Barbara writes:
While watching a 1995 International Wu Style Federation Convention video, I heard a speaker refer to "lao jia" and "xin jia." From the translation, it appeared these referred to the long form taught by Wu Chien Chuan and his son, Wu Gong Yi. The speaker said he had studied with both and set out to describe the differences, which seemed to be mainly differences in depth of stance-he kept using Drop Stance (Downward Posture, Snake Creeps Down) with a deep drop as an illustration of "lao jia,” As a student of a student (Young Wabu)of Wu Chien Chuan, Master Hwa seems to be in about as good a position as the speaker (whose name I didn't catch) to comment on this.
As I understood it, the difference between "Lao” and "Xin" is mainly a difference in how much external exercise you want to supplement the internal or whether you're looking for a practical fighting form or a showier one.
Pictures of Wu Chien Chuan doing Tai Chi suggest that he did drop his stance with a fairly deep drop, at least for the camera, but did he do it that way even in his last years? Would he have done it that way in free sparring?
Master Hwa's response:
I listened to that "speaker" and could not believe he said that. Just because he was taught "large frame" by Wu Chien Chuan when he was a teenager, he thought that was all Wu knew! If he felt that when he was a teenager, it's excusable. But now, in his old age, with all the published discussion about Wu's prowess at Compact Form, he still thinks that way. He is truly clueless. Unfortunately, this kind of person saw a master play one style and immediately assumed that it was that master's style or that family's style who had muddied the water about the history of tai chi. Prime examples are:
Yang Ban-Hou had other teachers besides his father, Yang Lu-Chan, so his style is different from his father's. "Large frame" or "large circle" is the hallmark of the Yang style, ignoring that several Yangs are known for their zeal for compact forms, such as Yang Shao-Hou, brother of Yang Cheng-Fu.
This reminds me of a Chinese saying, "sitting in the bottom of a well trying to figure out how big the sky is." You are right. What they did for the camera was not representative of the style. During that era, printed pictures in the book had inferior quality (I have several such books), and it wasn't easy to see any details. If a pose was in the compact form, it probably showed very little of what was going on. Master Wu's pictures are all in huge frame style. As told by one of Wu Chien Chuan's students had an interesting story in which he asked Wu why one of his tai chi photos had the wrong posture. Wu said that the photographer had told him to do it this way. The story shows that these masters did not care about their photographs.
My teacher, Young Wabu, described how Master Wu could stick to the opponent during sparring, keeping the opponent constantly out of balance. This is the epitome of tai chi martial arts. It is formless, an abstract of all the training he had gone through—leg power from a "large circle," internal power from a "small circle," movements from form practice, sense and touch developed during push hand and sparring exercise, etc.
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