When I first started reading and posting to rec.martial-arts in the early 90s, I viewed the online forums as a way for interested martial artists to try and make sense of the Chinese paradigms in martial arts. Also, as a way to meet people with similar interests. I did not expect to meet people who were severely disenfranchised with “Kung Fu”, or naysayers from other martial arts that (in the end) turned out to be incredible liars, mainly about their skill level in martial arts.
Over time, rec.martial-arts collapsed as did usenet itself. I moved on, and discovered a few online forums such as empty flower, the yang family tai chi forum, and the kungfu magazine forum. Later and recently, someone told me about martialtalk. Although, most of the last many years were spent on rum soaked fist. There was a lot of good information posted on these forums, historical information that is now lost, stories, and of course the “goods” — information about training you can’t get elsewhere. But towards the end of 2024 I noticed a disturbing change, and in early 2025 it became obvious. People had started using ChatGPT and other AI tools to “fake” knowledge and experience in martial arts like Tai Chi.
You see, there were always people who lied about what they knew and how good they were. There were always people who would reveal, through their words, how little they knew about Tai Chi and other arts. But by mid 2024 and into 2025, propaganda from the Wushu crowd and certain other groups had become so loud I felt it had, for the first time, begun to drown out traditional knowledge. I observed a curious change in tone online. Before, people were trying to figure out how Tai Chi worked. Today, people were stating with confidence how Tai Chi worked — except, I knew for a fact they were wrong. In which ways they were wrong will be explained later, for now let it suffice that you knew they were wrong because everyone had a different message. This was a generational shift. In the 70s and 80s during the kung fu craze, a generation became disappointed by the lack of authentic training. This was a major component of the shift away from Kung Fu and towards Japanese arts like Judo in the 90s, and the rise of MMA. These people became the naysayers and the Chi deniers. But of those who went through the 90s and early 2000s, a different kind of generational failure became apparent. They were the Tai Chi people who didn’t believe in Chi. As a result, all sorts of things were added and removed and all sorts of false theories were created to try and explain “Tai Chi” and “Internal Martial Arts”. One of the most notable things that facilitated this was internal discord in the Tai Chi community itself created by non-Tai Chi people who lied and pretended what they were doing was Tai Chi when it was really other martial arts. There are lots of groups guilty of this. Taoist Tai Chi is one such group. The non-group of modern push hands competitions (which looks like wrestling) is another.
Thus, today we are in a state of confusion greater than any I have ever seen. The great western misunderstanding (essentially that wu wei means doing nothing and that mindless void is meditation) — known and stated as heresies in daoism and buddhism, have been accepted and promoted in place of real training by people selling the illusion of skill without effort, a lack of personal responsibility.
It surprised me then, when I realized that the online forums I used to love reading and posting to had become completely irrelevant. Not just to me, but objectively irrelevant because they had become either dead spaces or platforms for people to push wrong ideas. The usual culprit is someone who does NOT do Tai Chi who talks like they do Tai Chi, or that they are a Tai Chi expert. What do I mean by “does not do Tai Chi” means they do some other martial art, such as Thai Kickboxing. Nothing wrong with Thai Kickboxing, it’s just that it isn’t Tai Chi, and Tai Chi qualifies me to explain Thai Kickboxing as much as Thai Kickboxing qualifies me to explain Tai Chi.
I get it. The MMA/etc crowd is saying “fighting is important”. Duh, we all know that, the problem is, not every school trains the same way. I know this may seem obvious, but strangely the opposite seems to be taking hold online. People who went through the mill (like the disappointed generation from the 70s to 90s) are doing it again — There are a large number of people who went through the mill in the 2000s who are just now realizing it’s been 20 years and they have nothing. And they’re looking for someone to blame. Anyone but themselves. It’s not their fault, they don’t understand.
Nobody told them.
Well, to be fair, I think they did. See, I did not discover this all on my own. My sifu told me about it. Big question, why didn’t other sifus tell their students about this? Well I looked into it and I think they did. I felt sick. Even more sick than before. I couldn’t believe it. The previous generation and the one before, they all told the same thing. But the western students weren’t listening. I couldn’t believe it. Heads of systems with 20, 30, 40 years of experience, had no clue. They ignored the words of their teachers.
If you are listening, and you care, and you don’t want to fail miserably the way everyone else I can see, as far as the eye can see did….
Go and read the four books.
Do you know what the four books are?
Some people say, the Tao te Ching, I Ching, Huangdi Neijing, and the Transmission of the Lamp (the Blue Cliff Record will substitute in a pinch). These are certainly good books, required reading too. But that’s not what I mean. The four books begins with the Da Xue. If you care, now you know what to do.