Yes, at it's core it is a martial arts, not wellness.

More accurately, it was a martial art in the 19th century, when it was practiced by professional bodyguards, but that did not resemble much what is today called Tai Chi.

What is practiced today is a health-preserving exercise derived from that martial art.

This is the same as for what is today called "karate", whose origin is from a 19th century martial art practiced by professionals, i.e. bodyguards and law-enforcement officials, but from that in the 20th century health-preserving exercises and sportive competitions were derived, which do not look at all like the original art.

There are people who claim that they still know which were the martial art techniques from which the movements of the Tai Chi forms were derived, but at least for most of them the claims are unlikely to be true and if they demonstrate a supposedly original movement there usually exists no evidence that it truly was transmitted from the ancient masters and it is not just a modern guess of how the original movement might have been.

As a health-preserving exercise, Tai Chi is indeed one of the best.

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dentemple 2 days ago | parent | next [-]

The 19th century isn't THAT long ago. Master Sun Lutang, founder of one of the martial art branches of Tai Chi died in the 1930s (1). There are folks alive today, such as Grandmaster Lin Chih Young (2) who can claim a lineage to him that goes back only three generations, and there are others walking around who are only four or five generations removed. These lineages are unbroken and, although some of the ancient material has, indeed, truly been lost, much of the Wu Dang / Taoism-based martial arts are still preserved and can still be "transmitted" to anyone willing to find these teachers and put the time in.

Many of these 19th century masters cross-trained in all of the related arts from that era and proceeded to carry down these traditions to their students.

Therefore, the original movements can, indeed, still be found in the world, and you can still learn them. You just won't see any of these movements displayed in Hollywood (because they're not flashy enough for the big screen), or in an MMA ring (because they're not designed for sport fighting), or through any school or lineage that remains or currently exists in China post-Cultural Revolution (because all of the true practictioners fled to Taiwan and elsewhere).

But you're right in that it doesn't AT ALL look like the Tai Chi that most of the world practices today. Many of the movements and forms have kept the same names... but they are trained and performed VERY differently from what most people would recognize.

(1) https://linnatural.com/about-our-martial-arts-school-in-coro... (2) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun_Lutang

Full disclosure: I mentioned Grandmaster Lin specifically because I've met, witnessed, and learned from him directly having attended seminars that he's run in the past.

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lukan 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

"There are people who claim that they still know which were the martial art techniques from which the movements of the Tai Chi forms were derived, but at least for most of them the claims are unlikely to be true and if they demonstrate a supposedly original movement there usually exists no evidence"

Erm, with martial arts it is really easy to find out, if something has any (combat) value simply by trying it out in a (training) fight. So I do lot's of martial arts and I can say with confidence some technics of Tai Chi helped me become better. And I know many other fighters who also do Tai Chi. But .. I also don't know anyone who has done just Tai Chi, but also do it.

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adrian_b 2 days ago | parent [-]

The fact that a martial art technique is a guess invented right now to explain the origin of some Tai Chi movement does not mean that it is a bad technique.

If the one who made the guess is competent, it may be an excellent technique. However, the fact that it is a good technique does not mean that the guess is right.

The problem is that there have been far too many examples of martial arts experts, especially among those from Asian countries, who instead of saying that they have invented some techniques themselves, or at least that they have altered them significantly in comparison with what they had learned, they claimed that they had learned them from some older master exactly in the form that they demonstrate, and that the older master had in turn learned them exactly in the same form from even more ancient masters.

So when someone claims that some technique has been transmitted from their masters through several generations, that is more likely to be BS than truth. In Japan there are better sources of historical evidence, because the martial arts were practiced by professionals and there is a lot of written evidence from their training schools, but in China the martial arts that used non-military weapons or no weapons were more likely to be practiced by outlaws, with few exceptions like the bodyguards of various VIPs, including the emperor, so the written evidence is more scarce.

Unlike these claims of false antiquity, which I strongly dislike, there are also many attempts done nowadays to reconstruct the original movements of the forms of Tai Chi and of other Chinese, Okinawan etc. martial arts, which are presented as what they really are, i.e. guesses.

Those attempts of reconstruction, carefully done based on various lines of evidence, which are presented openly, are very interesting and I enjoy them very much.

If there still exist people who have preserved non-public details about how Tai Chi really was 200 years ago, they are likely to be found in Taiwan, because in mainland China after WWII there was a period of oppression of all former martial art experts, so few masters of Tai Chi or of other arts have survived through it, therefore most of the knowledge that has been preserved was that of the beginners, who according to tradition were not taught the complete art.

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lukan 2 days ago | parent [-]

" they claimed that they had learned them from some older master exactly in the form that they demonstrate, and that the older master had in turn learned them exactly in the same form from even more ancient masters."

Yeah, that is a old thing I guess. The more mysticism around his ancient mystic technics, the more respect for the master. But it used to be worse I think, the boxer rebellion cleaned up with lot's of superstition in the area in general, as martial arts masters turned out not to be bullet proof either https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boxer_Rebellion

(I learned that fact actually in a Tai Chi book)

I just know that I don't care about ancient wisdom/tradition, but about things that work here and now. And Tai Chi people taught me good things and I know some of them were also good fighters. And the non fighting technics are useful as well.

	▲	adrian_b 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		I agree.

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dentemple 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Not to "Well, Actually," but it was intended to be both. Tai Chi and its related arts (xingyi, tongbei, etc.) were formalized and taught by the old masters as expressions of the Tao. The base movements are derived from the basic elements of the Tao, and Taoist meditiation and internal medicinal practices (qigong) were as important as learning how to produce explosive force (fajin) from it.

Learning Tai Chi in the way that it was meant to be learned means cultivating not just your external body but also your spiritual self, mental wellness, and internal organs as well.