Formosa Neijia

This training was popularized in the West by Jou Tsung-hwa, if I’m not mistaken. I know that Jou took some flack from some people for this practice, because they thought it was “made up” or something. But it is a legitimate practice that I’ve picked up bits and pieces of from various taiji and bagua teachers, both in Taiwan and the States. The source of the diagram seems to be a book by Gu Liu-xin. Pretty solid source.

The idea of this type of pushing hands, as far as I was taught, was to more fully incorporate the silk reeling into the push hands training. Not that basic push hands doesn’t employ silk reeling; it obviously does. But this pattern is a bit more complex because it mixes the clockwise and counterclockwise circles into one circle. This type of training is also typically where the diagonal approaches to push hands are introduced, giving you a much great range of technique and motion. It expresses diagonal jins (trained skills/powers) very well.

Also, the change in motion in the middle gives lots of chances to fajing with various body parts. You’re circling one way, and then when you reverse the flow, you can fajing while staying on the circle. This makes your fajings more rounded than the typical punches that many people think of when they fajing.

Here are some examples:

This version is by Jesse Tsao and it looks pretty good to me. What I like is that he makes the eight basic techniques of taiji so clear. He pints them out and does applications for each. Notice that most people don’t do this. They like to hold things back. I think the eight basics are too important to be held back. They are basics, after all. The silk reeling in the taiji symbol sticking hands naturally leads into excellent applications of these energies, especially the last four (cai/pluck, lieh/split, zhou/elbow, kao/bump). It’s great that someone finally showed how they emerge from this taiji symbol training.

This is Dr. Yang’s version. It also looks pretty good. Dr. Yang’s DVDs always have good production values. I think the instruction is very clear. However, I wonder if he will really show how the eight basic energies of taiji emerge from the training. I should note that his Push Hands Vol. 3 & 4 was supposed to have information on the last four energies listed above, but instead he went off on a tangent and showed other energies. So I doubt he’ll cover that material here, either. Still, this looks like a great disc for beginners to get the basic flow. I know he splits it up so he can break the training down in detail.