everyone applauded, but Tony was incensed. “Dude, the guy’s just standing there and you blast him? Of course he’s going down. You stand there and let me blast you with a hook and we’ll see what happens.” Tony was eventually kicked out of the seminar.
I quickly learned the short form and tried to focus on the precepts that Master Chen talked about extensively in every class.
Tai chi, like all martial arts, is an organic fighting process that is shaped by the temperament and experiences of the teacher. Master Chen had been a fighter in mainland China and Taiwan and had been training and thinking about fighting for fifty years. It showed; he had evolved several concepts into deep insights about how he saw striking.
Master Chen was all about body mechanics, the tiniest details in throwing a punch, the generation of power—what chi really is. In this context, tai chi’s slowness suddenly made sense. People sometimes make fun of tai chi for its slowness: “That can’t be a fighting art.” But of course it is, and when you start to think about perfecting your mechanics, you need to move slower and slower, to really break down what your body is doing.
Master Chen’s tai chi short form was all about “going to sleep” and “waking up”—he would keep harping on that. The body goes to sleep on the exhale and wakes up on the inhale, a coiling and uncoiling of the body around the hips; once again he was talking about generating power.
He spoke often about the “three nails,” an important concept of his—in the big toe, on the ball of the foot, and on the inside edge of the heel. They are the places that your foot is rooted to the ground. It is as if your energy could drive nails into the floor to hold you; they are the basis from which you generate power.
Master Chen said, “When I start doing tai chi, I realize that power isn’t in arms, it comes from the hips. And then, I start to think maybe ten years later and I realize it is coming from the legs. And then, after twenty years, I saw that it was actually coming from the toe.” He reiterated this point continually: that you must feel power coming off the toe; driving energy down through your toes is what is sometimes referred to as “rooting,” and it is what drives all your movements. F. X. Toole tells the story of a trainer who “taught her how to stay on the balls of her feet, how to generate momentum off her right toe; how to keep her weight over her left knee”—all things that could have been lifted from Master Chen’s class.
What endeared Master Chen to me was his constant talk of fighters. He always used the reference of a fighter to illustrate his points, and when I told him I was a sometime fighter, he was delighted—I wasn’t just there for the health benefits. I could understand a lot more of what he was talking about than most of the Manhattanites.
The common conception of throwing a punch is that the arm should be loose for speed but the hands strong in a fist. Master Chen described it as “hollow arms,” meaning that the arms are empty except for the energy that activates them, and the hand should be open, curling into a fist as it hits. His hands were always in the shape of hands inside boxing gloves—never fists, the gloves won’t allow it. You strike with two knuckles; Chen quoted Jack Dempsey about hitting with just those top two knuckles. In his book, Chen had detailed diagrams of bullets, showing how more powder and cartridge width increased velocity. He talked about generating speed from pressure changes and generating power from speed in a speech that made me think of Virgil Hunter. Chen was practical to the tips of his fingers. In the short form, one’s movements should be led by the fingers (activated off the toe), and punches were the same. It’s all about velocity, sinking down and rising—not up, but into a shape. And as all hard artists, like boxers and karate disciples, should study tai chi, so should tai chi practitioners study the hard arts, so that both supplement yang with yin.
Chen’s most interesting concept was that of compression. He had this argument with many martial artists. When you’re learning about strikes, you’re taught to exhale on the strike. But it’s not just exhalation; it’s also compression. When a boxer hisses as he punches it’s a form of compression. This is one of those obvious, head-slapping truths: An exhalation, an open-mouthed “whoo” of air, has no power. But when you control the air, when the karate guy shouts “Kiai” as he punches, that compression is what generates force. It’s like a grunt when you pick up something heavy; you have to make an internal compression to generate power. Boxers hiss or grunt; the Thais yell.
“They say tai chi is about ‘relax,’ but really they mean ‘relax with compression.’ When you lying in bed, you are relaxed, but little compression. It’s like a sick person in the hospital; they are walking around like a skeleton.” Chen would demonstrate walking without compression, a perfect facsimile of a very old sick man, frail, scarcely moving. It was great because it wasn’t acting; he was demonstrating a different way of being.
Chen continued, “When they say a boxer is ‘out of gas,’ they not mean tired, they mean cannot make compression,” and I thought about my fight. He was dead right. It wasn’t that radical an idea, but I had never heard it before.
“When you walk around with compression, you are thinking: How cool I am. The compression is filling you up.”
Master Chen had an open-minded approach to his art, which gave him great strength. He was always thinking about it and refining ideas. I was extremely lucky to have walked into his studio. For him, tai chi wasn’t about doing tai chi every day, running through the form (although that had to be done). You couldn’t just run through the form blindly every day and think that in ten years you would get all the health benefits, become spiritual. It’s work. Every time you went through it, it had to be done as close to perfect as possible. He tried to do tai chi as it was intended to be done, not necessarily as he had been taught it, or others had shown him.
He had other ideas he was workin