Quick Answer
Liao's book is the most readable explanation in English of what tai chi is actually trying to do, and it is a teacher's interpretation rather than a translation. The three texts inside are genuinely important and the man they are attributed to almost certainly never existed as described. Both of those facts are worth knowing before you buy it.
Key Takeaways
- Three short texts, a lot of commentary. The classics themselves run to a few pages; the value here is Liao's explanation of them.
- Chang San-feng did not write it. The texts appeared with the Wu family in the 1850s and 60s, and the attribution is later.
- Liao treats tai chi as energy work first. That is a real position inside the tradition and it is not the only one.
- You cannot learn the practice from any book, and the thing books cannot teach is the one thing the classics keep pointing at.
- The health evidence is good and it is about the exercise, not about the chi model. Keep those separate.
🕑 15 min read
What This Book Is
Waysun Liao was born in 1948, trained in Taiwan, and has taught in the Chicago area since the 1970s. T'ai Chi Classics was published by Shambhala in 1990 and has stayed in print ever since, which for a book on internal martial arts theory is unusual.
It contains three short classical texts in Liao's translation, a substantial body of his own commentary explaining what they mean and how to work with them, chapters on energy and meditation, and his own line drawings of postures and of the internal movement he is describing.
The proportion matters. The classics themselves would fit on about eight pages. Everything else is Liao. A reader buying this expecting a scholarly edition of primary sources will be disappointed; a reader buying it to understand what a tai chi teacher is actually asking for will find it one of the clearest things available.
On romanisation: older English writing on this subject uses Wade-Giles, so you will see T'ai Chi Ch'uan, Chang San-feng and chi. Modern scholarship uses pinyin: taijiquan, Zhang Sanfeng, qi. They are the same words. This article uses the older forms where it follows Liao and the newer ones where it follows the historians, which is unfortunately how the literature actually works.
The Three Texts Inside
The first is the T'ai Chi Ch'uan Ching, traditionally attributed to Chang San-feng. It is the shortest and most gnomic, and it contains most of the lines practitioners quote: that in any movement the whole body should be light and agile and connected, that the chi should be roused and the spirit gathered within, that the root is in the feet, issued through the legs, controlled by the waist and expressed in the fingers.
The second is the T'ai Chi Ch'uan Lun, attributed to Wang Tsung-yueh. It is the most systematic of the three and it contains the theoretical frame: the movement from stillness into division and back, the principle of neither excess nor deficiency, of yielding when pressed and adhering when the opponent withdraws, and the famous observation that a force of four ounces can deflect a thousand pounds.
The third is the Expositions of Insights into the Practice of the Thirteen Postures, attributed to Wu Yu-hsiang. It is the most practical, addressing how the mind directs the chi, how the chi moves the body, how the spirit should be raised so the body feels no heaviness, and how to store and release.
All three are extremely compressed. They read like notes made by someone who already knew the practice, for other people who already knew the practice, which is precisely what they are, and it is why a commentary of some kind is not optional.
Chi, Jing and Shen
Liao organises everything around three terms, and understanding his usage is the key to the book.
Chi is the vital energy the practice is meant to accumulate and circulate. Liao is emphatic that this is the actual content of tai chi and that a form performed without it is calisthenics with slow tempo.
Jing is trained internal force. The distinction Liao draws, and it is the traditional one, is between li, ordinary muscular strength that is local, tense and visible, and jing, which is whole-body, connected, released rather than pushed, and which arrives without the shoulders rising. This is what the four ounces deflecting a thousand pounds refers to.
Shen is spirit, or directed awareness, the quality that makes a posture inhabited rather than merely held. The classics say the spirit should be at the top of the head as though suspended, and that when the shen is present the body has no dullness.
Liao's ordering is deliberate and it is his signature: develop chi, refine it into jing, and let shen direct both. Many teachers reverse the emphasis and build structure and mechanics first, treating chi language as a description of correct biomechanics rather than as a substance. Liao's position is a real one within the tradition, and a reader should know it is a position.
The Thirteen Postures
The thirteen postures are not thirteen movements. They are eight energies and five directions, and they are the analytical vocabulary of the entire art.
The eight are commonly rendered ward off, roll back, press, push, pull down, split, elbow strike and shoulder strike. The first four are called the four squares and the second four the four corners, and they correspond in the traditional scheme to the eight trigrams of the I Ching.
The five are advance, retreat, look left, gaze right, and central equilibrium, corresponding to the five phases.
Every movement in every form, in every family style, is described as a combination of these. Once you have the vocabulary, a form stops being a sequence to memorise and becomes a set of variations on thirteen things, which is a considerable relief and is the single most practically useful piece of theory in the book.
