(Scraps
from a Sinological Scrapbook 漢齋閒情異誌, fragment 28)
For some years now I
have been practicing T’ai Chi Chih, and like many who have studied it and kept
up with it, I have benefited in health and spirit. Unlike most, however, I also
studied Chinese at the university and went on to spend years in Taiwan
By saying this and contextualizing
T’ai Chi Chih in this way at the outset, I am making a statement. I am saying I
beg to differ with the standard publicity image of T’ai Chi Chih (hereinafter
TCC). That view would have us believe TCC just dropped down from the sky in
1974; it is unique; it had no important antecedents. Justin F. Stone, the ‘originator,’
experienced ‘intuitive flashes’ and devised the various movements based on
them.
I believe that account,
though it contains truths, is one-sided and misleading. It ignores, or has been
ignorant of, some conclusions that I have drawn based on research into Justin
Stone’s own books and some relevant books in Chinese.
I own three successive
editions of Stone’s instruction manual titled T’ai Chi Chih![1]
Their publication history is complicated, but the first printing of each seems
to have been in 1974, 1984, and 1996 respectively. For convenience, rather than
repeating the title I will refer to them simply as ‘1974,’ ‘1984,’ and ‘1996.’ Giving
us three quick-freezes in time, each appearing some years after its
predecessor, they enable us to piece together a more nuanced version of what I
believe actually happened. In particular, the introductory material, forewords,
and prefaces contain valuable hints.
To begin with the original
handbook which came out in 1974, the first thing that meets the eye is the
prominent role played by Wen-Shan Huang. Huang is the volume’s dedicatee –
Stone calls him ‘my friend and teacher’ – and is also the author of an
extensive foreword placing TCC in the context of various Chinese concepts and practices.
Huang, whose name would
now normally be written Huang Wenshan (黃文山), lived from about 1898 to 1988 (sources differ). Unlike many other
guiding lights of what was then called the Human Potential Movement, he was
highly educated and held high academic credentials as an anthropologist. Aside
from his scholarly work, he had studied tai chi in China California
Very clearly, Huang
places Justin Stone’s system in the context of existing Chinese disciplines. He
says: ‘T’ai Chi Chih, or any other forms of the exercise of the Inner School
As a little research in
internet sources and libraries in the Far East has shown, T. T. Ching
(1898-1975) was a teacher in Hong Kong whose
name written in Chinese characters is 程達材.[3] Starting
in the early 1960s he published several books on what he called ‘Tai Chi Ruler’
and indeed claimed to have learned from Chao Chung Tao (趙中道, in the modern transcription
Zhao Zhongdao) in 1957. (I have a book of Ching’s in Chinese dating from 1964,
as well as a more extensive later volume called Xiantian qigong taiji chi quanshu先天氣功太極尺全書 whose English title – the main text itself is in Chinese – is The Book of Tai Chi Ruler with Complete
Details.) Ching’s work and methods were known in Taiwan
I have not found any
specific evidence that Justin Stone himself ever studied with T. T. Ching. But
in his 1974 description of the movement that he calls Bass Drum (which aside
from lacking a wooden ‘ruler’ is virtually the same, including the crucial foot
and leg movements, as what Ching in Chinese called yao chi or Rotating the Ruler), Stone includes a footnote: ‘In
Taiwan a stick somewhat like a bone is held, so the two hands must remain
equidistant apart.’ This would seem to imply that Justin Stone at some stage had
seen Taiwanese students performing Ching’s version of this movement. Or perhaps
he had heard about this from Huang or someone else. In any case, at this point
in time Stone was not averse to publicly associating part of his own system
with a pre-existing set of exercises. (This and the bare-handed movement which
Ching called mo yu or Groping for
Fish, which Stone calls ‘Around the Platter,’ are now the standard first two
movements in the regular T’ai Chi Chih sequence.)
Comparing the 1984 revised edition with
the original book from 1974, at first sight we see mostly similarities. With a
few exceptions, the movements and postures described are the same, and for the
most part the descriptions and illustrations are unchanged. Turning to the
introductory material, however, we discern a striking new accent in the way the
book is now being presented to the world. The original preface by Huang,
unmistakably implying a direct link between Justin Stone’s system and the Tai
Chi Ruler which had already been taught in the 1950s by T. T. Ching, has been
entirely deleted. Stone’s ‘Instructional Introduction’ has been maintained, but
the wording of its first paragraph has become less modest. In 1974, Stone had
written: ‘The movements...are the results of many years of experimentation.
They represent an extension and development of the original movements taught by
a Chinese master. The important principles have been retained as the repertoire
has been expanded.’
In the 1984 revision,
this has been changed to: ‘The movements...are the results of many years of
experimentation. From a development of the original two movements shown me,
adding the leg motions and making other changes, I expanded and added eighteen
more...Drawing on my meditation experiences and T’ai Chi Ch’uan training, I
intuitively devised the other movements...’
The ‘New Introduction’
to the revised volume also includes the snippet: ‘These are not ancient forms;
they were originated by me...’
Another dramatically new
feature is that the system’s name, ‘T’ai Chi Chih,’ is now being construed to
have a different meaning in Chinese. Rather than ‘Chih’ being referred to the
Chinese character for ‘ruler’ as Huang had done, it is now said to be a
different character meaning ‘knowledge.’ The whole expression is said to mean ‘Knowledge
of the Supreme Ultimate.’
In the still newer and
extensively revised version which came out in 1996, the new stronger statements
of originality are maintained. The name is again ‘Knowledge of the Supreme
Ultimate,’ and once again there is no trace of Huang’s original preface. (The
revisions are mostly in the illustrations and instructions to the movements,
not the movements themselves.)
