Monday Morning Tai Chi Training Tips # 443
Eight Energies
Do – Re – Me – Fa – So – La – Ti – Do. From those few notes, all the songs we sing are constructed. Eight basic sounds, or since sound is nothing but waves of energy, we can say eight basic energies create an infinite number of possibilities.
In Chinese Internal Arts we also have eight basic energies: peng (ward off), lu (roll back), ghee (press), an (push), tsai (pull down), lieh (split), chou (elbow), kao (shoulder). These make up the hundreds of movements in Tai Chi Chuan.
There are eight trigrams that surround the Tai Chi (double fish) symbol to signify the PaKua, another internal art of China. These same eight trigrams are combined into 64 hexagrams to make up the “I Ching”, which is the oldest known book of philosophy in China. So we should not get too hung up in the idea of how complex the internal arts are, but look at how very simple the basic structure really is. Concentrate on the eight basic energies and all the variations in the form will be simple.