Tai ChiChuan – Dim Mak Controversy

The Tai ChiChuan – Dim Mak Controversy

By John Chow, of Tao of Tai Chi Chuan Institute, Melbourne, Australia.

Tai Chi Chuan is a soft and internal martial art, the roots of which probably go back to as far as the Tang Dynasty in China. Its emphasis is on softness and yielding to make use of the opponent’s force instead of resisting the opponent’s force and striking the opponents.

Thus, the combat applications of Tai Chi Chuan usually consist of neutralising and absorbing the attacking force, and then repelling it, sometimes vigorously. This is the characteristics of Tai Chi Chuan, as opposed to other styles of Chinese martial arts.

The opposing characteristics of Shaolin external arts is they rely on the external structures of muscle and bones, and thus, they emphasised strikes, kicks and joint locks. Tai Chi Chuan does not rely on such methods.

Even in many books of Tai Chi Chuan published in the past century, many masters, because they wish to embellish the contents of their books, have included strikes as part of Tai Chi combat applications. These are embellishments to try to explain the relevance of the Tai Chi Chuan postures to someone who can not appreciate the subtleties of the internal mechanisms of the internal structures of the human body and who has to see lots of strikes, punches and joint locks in order to appreciate Tai Chi Chuan as an effective martial art.

Dim Mak belongs to the category of strikes. In this case, Dim Mak are strikes to certain parts of the body, within a system of human biological time to produce paralysing, debilitating, incapacitating, or even fatal results to the victim.

While many people do not believe that there is such a thing as Dim Mak, as a Chinese martial artist who has grown up in Asia, I do believe it does exist, and it does work. Many old Chinese martial arts masters retain a working knowledge of this art in their repertoire.

Since Dim Mak is a striking art, it is considered by most internal martial artists as belonging to the external Shaolin system.

However, in the past 15 years, there has been claims from non-Asian sources that Tai Chi Chuan has Dim Mak, and not only that:- all those techniques and theories we have been taught in Tai Chi Chuan and have been practising for more than a hundred years are sheer fabricated nonsense which cover up the truth - which is - “Tai Chi Chuan is actually the art of Dim Mak!!! The founder of Tai Chi Chuan, Chang San Feng, created all the other techniques and training methods were cleverly devised as a camouflage to hide this secret deadly art of “energy disruption” from the public”.

A controversy has thus started.

Let me put forth some facts:-

1) Many old Chinese martial arts masters have a knowledge of Dim Mak.

2) Most old Chinese martial arts masters who have a knowledge of Dim Mak belong to the external Shaolin system.

3) Throughout history, there have been many accounts of Shaolin masters effectively applying Dim Mak.

4) Most old Chinese Tai Chi masters do not have a working knowledge of Dim Mak. Those who do usually have studied the external Shaolin system as well.

5) There is no record of Chang San Feng always and indifferently using Dim Mak for his combat applications.

6) There is no record of the founder of Yang Style Tai Chi Chuan , Yang Lu Chan, using Dim Mak for his combat applications. He had always relied on all the techniques and training methods that we know today as the repertoire of Tai Chi Chuan.

7) There is no record of the founders of other traditional styles of Tai Chi Chuan in the respect either. For example, Wu Quan Yu, Sun Lu Tang, Fu. The great Chen Fa Fe of the Chen style also did not attempt to use Dim Mak either.

8) The only record of a great Tai Chi Chuan master who studied and used Dim Mak was Yang Jian Hou who had deep mystical habits and delved deeply into the strange and paranormal. He thus took a liking to Dim Mak. He also studied psychic phenomena and the ability to move or strike objects at a distance without physical contact. He is known to hurt his students, so few remained with him.

9) All other Tai Chi Chuan masters do not have the ability of Dim Mak, even though they may, as Chinese, have some superficial knowledge of it.

10) No Tai Chi Chuan master, starting from the time of Yang Lu Chan, had ever settled a fight with Dim Mak. This include Yang Jian Hou, who is the only Tai Chi Chuan master to have studied this deadly art.

11) All Tai Chi Chuan masters, from the time of Yang Lu Chan, and even before, used techniques and theories that we still have access to and still use today. Their Tai Chi Chuan is the same as what we know as traditional Tai Chi Chuan today. There is no difference. There is a difference in ability only, and this can not be attributed to Dim Mak because these old masters did not know how to apply Dim Mak.

12) The “13 Postures” were the basis of Tai Chi Chuan from the time of Chang San Feng, and they still are today.

13) All Tai Chi Chuan masters have taught and explained and applied the 13 Postures. They have always attributed their skills to the 13 Postures.

14) No old Tai Chi Chuan masters had attributed their skills to Dim Mak.

15) Even Yang Jian Hou (being the only old Tai Chi Chuan master to have truly studied Dim Mak, possibly from a Shaolin source) did not attributed his skills to Dim Mak.

16) All Tai Chi Chuan masters praise the 13 Postures, in particular, the Grasp Bird’s Tail techniques of Peng, Lu, Ji and An. There is even a famous Tai Chi Chuan saying, “Half of Grasp Bird’s Tail is enough to settle any fight”.

17) All the old Tai Chi Chuan masters, as well as the current generation of masters practise Tai Chi Push Hands in order to acquire understanding and actualisation of the 13 Postures.

18) All old traditional Tai Chi Chuan masters refer to the 13 Postures as the basis of Tai Chi Chuan, and have demonstrated their assertions countless times.

19) All old traditional Tai Chi Chuan masters have demonstrated the combat applications of the 13 Postures countless times in practice as well as in actual encounters.

20) No accounts of encounters of Tai Chi Chuan masters had involved Dim Mak. Why don’t they use this art to save their lives if they know it well?

21) The 13 Postures is the central pillar of Tai Chi Chuan, and is not a myth, nor a camouflage.

22) No Tai Chi Chuan master has ever praised Dim Mak, or even mentioned Dim Mak as a Tai Chi Chuan teaching!

From the above, we can conclude that Tai Chi Chuan is certainly not Dim Mak in disguised as claimed by a non-Asian source. In fact, Tai Chi Chuan does not even include Dim Mak. All the great Tai Chi Chuan masters, except Yang Jian Hou, do not have a working knowledge of Dim Mak. They have always relied on the 13 Postures, and have always used the 13 Postures in actual combat encounters.

Therefore, the idea that Tai Chi Chuan is Dim Mak in disguise is a modern myth propagated in the West. (A traditional Chinese may be very amused at our imagination)

John Chow,

Tao of Tai Chi Chuan Institute,

Melbourne, Victoria, Australia.