author: @sleepyfox
title: It's a kind of magic
date: 01-JUN-2026
Queen song references aside, the argument that I want to make about Tai Chi (more correctly written 'Taiji Quan') is that it is not magic. Let me explain. No, that will take too long, let me sum up...
Much of the language used by Taiji instructors worldwide, and I'm not just talking about in China here, but pretty much universally no matter what country you are in, is impenetrable. The words used are words like 'Qi', 'Song', 'Jing' and 'Peng'. Native language translations are little used, except for the posture names. Practices are often called by their original Chinese names, like Zhan Zhuang, Chan Sui Jin or Tui Shu. This is complicated by the fact that the transliteration of Chinese characters into the Roman alphabet has its own difficulties - see the whole confusion between T'ai Chi Ch'uan, Tai Chi and Taiji Quan already mentioned.
The problem is that even when we are careful, and we refer to things with their original Chinese characters (太極拳) or their correct Pinyin transliterations (Taiji Quan), there is still misunderstanding. Some recent examples from my experience: people referring to 'Thai Chi' - thinking that it is from Thailand, like Thai cooking; people thinking that the Chi in 'Tai Chi' is the same as the Chi in 'Chi Kung' (it isn't), people thinking that Taiji is somehow elitist because the most common translation of the name is 'Supreme Ultimate Fist' - the 'supreme ultimate' here refers to the Dao, the origin of the universe, not the martial art itself.
This problem is compounded when we talk of words like 'Chi' (more properly written 氣 or 'Qi'), which are often translated to the English as 'energy' or 'vital force' (from the French 'Élan vital') which is connected with Medieval mysticism, alchemy and religious ritualism. Even everyday Chinese people struggle with words like 'Jing' and 'Song' - often translated as 'force' and 'relaxation' respectively. These are bad translations that fail to capture the meaning of the words, which have no simple translations into English and which are not even understandable to day-to-day normal Chinese citizens.
The reason for this is that the language used in Taiji Quan, and many other traditional martial arts, is deliberately coded, obfuscated so that only initiates can correctly interpret it so as to hide the essential meaning of the art's secrets from outsiders.
Many of the concepts are explicitly linked to the mystical religious practices of the period, including medieval Chinese herbology, alchemy, geomancy and divination. Five Element Theory (五行 'Wuxing') permeates traditional Chinese arts as a world view and model used to explain the interactions between planets, forces and systems in society, the human body and even politics.
Of course, we had something similar in Europe with the four elements of the ancient Greeks, but this was displaced during the Enlightenment by the science of Chemistry and the discovery of the periodic table. Using Wuxing to explain martial arts today is like trying to explain the oxidation of metals in a modern-day chemistry classroom using the Greek elements of Fire, Air, Earth and Water.
Yet around the globe, we continue to do so. Taiji teachers continue to use language that would have been difficult to understand even for a 15th Century Chinese farmer, let alone a modern-day European office-worker.
This doesn't help.
Let's come back to 'Magic'. Magic is something unknown, unknowable. It isn't something we expect to see in the street in daily life, neither is it something we could expect to learn in an evening class in a local community college. The trappings of Magic places Taiji Quan on a pedestal, out of reach of the ordinary person - something obtainable only by heroes, not mere mortals like us.
This is a shame, because Taiji really isn't that difficult to learn, certainly easier than say learning the violin, which thousands of children do every day. I'd like to strip away some of the obscure lingo from the teaching of Taiji, and make it more understandable to the lay person, the European, the modern-day ordinary everyday person-about-town.
It is easy to misunderstand my motivation here: I don't want to take away from what a wonderful art and practice Taiji is, it has personally given me a lot, but it isn't magical, and it is both knowable and teachable, particularly to non-Chinese people. I want Taiji to be accessible to everyone, not hidden behind a veil of mysticism, esoteric medieval language and historic religious ritualism.
It's not that I exclude the traditional Chinese terms completely either, I still mention them for reference so that when people encounter them in literature or in talking to other practitioners they are not taken by surprise; I just rely on plain English definitions and modern scientific explanations.
There's something else that I don't like about thinking of Taiji as 'Magic', and that is the association that many of us have with Magic as referring to stage trickery and sleight-of-hand that is used to deceive, and possibly also entertain, an audience. Whilst Taiji does have some 'tricks', most of the things that it enables us to do are a function of skill derived through effort and hard work - the meaning of the term 'Kung fu'. To liken it to a trick demeans both it and us.
I hope that by embracing modern language, science and rationalism I make Taiji accessible to a wider audience. It may not rely on magical thinking, but it is still a kind of magic.