An exercise worth doing: take any three consecutive movements of whatever form you practise and name the energies in them. Not the posture names, the energies. Which is ward off, where does roll back begin, at what point does the weight actually transfer. Most people who have done a form for years have never done this, and doing it once changes how the whole sequence feels.
Song, and the Instruction Everything Turns On
The classics keep returning to a quality usually transliterated song or sung and translated as relaxation, which is one of the worst translations in the field.
It does not mean slack. A slack body cannot transmit anything. What is meant is the release of unnecessary holding, particularly in the shoulders, chest, hips and lower back, while structural connection through the frame is maintained, so that a force entering at one point travels through the whole body to the ground rather than being absorbed and stopped by a tense segment.
Liao explains this as well as it can be explained in prose, and prose is not the medium. What actually teaches song is a teacher putting a hand on your shoulder while you move and saying, that, there, stop doing that. Most students spend years on it. Many never get it and continue to produce a technically correct-looking form that will not do anything.
This is the honest limit of every book on this subject, including the classics themselves, and it is worth stating clearly because the compressed poetry of the original texts can create an impression that the knowledge is being transmitted when what is being transmitted is a description of it.
Moving Meditation
The subtitle of the current edition describes the art as moving meditation, and Liao means it structurally rather than as a marketing phrase.
His account runs like this. Attention is normally scattered across many objects. In the form, attention has one continuous task, which is following the movement of chi through the body, and because the body is moving the attention has something to hold that will not let it drift into thought in the way a still object does. The result is a state that is neither the effortful concentration of a beginner's sitting practice nor ordinary distraction.
He includes seated and standing energy work alongside the moving material, which puts the book closer to the internal alchemy tradition of the Secret of the Golden Flower than most tai chi manuals get. Readers coming from qigong will recognise the territory immediately, and the relationship between the two practices is discussed in our comparison of qigong and tai chi.
The philosophical background is Taoist and Liao does not labour it. The idea of yielding as strength, of the soft overcoming the hard, and of acting without forcing comes straight out of the Tao Te Ching, and tai chi is arguably the most complete physical expression of that text anyone has built.
Who Actually Wrote the Classics
Here is the part that most tai chi books do not tell you, and it does not damage the practice at all.
Chang San-feng is a legendary figure, a Taoist immortal of the Song or Yuan period, credited in the traditional account with inventing the internal arts after watching a snake fight a crane. There is no evidence he wrote anything about tai chi, and considerable reason to think the association is late.
The texts we call the Classics enter the documentary record in the middle of the nineteenth century, in connection with the Wu family and with Li I-yu, and Wu Yu-hsiang's own account of finding the Wang Tsung-yueh text is itself part of the problem rather than independent confirmation of it. Douglas Wile's Lost T'ai-chi Classics from the Late Ch'ing Dynasty, published by SUNY Press in 1996, translates and analyses a body of manuscripts released from family holdings and lays out what the documents actually support about authorship, transmission and the roles of the various named figures.
The short version is that the Classics are nineteenth-century texts, written by literate members of the Wu and Li families who were codifying an art they practised, and attributed backward to legendary authority in the ordinary way that Chinese texts of every kind were.
None of this makes the texts less valuable. A nineteenth-century practitioner writing down what he had learned about weight transfer and released force is a better source than a fourteenth-century immortal would be, because he existed. The attribution was a claim about lineage in a culture where lineage established legitimacy, and reading past it costs you nothing.
Where Tai Chi Came From
The historical trail leads to Chen Village in Henan province, and to Chen Wangting in the seventeenth century, who appears to have combined existing military boxing methods with breathing and energy work and the classical theory of yin and yang.
The researchers Tang Hao and Gu Liuxin established this in the twentieth century through fieldwork and genealogical records, and it is now the broadly accepted account. The Chen family kept the art within the village until Yang Luchan learned it there in the nineteenth century and took it to Beijing, where it was adapted, taught outside the family, and became the ancestor of the Yang style that most people in the world now practise, and through further branches of the Wu, Sun and Hao styles.
The traditional Chang San-feng story persisted alongside the documented one for a long time and still appears in a great deal of popular writing. Some of that persistence was nationalism and some was simple lineage pride. Neither is a reason to repeat it now.
Liao's Translation Against the Scholarly Ones
Liao's renderings are interpretive. Where the Chinese is compressed to the point of ambiguity, he expands it into the meaning his own training tells him is intended. Where a term has several possible senses, he chooses the one that fits his system.
