I haven’t yet written much about the origins of Tai Chi mainly because they are not fully known and certainly not agreed upon.
However I did mean to write about the ‘Yi Jin Jing’ which is generally translated as either ‘sinew changing classic’ or ‘muscle and tendon changing methods’.
I learnt about the Yi Jin Jing much later in my Tai Chi journey somewhere around 18 years after I first started training in the art. However it profoundly began to change the way that I practiced from then on.
The generally known story around this set of teachings is that they were brought into China from India by the Buddhist monk Bodhidharma and taught to the monks at Shaolin where they became incorporated into the many arts that were practised there.
Later they became intrinsic to the practice of Tai Chi and the way that the art should profoundly transform the body and by extension the mind, energy and consciousness.
I wanted to give credit to one of the teachers alive today who has taught the Yi Jin Jing at a deep level to many students around the world by posting his overview here.
In future posts I will describe my own experience working with the material.
“When Bodhidharma encapsulated his teachings within the treatise of the ‘sinew changing methods’, he provided a framework to transform the body in a profound manner, so that Qi could be built, channels could be open, and preparation could be put in place for the embodiment of the spiritual path.
The coming together of Indian methods, Bodhidharma’s own realisations and the Chinese traditions gave birth to one of the deepest understandings of inner work which is still integral to the martial arts today.
It is safe to say that, from this point onwards, all of the arts of China, both Buddhist and Daoist alike, incorporated the teachings of the ‘sinew changing’ to varying degrees. The training of these methods may differ from tradition to tradition but the underlying ethos should remain the same.
The body must be taught how to develop Qi first. This Qi enters and mobilises increasingly dense layers of the body until it is ready for the subtle channels to become opened. In many ways a Chinese art can be judged by its ability to take a practitioner through the ‘sinew changing’ process.”
Damo Mitchell Bali, Indonesia