Quick Answer
A hundred pages that put the Tai Chi Classics into the hands of Western students for the first time in usable form, translated by four practitioners in the Cheng Man-ching line. The texts are short, compressed and authoritative in every lineage; the translation is plain and reliable; the commentary is brief. It is not a book about how to do the form. It is the book about what the form is for, and it should be read once a year by anyone who practises.
Key Takeaways
- Seven short texts that every lineage of tai chi treats as its constitution.
- Rooted in the feet, directed by the waist, expressed in the hands: the sentence the whole art unfolds from.
- The mind leads, the chi follows, and the body follows the chi.
- Invest in loss is the practical instruction the classics keep circling.
- Own Liao as well. The two together cover what either alone leaves out.
17 min read
What This Book Is
The Essence of T'ai Chi Ch'uan: The Literary Tradition was published by North Atlantic Books in 1979, translated and edited by Benjamin Pang Jeng Lo, Martin Inn, Robert Amacker and Susan Foe.
It contains the core texts known collectively as the Tai Chi Classics, in English, with the Chinese, a short introduction, and brief notes. The whole runs to about a hundred pages and can be read in an hour.
Its importance is historical as much as textual. Before it, English-speaking students had the classics only in fragments, in Cheng Man-ching's own books, or not at all. After it, the texts were on every serious student's shelf, and the plain, practitioner's English of this version became the way most of the West heard them.
It is not a manual. There are no photographs, no form sequences, no instructions for a single posture. The book assumes you are learning the movements from a teacher and offers the principles the movements are meant to express.
The name. T'ai Chi Ch'uan is the Wade-Giles romanisation; Taijiquan is the pinyin; both mean the same thing, the boxing of the supreme ultimate. The book uses Wade-Giles throughout, as most Western tai chi literature did until recently, and this review follows it where quoting the book.
Benjamin Lo and the Cheng Line
The translator's lineage shapes the translation and should be known.
Benjamin Lo, 1927 to 2018, studied with Cheng Man-ching in Taiwan from 1949, was among his senior students, and taught in San Francisco from 1974 until his death. He was known for an austere insistence on principle over technique: relax, stay upright, separate the weight, let the waist move the body, and do not resist.
Cheng Man-ching had shortened the Yang family form to thirty-seven postures and brought it to New York in the 1960s. His reading of the art, emphasising softness, investment in loss and the five principles he distilled from the classics, became the dominant Western reading.
The translation was made within that reading. Terms are rendered to support it; the commentary reflects it. That is not a defect, since the Cheng reading is a legitimate and coherent one, but readers from other lineages should know they are getting the classics through a particular lens.
What the Classics Are
A small body of texts, no more than a few thousand characters in total, that the tai chi tradition treats as its scripture.
They are written in the compressed style of Chinese technical literature, often in rhymed lines of four or seven characters, and they state principles rather than describing techniques. Root in the feet. Sink the chi to the tan tien. When one part moves, all parts move. The whole body is a single unit.
Each lineage has its own versions and its own additions, but a core is shared across all, and that core is what this book gives.
Their function is to be memorised and to be measured against. A teacher will quote a line to correct a student. A student will recognise, after years, what a line was pointing at. The texts do not explain themselves and were never meant to.
The Question of Attribution
The book presents the traditional authorship. The tradition is mostly legend.
Chang San-feng, to whom the first treatise is attributed, is a semi-mythical Taoist immortal placed variously in the twelfth to fifteenth centuries and connected to Wudang mountain. There is no evidence he wrote anything or practised tai chi.
Wang Tsung-yueh is a shadowy figure of the eighteenth century, if he existed. The texts attributed to Wu Yu-hsiang and Li I-yu are on firmer ground: the Wu and Li families of Yongnian in the nineteenth century, associated with the origins of the Wu (Hao) style, almost certainly produced or compiled most of the classics as we have them.
The book does not go into this. It gives the names and moves on. Readers who want the history should look to Douglas Wile's work on the classics. For practice, the attributions do not matter and the tradition's own view of them is part of what is being transmitted.
The Treatise of Chang San-feng
The opening text, and the one most often quoted.