The result is far more usable than a literal version and it is not what the text says. A reader who wants to know where the original is genuinely uncertain, where translators disagree, and what the commentarial tradition made of a given line, needs a different book.
Barbara Davis's The Taijiquan Classics: An Annotated Translation, published in 2004, gives the texts with full annotation and includes translated commentary by Chen Weiming, which is the closest thing to reading them the way a Chinese practitioner would have. Wile's work is the essential historical study. Benjamin Lo and colleagues produced the plain translation that has served English-speaking practitioners since 1979 and is still the standard bare text.
The right approach is to read Liao for what the practice is for and one of the others for what the texts actually say.
What a Book Cannot Teach You
Every book on tai chi has to face this and most of them fudge it. Liao is reasonably honest about it and it is worth being blunter still.
The form can be learned approximately from video and corrected badly from a book. Alignment, weighting, the timing of transfer, the release in the kua, the moment when the shoulder rises and kills the connection: these are corrected by a teacher watching and touching, and there is no substitute. A student practising alone from a book will encode errors, and encoded errors in a movement practice take longer to remove than they took to acquire.
Push hands, which is where any of this gets tested, requires a partner by definition. Without contact the whole theory of yielding and adhering is untestable, and a practitioner can believe for years that they have jing when what they have is a habit.
Use the book the way it is best used: to understand what your teacher is asking for, in the week after the class where they asked for it and you did not know what they meant. That is a genuinely valuable function and this book performs it better than almost anything else in English.
On health claims: tai chi is a low-impact exercise that is suitable for most people, and it is not a treatment. If you have a cardiac, joint, balance or neurological condition, or you are recovering from injury or surgery, speak to a qualified clinician before starting, and tell your teacher. The traditional language about chi circulating and clearing blockages is a model within a tradition, not a description of physiology that any clinical study has confirmed, and it should never displace medical care for a medical problem.
What the Health Evidence Says
This deserves a fair hearing in both directions, because the popular writing overstates it and the sceptical writing understates it.
The strongest body of evidence concerns balance and falls prevention in older adults, where tai chi has performed well across a substantial number of trials and has been incorporated into public health falls-prevention programmes in several countries. Our guide to tai chi for seniors covers this in more detail. There are also promising findings in areas including fibromyalgia, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, and motor symptoms in Parkinson's disease, with the usual caveats about trial size and blinding difficulties that affect all exercise research.
What that evidence supports is the exercise: a slow, weight-shifting, continuously balanced, attentionally demanding movement practice does specific measurable things to bodies, particularly older ones.
What it does not support is the explanatory model. No clinical trial has tested whether chi exists or circulates, because no trial is designed to and no measurement of it exists. The benefits are real and the mechanism proposed by the tradition is unverified, and holding both of those at once is the honest position. Liao writes as though the model is established fact, and readers should read those passages as tradition rather than as findings.
Which Book to Buy for What
Buy Liao if you already practise, have a teacher, and want to understand the internal side of what you are doing. This is its job and it does it well.
Buy Davis if you want the texts with the scholarship, the alternative readings, and the traditional commentary.
Buy Wile if the history interests you, if you want to know where these documents came from, or if you have been repeating the Chang San-feng story and would like to stop.
Buy the Lo translation if you want the plain text in your bag to read in the park.
Buy none of them first if you have never done tai chi. Find a class. Our guide to starting tai chi covers what to look for, and the comparison with yoga may help if you are deciding between them. Read the theory in your second year, when the words will have something to attach to.
Who Should Read It
Read it if you have been practising for a while and have started to suspect there is something in the form you are not doing. That suspicion is correct and this book is a good guide to what it is.
Read it if you are interested in Taoist internal practice generally, since it connects the physical art to the meditation tradition more explicitly than most books in the genre.
Read it if you teach, because Liao's explanations of jing and of the thirteen postures are unusually clear and are worth stealing.
Do not read it as history, because it repeats the traditional attributions without qualification. Do not read it as a translation, because it is a rendering through a system. And do not read it instead of finding a teacher, because the one thing it is honest about is that the thing being described has to be received from a person.
The most useful idea in the classics has nothing to do with fighting. The instruction is to yield exactly as much as the pressure requires and no more, to stay connected while yielding, and to return the moment the pressure withdraws. As a description of how to handle force it is a martial principle. As a description of how to handle a difficult conversation, a demand at work, or a piece of bad news, it is remarkably exact, and it is the reason people who have practised for decades tend to talk about tai chi as something other than exercise.
Eight pages of classical text, and a lifetime of finding out what they meant.
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Frequently Asked Questions
What is Tai Chi Classics by Waysun Liao?
