Why The Same Form?

A pianist will study many pieces over the course of his or her life. In many martial arts there are a number of different Forms, or Kata, or whatever you want to call them. Yet if we look at a lineage of Taiji, often there is just one form that the Taiji player practises daily over and over again. So the question is: why the same Form?

To answer this we need to consider some of the various purposes of Form practice.

1. To remember and reinforce what is already learned;
2. To give exercises with which one can learn Taiji;

If we look at the first of these, and in particular consider 'remember'. When we learn something new in Taiji, we look for it in our Form. Perhaps it is some detail of what our thigh muscle is doing. So we pay attention to that on Monday. On Tuesday we want to pick up where we left off, so we need to recall what we were doing before we went to sleep. By doing the same form on Tuesday, that we did on Monday, we have ample reminders of what we were working on, and we can then spend Tuesday adding to it. And then, Wednesday, we pick up where we left off on Tuesday and carry on.

If we stop one Form and start another, first we must spend weeks and months learning a new choreography before we can even begin to study it in earnest. Occasionally we will do this. For example the lineage I follow has some fast forms inherited from my teacher's teacher's prior background in a Form of Kung Fu called White Crane. There are things that can be studied in a fast form for which the 37 posture Cheng Man-Ching Form, which is one of those slow forms, isn't the best choice. But still, two Forms is still a small number.

But the thing with moving on from one form to another is that, since you are no longer practising daily the various aspects of the first Form that you learned through it, you will forget, and the memories and conditioning of the first Form will fade away. At least, unless the new Form you take on covers all the same ground. And unless that new Form adds significantly to what you are studying and learning, what has it added? Not much. And thus there is little point in moving from one form to another. And so Taiji players will tend to learn one form and practise it daily for years. For what you are studying in Taiji, which is primarily training the Mind and integrating Mind, brain and body, a reasonably comprehensive sequence of postures and transitions, and possibly a few other exercises, is all you need. And when it comes to how many different things you practise, depth matters more than breadth: doing the same Form twice as often is better than doing two different Forms and dividing your time between them, and moving on from one Form to another takes significant time and effort just to get you back to where you were with the old Form.