Taiji Is Not A Slow Dance

The Taiji Form looks to a naive onlooker like a slow dance. Many teachers even effectively treat it as such. Such people view the aesthetics of the Form as its aim: making it look smooth and beautiful is what matters. This is natural to think, understandable to believe, yet is completely wrong.

While a Form done well will look effortless, graceful, and enchantingly beautiful, a Form needn't be done well, in the Taiji sense, in order to look this way. A trained dancer could well make the choreography of the Form look more beautiful to a casual onlooker than an experienced master who is actually doing Taiji when performing the Form.

The TL;DR is that: you can do Taiji without doing the Form; and you can do the Form without doing Taiji. They are closely related, but not the same thing.

The Taiji Form is a sequence of exercises with which one can learn and practise Taiji. Taiji is a discipline of Mind, where one trains to move in an Intention Driven way: you form a strong Intention of a posture and possibly the transition into it, and you train your Mind and brain to follow it into the target posture. In the Form, you do this with one posture, and then do it into the next, and so on. The Form is a reasonably comprehensive set of postures with which to practise this: adding more postures divides your practice more thinly; learning other forms even more so. Thus a student will learn a small number of Forms (e.g. my practice is mainly based around the 37-posture Cheng Man-Ching Form, though I have learned the Yang Long Form and a Fast Form derived from Fujian White Crane in the past). Then while moving through that Form, one trains Taiji. Every Form done without practising Taiji while doing it is a wasted Form, no matter how pretty it might look on the outside.