A Shambhala book, first published in 1990, containing Waysun Liao's translations of three short classical texts on taijiquan together with his own extensive commentary, instruction and line drawings. It is one of the most widely read English books on tai chi theory and it is a teacher's interpretation rather than a scholarly edition.
Which three texts does it translate?
The Tai Chi Chuan Ching attributed to Chang San-feng, the Tai Chi Chuan Lun attributed to Wang Tsung-yueh, and the Expositions of Insights into the Practice of the Thirteen Postures attributed to Wu Yu-hsiang. Together these are the core of what practitioners call the Classics, and they are short, running to a few pages each.
Did Chang San-feng write the Tai Chi Chuan Ching?
Almost certainly not. The texts surfaced with the Wu family in the mid-nineteenth century and the attribution to a legendary Song dynasty immortal is a later addition. Douglas Wile's work on the recovered Wu and Li family manuscripts sets out the documentary situation, and no serious historian now defends the traditional attribution.
What are chi, jing and shen?
The three terms Liao's system runs on. Chi is understood as the vital energy circulated by the practice, jing as the trained internal power expressed through relaxed rather than muscular effort, and shen as spirit or directed awareness. Liao treats developing chi as the actual object of the practice, with the physical form as its container.
What are the thirteen postures?
Eight energies and five directions. The eight are usually rendered ward off, roll back, press, push, pull down, split, elbow and shoulder strike. The five are advance, retreat, look left, gaze right and central equilibrium. Every movement in every form is analysed as a combination of these thirteen.
What does song or relaxation mean in tai chi?
Not slackness. It is a release of unnecessary muscular holding while structural connection through the body is maintained, so that force can travel from the ground through the frame without being blocked. It is the hardest thing in tai chi to convey in writing and the thing a teacher's hands correct in seconds.
Can you learn tai chi from this book?
No. You can learn the theory, the vocabulary and the principles behind what a teacher is asking you to do. The physical corrections that matter, particularly around alignment, weighting and release, require someone touching your frame and telling you what is happening. The book is a companion to instruction rather than a substitute.
Where did tai chi actually come from?
The documentary trail leads to Chen Village in Henan and to Chen Wangting in the seventeenth century, a conclusion reached by the researchers Tang Hao and Gu Liuxin in the twentieth century and now broadly accepted. The Yang, Wu, Sun and other family styles descend from that root through Yang Luchan.
How good is Liao's translation?
It is interpretive. Liao renders the texts through his own understanding, expanding compressed phrases into the meaning he takes them to have, which makes them far more usable and much less literal. For what the Chinese actually says and where it is ambiguous, use Douglas Wile or Barbara Davis instead.
Is tai chi good for health?
The evidence for balance and reduced falls in older adults is among the better bodies of evidence for any movement practice, and there are promising findings in several other areas. That evidence supports the exercise. It does not confirm the traditional model of chi circulation, which is a separate claim that clinical trials do not test.
Which tai chi book should I buy first?
If you want a teacher's explanation of what the practice is for, Liao. If you want the texts themselves accurately rendered with the scholarship attached, Barbara Davis or Douglas Wile. If you want the plain standard translation practitioners have used for decades, the Benjamin Lo volume. They do different jobs.
Who is Waysun Liao?
A Taiwanese-American teacher, born in 1948, who founded a school in the Chicago area and has taught in the United States since the 1970s. His approach places energy work and meditation at the centre and treats the martial application as secondary, which is a position within the tradition rather than the whole of it.
Name the thirteen
Whatever form you practise, however long you have practised it, spend one session naming energies instead of counting movements. Where is ward off actually happening. When does roll back start, and is it the arm or the waist doing it. Where in this sequence is central equilibrium lost. The classics are eight pages long because they assumed you would do this and did not need to be told. Doing it once will show you how much of your form you have been performing rather than understanding.
Sources & References
- Liao, W. (1990). T'ai Chi Classics. Shambhala Publications.
- Wile, D. (1996). Lost T'ai-chi Classics from the Late Ch'ing Dynasty. State University of New York Press.
- Wile, D. (1983). T'ai-chi Touchstones: Yang Family Secret Transmissions.
- Davis, B. (2004). The Taijiquan Classics: An Annotated Translation, with commentary by Chen Weiming. North Atlantic Books.
- Lo, B. P. J. et al., trans. (1979). The Essence of T'ai Chi Ch'uan: The Literary Tradition. North Atlantic Books.
- Tang Hao and Gu Liuxin, research establishing the Chen Village origins of taijiquan.
- Clinical literature on tai chi for balance and falls prevention in older adults.