Sun Style Tai
Chi Founder and Grand master Sun Lu Tang
Lori Ann White - Shaolin Instructor
By all accounts, Sun Lu Tang was an extraordinary man.
Born in 1861 in Hebei Provience, Sun was the child of
a poor farmer. Sun's father, recognizing the boy's intelligence,
wanted to provide him with a good education. Unfortunately,
he could only afford two years of formal schooling for
Sun before he lost everything to poor harvests and the
Qing dynasty's oppressive taxes
Here the young Sun's life begins to resemble a Kung Fu
movie. After his father's death, sun, a small and frail
seeming child, went to work as a servant for a cruel master
with an even crueler son. The young boy worked hard and
silently endured the beating until one day, while out
herding sheep, he saw a group of men practicing martial
arts. The rest, as the saying goes, is history.
He studied for about three years with a Shaolin master
named Wu who was quite impressed with the boy and taught
him quickly. When Sun's mother heard that he was studying
Kung Fu, She at first objected, afraid that he would hurt
himself. Then she saw how much healthier her formerly-sickly
child looked and give her blessing to him to continue
his studies.
One fateful day, Sun finally beat up the bully's bigger,
stronger, even meaner cousin and lost his job. He and
his mother went to live with a kindly uncle who owned
a calligraphy shop, and here Sun's luck finally took a
turn for the better. He could practice the calligraphy
he learned during his two years of formal schooling, and
practice the martial arts. His uncle, a prosperous businessman,
introduced him to two men who were to prove very important
to the youth: a scholar named Zhang who was to become
Sun's father-in-law and who helped Sun continue his academic
studies, and Li Kui Yuan, a master of the art of Xing
Yi Chuan.
Sun Lu Tang's introduction to the internal arts through
Xing Yi Quan might well be considered the true beginning
of his career in the martial arts. And "career"
best describes it: for the rest of his life until his
death in 1933 at the age of 72, Sun Lu Tang studied, taught,
lectured on, and wrote about the martial arts. He is credited
with writing the first book available to the General public
that grouped Xing Yi, Bagua, and Tai Chi together as internal
arts. The same book, Xing Yi Quan Xue, or The Study of
Form-Mind Boxing, is also considered the first written
work to point out the connection between martial arts
the I Ching, and Daoist philosophy.
Sue Lu Tang, through the careful reasoning, depth of
through, and literary merit evident in his published works,
elevated the martial arts to a field worthy of serious
academic study. Nothing demonstrates this better than
his development of Sun-style Tai Chi Chuan.
Though Sun-style Tai Chi Chuan is a young style, as Kung
Fu style go, it is now considered one of the four major
styles of tai Chi Chuan. One reason is for its quick acceptance
is simple: Sun-style Tai Chi works. Another reason may
be respect for the man himself. Sun Lu tang lived, studied,
and guided martial arts at a crucial point in the its
development.
Centuries of secrecy, of patriarchs teaching the family
style only to other family members, of the masters withholding
techniques from al but a very few senior students, of
a body of practitioners who were generally illiterate
farmers wanting merely to protect themselves from bandits,
had resulted in a body of knowledge that was mostly oral
and anecdotal. In addition, the persecution of the fighting
monks of the Shaolin Temple further reduced the number
of martial artists who were literate. Little was written
down, and few were able to read what documentation did
exist. The martial arts were shrouded in secrecy and suspicion.
However, the end of the Qing Dynasty found a country
sorely in need of the healing qualities of Kung Fu. Years
of grinding poverty, opium addiction, and national humiliation
after national humiliation at the hand of the Europeans
and the Japanese presented the new Republican government
with a dispirited, unhealthy populace, known by the unflattering
term, "the sick men of Asia."
Sun, and other top martial artists, were invited to teach
martial arts in the schools. Sun himself taught in Beijing,
Nanjing, Shanghai, Suzhou and Hangzhou. In the belief
that the martial arts should be practiced first for health
and personal development, not to learn to fight he was
the first to offer a martial arts course to a women.
Sun Lu Tang's research into the martial arts did more
than result in the creation of the Tai Chi style that
bears his name at the same time he was revolutionizing
the academic world's conception of the martial arts, he
was revolutionizing the academic world's conception of
the martial artist, Sun Lu Tang, through word and deed,
elevated the martial artist from unlettered ruffian, best
suited to performing on the streets for money or running
a bodyguard service, to the position of gentleman and
scholar. It is a position marital artists still enjoy
today-but we must remember the honesty, hard work, compassion
and intelligence of the man who first earned such high
regard. It is through emulating Sun and master like him
that we will continue to prove the value-both intellectual
and physical-of the discipline we called Kung Fu.