In every movement the entire body should be light and agile and all its parts connected like a string of pearls. The chi should be excited, the spirit gathered within. Let there be no hollows or projections, no breaks or continuities. The root is in the feet; the energy is released through the legs, directed by the waist, and expressed in the fingers.
That is most of it. A few dozen lines, each of which a practitioner can spend a decade on.
The treatise's great contribution is the image of the body as a single connected whole moving from the ground up, with the waist as the commander. It ends with the warning that the whole art is a matter of intention and not of external force, and that if a movement is wrong the fault is to be sought in the waist and the legs.
Wang Tsung-yueh's Classic
The philosophical text, and the one that gives the art its name.
T'ai chi is born of wu chi, the undifferentiated; it is the mother of yin and yang. In movement they separate, in stillness they unite. The opening lines place the practice inside the cosmology of the I Ching and the yin-yang tradition: the body moving and stilling is the cosmos moving and stilling in miniature.
From there the classic turns practical. Neither overreach nor fall short. When the opponent is hard I am soft; this is called yielding. When I follow the opponent, this is called sticking. And then the lines that define the art's martial theory: a feather cannot be added, a fly cannot alight; the opponent does not know me, I alone know the opponent.
The classic's claim is that sensitivity is the whole game. Four ounces deflect a thousand pounds because the person with four ounces has understood the direction of the thousand pounds and the person with the thousand pounds has understood nothing.
Wu Yu-hsiang's Exposition
The text on the inner mechanism, and the one most concerned with chi.
The mind mobilises the chi. Make the chi sink calmly, so it can gather into the bones. The chi mobilises the body; make it move smoothly so it follows the mind. The exposition sets out a chain of command: mind, then chi, then body, and warns that if the order is broken the movement is merely physical.
It also contains the line that the spirit should be gathered within and the chi should be like a wheel, and the injunction to store energy like drawing a bow and release it like shooting an arrow.
Of the classics this is the one most obviously connected to Taoist inner cultivation, and readers of the alchemical literature will recognise the vocabulary. The book's commentary treats it practically and does not explore the connection.
The Songs
Two rhymed texts meant to be memorised.
The Song of the Thirteen Postures runs through the principles in verse: the source of the will is in the waist; attention should be paid to the changes of full and empty; the chi should circulate freely through the whole body. It closes with the reminder that the purpose of the art is to prolong life and preserve youth, and that if one does not seek along these lines the effort will be wasted.
The Song of Pushing Hands is shorter and martial: be conscientious in ward-off, roll-back, press and push; let the opponent attack with great force and use four ounces to deflect a thousand pounds; lead the force into emptiness, then join and discharge.
The songs are where the two purposes of the art, health and combat, sit side by side without any apparent tension. That is the tradition's own view and the book transmits it.
Li I-yu's Secrets
The nineteenth-century texts, and the most practical.
The Five Character Secret lists five words: the mind is calm; the body is agile; the chi is gathered; the strength is whole; the spirit is concentrated. Each is expanded into a paragraph of instruction. The passage on whole strength, which explains that the power of the whole body must be trained into one unit so that full and empty are clearly distinguished, is the most concrete account of body mechanics in the collection.
The Essentials of Form and Push Hands is a checklist: the head suspended, the chest slightly hollowed, the shoulders relaxed, the elbows dropped, the waist loose, the weight separated, the whole body coordinated. It is the source of the lists of ten or thirteen essentials every teacher gives.
These texts are where the classics come closest to the training hall, and they reward being read with the body rather than the mind.
Rooted, Directed, Expressed
The single sentence the art unfolds from, and worth a section of its own.
The root is in the feet, the energy is released through the legs, directed by the waist and expressed in the fingers. From the feet through the legs to the waist must be one unbroken flow of chi.
Every teacher in every lineage returns to this line. It describes a body in which nothing is done by the arms. Power comes from the ground, is transmitted through a connected structure, is steered by the centre, and reaches the hands last. The hands do not act. They report.
Understanding this intellectually takes a minute. Learning it in the body takes years, and the classics are honest that the years are the point. The book gives the line and the commentary explains what it means in push hands, which is where the difference between a rooted and an unrooted body becomes instantly and physically obvious.
