Formosa Neijia

This past Saturday, I had the distinct pleasure of meeting with one of Taiwan’s top teachers — Chen Yun-ching. I met him near his home in Taizhong and we chatted and compared practices for a couple of hours.

One of the main things that I got from the conversation is that his father’s martial arts were intended to be simple, plain-vanilla arts with no secrets, and no bells or whistles. The idea was apparently to have systems of taiji, bagua, xingyi, and shaolin that everyone could do and enjoy. CPL apparently wanted a break with the secrecy and other things of the past that he saw as preventing the advancement of CMA.

Chen laoshi seemed a bit worried that some people have changed his father’s systems because these changes potentially create conflicts. If there are different versions of his father’s arts, then who has the correct ones? Who has the “real stuff”? He implied that his father’s efforts were to craft systems and write books in such a way that those kind of conflicts would come to an end. The books were to save for posterity the way to do the systems so there would be no confusion or conflict about who really had what. No secrets! Kind of an amazing concept for CMA, don’t you think?

Chen laoshi also said that his father intended to keep the systems intact as they were, with little to no “cross over” between them. The taiji, bagua, xingyi, and shaolin are intended as separate practices. So the CPL taiji isn’t a mixed system with bagua, and xingyi thrown into the mix, according to Chen laoshi.

I asked about the mountain-top boxing (feng chuan) and he said that it was their family system of shaolin. Apparently, CPL intended the two feng chuan forms to serve as a type of “greatest hits” of his shaolin system. As I watched Chen laoshi performing them, I was reminded of Han Qing-tan’s long fist. Chen laoshi confirmed that they share many similarities.