In Taijiquan as well as in life nothing remains the same. What I knew yesterday is not what I know today. Knowledge and experience have a way of changing one's outlook.
I went to one of my teacher's annual camps in which he never fails to make me challenge what I thought I knew about this mysterious art. One of the problems of learning the form in isolation from the applications is that it becomes an end in itself and practictioners often forget the purpose and function of the moves within the form.
These camps follow an interesting format whereby my teacher does not teach, rather we the participants take our turns at teaching everybody else under his watchful eye. There is nothing quite like teaching other teachers stuff they already know under the baleful glare of your own teacher.
This year instead of the simple "show me an application for ....." it became a show and tell of a completely different nature. He asked us to show him Six punches, then six kicks, then six throws, then six locks, then six hidden techniques that were in the form that we practised daily. To respond to this request we had to deconstruct the form mentally and then associate it with the applications we had practised interminably over the years and in one specific case I had to make one up when either memory or ignorance failed me.
On the final day , the acolytes failing to prevent the God of Literature from emptying the wine vessel, my teacher demonstrated something that I had never seen him do before and thus changed my view on a certain tenet of Taijiquan, namely 'Thou Shalt Not Go To Ground'. The technique he demonstrated was a scissor kick take down continuing into a rolling leg lock and stike to the back of the head. This technique was the leg crossing and spinning around manoeuvre found in the second Turn Around and Kick With Heel technique.
It occurred to me then that even though it is ideal that we remain on our feet there may be circumstances where we are knocked down and must have an appropriate response for this situation. Which brings me back to the Step Back Repulse Monkey application problem I mentioned in an earlier article 'Taking the Monkey'. I was demonstrating to my class the incorrect way of performing this technique when as I was falling to the ground with the application of the counter I realised my legs were in the perfect position to perform this scissor leg take-down. So instead of stopping myself from falling I continued rotating and sliding my foot in front of my opponents ankle while hitting the back of his knee with my other leg. I continued rotating my body once on the ground so that I ended up on his back with his leg caught in a lock by both of mine.
A few months later I received a copy of a digitised copy of a Cheng Tin Hung training tape from the early sixties and observed a man on the floor use precisely this technique to down the guy who had thrown him to the floor.
This reinforced for me the Taiji principle that there is strength in weakness and weakness in strength. Even when you are almost beaten that is the moment when you can change defeat to victory.