WHADDYA MEAN, “I'M SOFT?

 By Phillip Starr

I remember back in the 60’s when the martial arts media first referred to all gong-fu styles as “soft” and arts such as taekwondo and karate as “hard.” They said that the reason for this difference was that gong-fu utilized circular movements, while karate and taekwondo emphasized linear techniques. I was very young at the time, but I knew that this definition made little, if any, sense.

In China, no such delineation ever existed. Only in America. Yes, there are “internal” styles and “external” styles, but the differences between them have nothing to do with circular or linear techniques. Virtually all forms of bare-handed fighting utilize both. For example, xingyiquan, which is one of the “three sisters’ of the internal arts (the other two are taijiquan and baguazhang), is renowned for being very linear. Clearly, defining “hard” and “soft” has nothing to do with techniques being linear or circular…

Of course, what the magazines were referring to was the differences between the so-called “internal” and “external” forms. But to refer to “internal” arts as “soft” is a serious error. I recall that back in those days, taijiquan was very new to the West and the martial arts media was fascinated by it. Of course, all they saw was the popular Yang style, which is done completely in slow-motion. Performed well, the practitioners seem to be almost weightless and taiji teachers emphasized the need for relaxation, eschewing the use of muscular force. This led the journalists of the day to conclude that this mystical art bestowed upon its practitioners some kind of supernormal power that did not require any strength at all.

When baguazhang and xingyiquan were discovered by the media, the writers were awed and wrote many articles about how senior practitioners of these arts possessed what bordered on superhuman powers! Bagua and xingyi were still quite rare, but the taijiquan schools filled up very quickly with thousands of superman wannabees.

It would be many years before senior taiji instructors corrected these mistaken ideas. Even so, many devout believers refused to listen to them. So, this (and other) mistaken concepts about the “internal” arts persist to this day…