In the newer publicity material on TCC, Justin Stone is simply said
to have ‘originated’ the system in 1974. (See, for example, the brief biography
of Stone at the back of his 1996 volume, and later brief biographical summaries
on the internet.) The emphasis is less on the ‘many years of experimentation’;
indeed, the 1996 biography goes so far as to say that Stone originated the set ‘through
intuitive flashes’ in 1974.
This
sudden-precipitation model does not quite tally with what Stone himself wrote
in his 1984 introduction (and repeated in 1996): ‘...I began, around 1969, to
experiment with my own forms based on the ancient principles. Having been
fortunate enough to learn several little-known movements from an old Chinese
man – movements practised in former days – I used these as the starting point
for my experiments...In 1974, Sun Publishing Company asked me to write a
book...and I began the laborious task of finishing and naming the nineteen
forms...’
A bit of background on
this is to be found in an article on Stone in the Albuquerque Journal for 28 July 2005. There we read: ‘During a 1971
trip to Albuquerque
‘“It was just a few
movements, so there wasn’t much to write about, but then, over the course of
the next week, movements just started coming to me along with their names,”
Stone said.’[4]
What all this suggests is that (1) the precipitation of the forms
was not as sudden as all that, and (2) the inviting prospect of a publication
played a strong catalytic role in the ‘intuitive’ process.
The year after Stone’s
book was first published, T. T. Ching died at age 77, not because he had been
neglecting his health by ‘rotating the ruler’ insufficiently, but as the result
of a traffic accident. It is interesting to speculate on what might have happened
if he had lived long enough to see the success and growth of Justin Stone’s
system after all references to him personally had been dropped. Would the two
Teachers have joined hands in a collaborative effort, perhaps through the
intermediary of Wen-Shan Huang, friend of both, who lived till 1988? Or would
there have developed a rivalry of the ‘only-my-school-is-orthodox’ type which
is so common in the Far East ?
One also wonders
whether Stone’s mysterious ‘old Chinese man’ was Wen-Shan Huang himself...at
the time of Stone’s publication, he would have been in his seventies. Or was it
Tin Chin Lee, a Tai Chi master whom Stone met on a trip to Hawaii
Does any of this
matter? To the present-day Western practitioner, of course not. Once you have
abandoned the idea that only something with an ‘ancient’ pedigree can be right,
what works for you is right for you.
On the other hand,
although I am no longer a professional scholar – long since retired, I am now
as old as Justin Stone was when his revised edition with its revised claims
appeared – I am still enough of a scholar to enjoy sorting out old strands, old
clues, old loose ends. From this point of view, it is unfortunate that the
compilers of Spiritual Odyssey: Selected
Writings of Justin F. Stone 1985-1997 were so un-scholarly as not to
provide source dates or details on the various pieces included in the volume.
On page 78 of that volume, in a section called ‘Comments on Newspaper Articles,’
Stone is quoted as writing: ‘Please don’t falsify and say to interviewers that
T’ai Chi Chih is a thousand years old, a well-kept court secret.’
The interesting thing
is that this is exactly what Wen-Shan Huang did say, at the very beginning of
his enthusiastic foreword to Justin Stone’s book. Interpreting ‘Tai Chi Chih’
as ‘Tai Chi Ruler,’ Huang wrote: ‘More than a thousand years ago, this
exercise...was kept as a secret known only to the clansmen of the Emperor. Mr.
Chao Chung Tao, who was the descendant of one of the Emperor’s clansmen, was
taught the secret...My friend, Mr. T. T. Ching...was taught the teaching, or
Imperial secret, by Chao Chung Tao in 1957...’
Huang was probably, at that stage, trying
to help Justin Stone. In the Far East, if you are teaching a martial art or a
tai chi-related health discipline, the best thing is to claim that your method
is not original – no such thing, it is the authentic continuation of a school
whose unbroken tradition goes back many centuries. If you dare to set yourself
up as a Teacher, you are supposed to have a venerable background.
In the West, the opposite holds. Only the
new is truly relevant. Especially in anything involving health, only a recent
discovery is really credible. I suspect that in the 1970s, thrilled at the
chance to get more attention for his method by publishing a book on it, Justin
Stone was perfectly glad to be endorsed, and placed in an old Oriental
tradition, by an eminent Teacher like Wen-Shan Huang. Later, perhaps feeling
more confident that he could make it on his own, he was Western enough to want
to emphasize his originality. Since then, most of his followers probably have
had no idea of what a Chinese reader would undoubtedly think of as the main
roots of the whole thing.
In sharing what I have
discovered, it is not my intention to detract unduly from Teacher Stone’s
reputation. If his methods are effective – and I say they are – then they are
legitimate regardless of their exact provenance. It is undoubtedly true that
most of the movements he taught were of his own devising. It is also
demonstrably true that some of the most basic ones, including the leg and foot
movements which Stone himself emphasizes are characteristic and essential, were
already being taught by his teacher’s teacher many years before.
--Lloyd Haft
May 2015
[1] Published respectively by Sun Publishing Company (Albuquerque
[2] This information is from the original 1973 Hong
Kong edition of Huang’s massive illustrated handbook Fundamentals of Tai Chi Ch’uan (see the
Acknowledgements in English and Appendix C in Chinese). The book was reprinted
in 1974 with a new introduction by Laura Huxley, the wife of Aldous Huxley and
a widely known inspirational and self-help author in her own right. Four years
previously, Laura Huxley and Alan Watts had both written forewords to a much
briefer book on tai chi by Gia-fu Feng – surely one of the grand old books of
the Human Potential Movement!
[3] In the modern international Mandarin transcription this would be
Cheng Dacai, but I do not agree with the practice of automatically rewriting
Cantonese speakers’ names as if they were actually pronounced in Mandarin in
daily life.
[4] The article as I have consulted it on the internet really does say
the ‘trip to Albuquerque
