Searching For Tai Chi Sword’s Lost Techniques Videos of Sifu Jensen and other Experts

10,000 Victories School is known for the quality of our swordswomen and swordsmen. The 10,000 Victories Kung Fu and Tai Chi Team has won many awards including Gold Medals and Grand Championships for our performances of Tai Chi Sword, Wu Dang Sword and other classical sword routines at important martial arts tournaments. Many of our best performers and strongest competitors are swordswomen. Yeah! Go 10,000 Victories Women’s Tai Chi Sword Team! You Rock!

Sword practice is incredibly fun and empowering. Holding a sword for the first time, especially a real sword that is solid, strong, and well balanced feels powerful. Anyone holding a sword immediately senses this. Some people are a bit frightened even to hold a sword for the first time. As soon as you hold a sword you clearly know how much of an advantage you have over an unarmed person or even a small group of unarmed people. Learning how to handle and use a sword, even a little, simply feels great and is super fun.

I love both learning and teaching sword forms. As a result, I learned 11 different sword forms from a number of well known lineages and teachers.

Today, I would like to talk about our Weeping Willow Sword form and 46 style Tai Chi Sword and compare them to other well known sword forms like the Wudang Tai Chi Sword 59, Yang Tai Chi 32 Sword, Yang Tai Chi 59, Sword Tai Chi 42 International Competition Sword. In my humble opinion, many of the performances of Tai Chi by many current competitors and coaches lack important tactical aspects to their techniques and have become a bit more stylized than practical. In practical terms absolutely none of us want to actually fight and kill people with swords and would be totally horrified if we ever had to. Having practical fencing skills in the modern world is fun but not the slightest bit necessary. All that being said, many people ask me about the moves and how exactly are they used. In classical combat oriented styles of Chinese martial arts many of the sword tricks are clearly retained and taught. Learning many sword forms from many teachers allowed me to get these tips and tricks from more than one source or tradition and see the connections and similarity of fencing tactics common to all of these styles.

Learning one of the few rare partner sword forms like Three Combinations Sword Sparring Form helps us understand how these techniques were used and should be performed. As soon as you learn the Three Combinations Sword Sparring Form you will notice several things.

• Being long, incredibly long, is incredibly valuable and allows you to win and prevent your partner from escaping. This length is getting the tip of your sword the maximum distance away from your own body by incredibly extending your own arm and shoulder to focus on the very tip of your sword, and the edge of the sword immediately next to the tip, to cut the opponent while they are out of range and out of angle of you. Unlike Saber it is rare in straight sword that you want the tip of your sword near your body. Almost all the time the tip should be far away and pointing at the opponent.
• It is also immediately clear that all of those low stances are incredibly useful both for evading, advancing long, being evasive while advancing and allowing you to attack the opponents feet, ankles, knees and tendons while staying out of reach and out of angle of their movements. By using these extremely low and long techniques you win against people who are using shorter and more upright techniques. In a real sense, if you are not using the vertical element of your stance by becoming extremely “low and long” and “low and small” you are using a 2 dimensional geometry of front back and left right movement directions. When you are swooping into extremely low and long bow stances of the Northern styles, Swallow or “Drop” stances, and Dragon stances you have 3 dimensional geometry.
• The foot is pulled in to touch the knee so it will not be cut by the opponent. Many people like to hang their foot out stylistically away from their body during sword forms. There is no reason not to do this when practicing an empty hand form. In empty hand forms your foot may be in a variety of positions depending on whether you swept, hooked, retreated, or kicked before ending in the Crane Stance. In Sword forms most of the time none of that is happening. Instead, you are much more intent on making sure your opponent does not cut your ankle or knee tendons.

You learn these things in practicing sword sparring forms with a partner because these tactics work to “save” you, and they work to “get” your partner. Once you practice these sword forms, your eyes open and you see why these movements are so dang long and why the sword needs to be so far, far away and tip edge focused. Then, it is hard not to notice when people are not focused on these things. You immediately know you will “get” them because that is how you learned to “get” your favorite partner and how to avoid their tricks and moves.