A test the classics imply and Lo taught. Stand with a partner's hand on your chest and let them push. If you resist with the chest or the shoulders you will be moved, and the classics say why: the force has been met where it arrived instead of being taken to the ground. If instead the push travels through a relaxed structure to the rear foot and the foot presses back into the earth, you will not be moved, and you will not have done anything the partner could feel. That is what rooted in the feet means. Everything else in the book describes how to get there.
The Mind Leads
The principle that separates tai chi from calisthenics, and the one the book handles most lightly.
The classics insist that the movement is directed by the mind, that the chi follows the mind and the body follows the chi, and that a movement made without this sequence is empty. The Chinese term is yi, intention, and it names something more specific than concentration: the projection of attention through and beyond the body in the direction of the movement.
Lo's commentary explains the term briefly and practically. Readers wanting a fuller account of what it means to lead with intention, and how that relates to the Taoist understanding of effortless action, will find the book thin here. It states the principle and trusts the teacher.
Investing in Loss
The phrase is Cheng Man-ching's, and it is the practical heart of the Cheng reading.
To invest in loss is to be willing, in push hands and in life, to be pushed over, to yield, to lose the exchange, in order to learn what full relaxation feels like. The student who resists learns nothing; the student who yields completely discovers, eventually, that yielding is not the same as collapsing and that a fully relaxed structure is the one that cannot be moved.
The classics do not use the phrase but they say it constantly. Yield to the hard. Follow, do not resist. Lead the force into emptiness. Softness overcomes hardness.
The book's short commentary makes the connection, and it is the connection Lo spent forty years teaching. Readers from harder lineages may find the emphasis excessive. Readers who have tried to relax under pressure will recognise why it is there.
Peng, Sung and the Vocabulary
The technical terms, and how the book handles them.
Peng is the expansive, buoyant quality that should fill the body at all times, usually translated ward-off, though it names a state and not only a posture. Sung is the relaxation the classics demand, which is not limpness but a released, alert looseness. Chi is left untranslated and treated as the practitioner treats it: the felt quality of connected, mobilised energy, without metaphysical claims. Tan tien is the centre below the navel where the chi is to be sunk.
The commentary defines each briefly and by reference to what it feels like in practice. There is no attempt to explain chi in physiological or philosophical terms, and the book is better for it. A student learning tai chi rather than qigong needs the terms as tools, and that is how they are given.
The Translation
Plain, faithful and terse.
The translators chose ordinary English over either scholarly precision or poetic effect. Lines are short. Technical terms are kept consistent. Where the Chinese is ambiguous the translation chooses the reading that matches Cheng Man-ching's teaching and does not flag the alternative.
The result reads well aloud and memorises easily, which was the point. It has been criticised by scholars for smoothing difficulties and by practitioners from other lineages for its Cheng-line bias. Both criticisms are accurate and neither has produced a replacement that students prefer.
Lo Beside Liao
The comparison every student eventually makes.
Waysun Liao's T'ai Chi Classics, published by Shambhala, covers overlapping texts with far more commentary, a more explicitly Taoist framing, and extended discussion of chi cultivation and the energetic dimension. It is three times the length and reads as a teaching book rather than a source text.
Lo gives the texts and gets out of the way. Liao gives the texts and stays to explain. Lo's reading is martial and structural; Liao's is energetic and internal. Lo assumes a teacher; Liao partly substitutes for one.
Serious students own both and read them against each other. If forced to choose one, a student with a teacher should take Lo and a student without should take Liao.
The Limits
Three, and the book's brevity accounts for all of them.
The commentary is too short. A few pages of notes on texts that reward a lifetime of study. Readers will need other books, or a teacher, or both.
The history is absent. The attributions are given as tradition and the actual origins of the texts are not discussed.
The lens is narrow. The Cheng Man-ching reading is one reading, and readers from Chen, Wu or Sun lineages will find some renderings tilted away from their own understanding.
Who Should Read It
Read it if you practise tai chi in any lineage and have never read the classics. That describes more students than it should.
Read it if you are beginning tai chi and want to know, from the start, what the movements are for.
Read it if you practise in the Cheng Man-ching line, since this is your own tradition's version of the source.
Read it once a year. The texts do not change; the reader does, and the same line means something different after each thousand hours.
