What is your thought on Wushu

Do you really want to get me started in on this? I'll admit I do study one of the "Simplified" styles of Taijiquan, but the one I practice was created for the Second Sino-Japanese war.

There's more than one type of Simplified Yang Taiji. Does she practice the 13 form, the 24 form, or the 37 form?

Taijiquan (T'ai Chi Ch'uan in Wade-Giles romanization) is a martial art at it's core. However, it is widely know for it's health benefits, and if the health benefits are what promotes it, so be it.

My father, being a devout Buddhist, is very sadden by what happened at Shaolin Temple. First, the people who look like monks are not ordained monks. They do not keep any of the vows (poverty, celibacy...ect.). Some are actually married. The Shaolin Temple was the birthplace of Chan/Zen Buddhism. The temple past fame was that it was a center of Buddhist Theology, not martial arts. Now there is no theological training at the temple at all. The stuffs they showed to tourists are lame Wushu. It is just a tourist trap.

Most of the monks were killed or exiled during the Cultural Revolution. Shaolin, as an unbroken and continuing lineage (both theology and martial arts) is extincted.

One of the worst parts is, when you're doing a traditional style, the moves aren't flashy. They might be complicated to learn but each dip of an elbow, rotation of a finger has a use.

In a correctly taught version of the Yang 108, there are two different ways leading into Single whip for example. People often say, 'the applications for Single whip look nothing like the move' Which is so incredibly wrong. That means you've been taught only one way of doing it. Why? Because the second one is complicated and boring to watch. It's not very pretty.

Another thing that I see in Wushu competitions is that they rotate their rear heel back to get a wider, more spectacular stance, rather than having a shorter stance that is more practical. Their knees wobble as they move, sliding out sideways rather than forward.

As for Tai Chi for health getting it out there. That's part of the disease. Sure, it might help people get healthier, but unless their emphasis is upon doing it as a martial art, it's not helping any more than doing a slow dance or taking a walk in a park for the same amount of time.

It also destroys the art, piece by piece. I've lost track of the amount of times that I've answered people for our school, that no 'it's not relaxing chi building'. That makes it easy, it's how simplified forms came about and it means that the transmission tends to be lost. Of course, it's great for making money. You do a course for a year or two, until you can pass it off to the unwitting as 'the real deal' and then you rake in a fair bit of money from pensioners and others who want some new age stuff, without giving them anything of value.

That's not to say that you can't teach those same people the traditional version. Hell you can even break the 108 up into three separate forms. Each progressively harder than the last. Even if they never use it to fight, that focus on what it is for, doing the martial applications correctly gives so much better health benefits that it is crazy that people ever went for a simplified version. Hell the first section is only about 4 minutes long. There's no kicks admittedly, but the elderly generally don't want to start with them anyway.

Needless to say, you can probably see that this is a subject close to my heart. Fortunately it is much easier to find a Bagua or Xing-Yi instructor, often they teach Taiji as a martial art as well. Or all three, joining the three major internal arts together.

It also depends fully on the style. If you claimed to teach something like Shaolin or, for another hyped style, Ninjutsu, you can make a hell of a lot of money even through just putting out DVDs; whether or not the instructor is any good, however, is the thing that's up for debate, because many places refuse to take opened DVDs back for whatever reason, so if you're like me (or yourself, Liam) whose primary method is learning through DVDs, if it turns out the instructor sucks or it's a complete fake, you could find yourself out anywhere from 40-400$ or more because of it. Anyways, by claiming to teach the 'true art' of any style that has been hyped through the media, you could probably make a good deal of money.

Ah, yes, I always forget about the production company. However, there are some cases where actual qualifications can be overlooked in favor of fame; apparently, there's a man named Richard Van Donk selling a Ninjutsu home study course that 'will guide you all the way to shodan (black belt)' and I'd considered it for awhile. But, no reviews, so I scoured Youtube comments of his videos and he's basically teaching next to nothing. I even managed to find a torrent of his older tapes (the ones before he made the switch to DVD) and while the info I saw was decently presented, the video kept skipping back and forth, repeat itself after about 15 minutes, or never showed a full explanation. Basically, he would show a technique and go into the explanation part, then it would cut out.

On that note, have you ever had any dealings with Wing Lam Enterprises, Liam? They're completely dedicated, it seems to CMA and everything provided in the clips of their tapes seem very well presented and promising, but I've never actually heard anything about them.

Indeed, that's what I found, too. Unless things have seriously gone downhill in the last few years, a post that was made on a martial arts forum some years back called them one of the best. Which is good because they seem like the only place offering traditional gongfu and seem pointedly avoidant to all things wushu, with the exception of wushu steel practice swords.