A sword form that is commonly practiced in modern China today is called Wudang Tai Chi Sword, sometimes with the number 59 added to show the number of movements. 59 moves is long for a sword form, particularly in the modern period we tend to favor shorter routines. 32, 42 and 46 are the length of other well-known sword forms. Many classical routines like Dragon Phoenix Sword, and Zhang San Feng Tai Chi 6 Roads Sword are much longer. Some like 46 Style Tai Chi Sword count “styles” rather than movements. This means a movement might be performed 4 -6 times, but it is only counted as a single “Style” rather than counting its number of repetitions and adding that total to the total number of movements in the form. Thus 46 “Styles” Tai Chi Sword has close to 60 movements but repeats very few moves and teaches an exceptionally large variety of different movements. This is one reason I love this sword form and an important clue as to why the 46 style Tai Chi Sword is much more challenging, complex, and advanced than either the Yang Tai Chi 32 Sword or 42 Tai Chi Sword Competition form. In the case of both the 32 and the 42 Tai Chi Sword forms almost all the repetitions are removed, and also some of the more unusual or difficult techniques were also removed. So, the total number of different sword techniques is much lower. They were simplified to make them more suitable for exercise by people with a wider variety of abilities. However, like simplifying the traditional Chinese written language some meaning and content was in fact lost. In the case of Wudang Tai Chi 59 the sequence is not much shorter, but the meaning of the movements in some of my favorite movements is lost and/or performed with too much “Tai Chi Style”. By “Tai Chi style” I mean the idea of slowness carried too far. This is most true in the case of leaps. How do you do a leap slowly? Weirdly seems to be the answer!

Weeping Willow Sword by Sifu Jensen This clip  shows two of my favorite sections of Weeping Willow Sword.

In the first sequence we have quick leaping double thrust. We thrust once in the air and then again as we land. All sorts of strange things have happened to this leap in the modern world of slow motion Tai Chi sword not actually leaping, but really wanting to leap. After this dynamic leaping double thrust attack, we spin quickly hiding the sword with our body and then shooting it out suddenly and surprisingly from underneath our own left armpit. This should be a tight movement with the sword hidden right next to the body and completely invisible to the opponent. In many modern performances of Tai Chi sword forms this movement has totally changed. The idea of hiding the sword is lost and practitioners spin with the sword held wide away from the body where it would easily be seen by the opponent. In addition, there are also often other steps added that further lose the immediacy of the older technique.

In this performance by Master Daniel Tan performs Yang Tai Chi 32 watch 1:36 – 1:50 to view the techniques I am discussing. I like his performance; it shows commendable skill. He is doing these movements to the current standard and would receive great scores in competition. I am not criticizing him, but rather critiquing the choreography of this commonly practiced form, not master Tan as a performer.

https://youtu.be/WSfAUU-fXT4 Watch 1:05 – 1:17 Another skillful performer, Master Chen Sitan, performs Yang Tai Chi 32 and shows the current techniques. Note the total lack of hiding the sword or thrusting underneath the armpit. The foot gesture? Before the leap and the slow motion. Matrix Style?? Leap. It is OK to leap. Go ahead. I know you really want too! This foot gesture can be done as one of three things. A parry, hooking backward parry, and kicking dirt in the opponent’s face. If we weren’t holding the sword a stomp kick would make sense, or a backward hooking kick with the toes to the groin would also work well for this movement. But with a sword neither of those kicks make much sense to me.

If you feel like watching other Tai Chi Sword performances on YouTube or elsewhere I am sure you will see these same techniques performed in the Yang 32, Yang 42, 42 competition Sword form and in any version of the Wudang Tai Chi form whether 49 or 59 moves long.

In the second part of this clip sequence 00:24 to 00:34 we look at me, Sifu Jensen, perform a quick leap landing with a sideways thrust of the sword. This movement is immediately followed by a spinning 360 degree slicing cut at neck level. The idea is to attack everyone near you or at least drive them back away from you. The key here to this move is inserting the left leg deep into the stealing step aspect of twisted horse stance as we land and then cutting decisively and precisely in large even circle when you spin. The next technique is a leaping thrust downward to the rear. This thrust is designed to stab downward into an opponent charging you from the rear. In the last move, we again hide our sword from our opponents field of view with our body and turn suddenly almost throwing the sword out from our hand in an extremely long thrust that completely surprised the opponent. I am sure you will see these movements in any clip of Wudang Tai Chi Sword. If you are one of my students who has learned the Weeping Willow Sword Form, I think you will be able to recognize the Wudang Tai Chi Sword form as a variation, a modernized version of the older Weeping Willow Sword Form. Have fun!

If you like Tai Chi Sword you will be glad to know that we have beautiful and wonderful lessons for our beloved 46 Style Tai Chi Sword. You can browse Tai Chi Sword lessons and register here! More new sword lessons will be coming as well!

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