The classics describe a body in which force never meets force. Whatever arrives is received, taken to the ground, and returned along a line the sender did not expect. The person doing this is not strong. The person is connected, and the connection runs from the sole of the foot through an unbroken structure to the fingertips, steered by a centre that never hurries. That is a physical fact learned in push hands and it is also, the tradition insists, a way of meeting everything. The book gives the description in under a hundred pages. The body takes the rest of a life to agree.
The Tai Chi Classics, in the translation most of the West learned them from.
Affiliate disclosure: Thalira earns a small commission on purchases made through the link above, at no additional cost to you. Our comments on the brevity of the commentary and the Cheng-line lens are set out above and were not softened for the link.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is The Essence of T'ai Chi Ch'uan?
A 1979 translation of the core Tai Chi Classics, the short traditional texts on principle and practice, by Benjamin Lo, Martin Inn, Robert Amacker and Susan Foe, with a brief commentary. It is about a hundred pages.
What are the Tai Chi Classics?
A small body of short texts, attributed to Chang San-feng, Wang Tsung-yueh, Wu Yu-hsiang and Li I-yu, that state the principles of the art in compressed, often poetic form. Every lineage treats them as authoritative.
Who was Benjamin Lo?
A senior student of Cheng Man-ching who taught in San Francisco for decades and was known for an uncompromising emphasis on the principles: relax, keep the body upright, separate the weight, and let the waist lead.
Which texts are included?
The Treatise attributed to Chang San-feng, Wang Tsung-yueh's Classic, Wu Yu-hsiang's Exposition of Insights, the Song of Thirteen Postures, the Song of Pushing Hands, and Li I-yu's Five Character Secret and Essentials of Form and Push Hands.
Is it a how-to book?
No. There are no form instructions or photographs. It is the principles the form is supposed to embody, and it assumes the reader is learning the movements from a teacher.
How does it compare to Liao's Tai Chi Classics?
Liao gives more commentary and a more Taoist, energetic framing. Lo and his co-translators are terser and closer to the martial reading. Serious students usually own both.
Are the attributions historical?
Mostly not. Chang San-feng is legendary and the texts are probably nineteenth century, associated with the Wu and Li families. The book presents the traditional attributions without much scrutiny.
What is the most important principle?
The texts agree on a cluster: the whole body moves as one unit rooted in the feet, directed by the waist and expressed in the hands; the mind leads and the chi follows; softness overcomes hardness; and one must invest in loss.
What does invest in loss mean?
Cheng Man-ching's phrase, adopted by Lo, for the willingness to be pushed, to yield and lose in practice, in order to learn to relax fully rather than resist. The classics say it in other words throughout.
Is the translation accurate?
It is a practitioner's translation: faithful in sense, plain in style, and chosen to support the Cheng Man-ching reading of the art. Scholars have offered more literal versions; none has replaced it for students.
Is the commentary useful?
It is short and practical, explaining terms like peng and sung and connecting lines of the classics to what happens in push hands. It is not extensive and does not attempt a philosophical treatment.
Who should read it?
Anyone learning tai chi in a Yang or Cheng Man-ching lineage, anyone who wants the source texts in under an hour, and anyone who has practised for years without ever reading what the art says about itself.
Read the constitution
Most people who practise tai chi have never read the texts the practice is built on, in the way most citizens have never read their constitution. The classics take an hour. They will not teach you the form and they will not make sense on first reading. What they will do is give you the sentences your teacher is going to keep saying, in the form the tradition wrote them down, so that when the body finally understands one of them you will know which one it was.
Sources & References
- Lo, Benjamin Pang Jeng, Martin Inn, Robert Amacker and Susan Foe. The Essence of T'ai Chi Ch'uan: The Literary Tradition, North Atlantic Books, 1979.
- Liao, Waysun. T'ai Chi Classics, Shambhala.
- Wile, Douglas. Lost T'ai-chi Classics from the Late Ch'ing Dynasty, on the origins of the texts.
- Cheng Man-ching. Cheng Tzu's Thirteen Treatises on T'ai Chi Ch'uan, trans. Lo and Inn.
- Davis, Barbara. The Taijiquan Classics: An Annotated Translation.
- Smith, Robert W. and Cheng Man-ching. T'ai Chi: The Supreme Ultimate Exercise.