Finding Baguazhang

How did you first encounter Baguazhang?

The first time I encountered Baguazhang was coming across a class at university run by Bill Tucker. I went to visit, and we discussed Xingyiquan and Baguazhang there.

That was the first encounter, but I didn’t really start practising until I came across an old friend of mine, who’d opened a Xingyi class, and I trained with him as much as I could over the next year. Finally I was reacquainted with Bill Tucker for a Xingyi seminar and then Luo Dexiu, at a seminar in Canterbury, Kent. We practised Xingyi — I think we did the two-person form An Shen Pao — and we also touched on Baguazhang. It was a long time ago.

That was just before the summer of 2000. Literally two weeks after that seminar I was packing my bags and flying to Taiwan, where I would spend the next eight years.

What drew you to it rather than another martial art?

It wasn’t that there was one particular thing about Bagua. I’d practised a lot of other martial arts, and it was almost like I finally found that one.

I had read some material on Baguazhang early on — I think before I moved to Taiwan — and learned that my teacher’s teacher, Hong Yixiang, had said in an interview that an ideal progression was traditional external kung fu (something like Shaolin), then Xingyi, then Baguazhang, and eventually Taijiquan.

Whether I read that before or after meeting Luo, I can’t remember, but I remember feeling that it was fate. I’d done other external martial arts, spent a year training Xingyi, and then ended up with the teacher of our lineage learning Baguazhang. Everything I’d done up to that point had led to that moment. I was drawn to it as a natural progression rather than by reading or experiencing one particular thing about the art.

Had you trained other styles before Bagua?

I started with a brief introduction to karate when I was very young. The school felt intimidating — full of grown-ups, very serious, bow in and bow out, uniforms and belts, teachers who weren’t approachable. It didn’t sit well with me.

Then I went to Western boxing at a local community centre and enjoyed it for a while as a teenager. The cardio was hard, but that isn’t what put me off. I stopped after sparring with a semi-professional boxer — I caught him a couple of times and he hit me very hard. I was injured and didn’t go back, which was a shame.

Then I found a kung fu school that felt right. Lots of forms, sparring that was basically kickboxing, a diverse syllabus — Wing Chun, mantis, wushu, and more — with hard training and gradings every three months. I stayed with them for years until university.

After university I found a club in my hometown. An old classmate from that kung fu school had opened his own club and was teaching Xingyi. Funny enough, the person teaching him Xingyi was Bill Tucker, who I’d met at university. I trained with my old friend for about a year and a half — visiting teachers, seminars, sanshou-style tournament tactics, and mainly Xingyi.

When did you start, and how regularly do you train now?

I started Baguazhang in 2000 with Master Luo Dexiu, and moved to Taiwan very quickly after that seminar.

For the first couple of years I trained about twice a week. Later I trained four times a week with Luo; classes were sometimes three or four hours long. We ended up with four evening classes and a Sunday morning class that became the Xingyi class. Luo wasn’t really promoting that session — he’d been teaching a small group of Taiwanese high-school students before military service — but people kept showing up, the class grew, and we just joined in.

These days I can’t do as much dedicated personal training, but I teach a lot — about six hours a week at the moment. Teaching is part of the learning: students to demonstrate on, space to work with ideas. Luo described getting as good as he did partly because he had a large class of capable students to practise with for decades. I’ve been training for about twenty-six years.

Was there a moment early on when you knew you wanted to continue?

There wasn’t a lot of overthinking. There were practical social and economic decisions around that time, but a main reason was meeting Bill Tucker and the people around that lineage, then meeting Luo as a person. They felt like the right type of people — nobody’s perfect, but there was something about their character.

Before Taiwan I’d also seen the BBC Way of the Warrior internal-arts episode featuring Hong Yixiang, with Luo in it as well, and Hong’s son. I wasn’t really aware then of the Daoism around the art; it stayed more as a subtext. The Yijing and the trigrams weren’t philosophy homework so much as something that suited how I already thought.

I liked the more internal side of training. I didn’t have to be an amazing cardio athlete — I could practise standing, circle walking, holding Santi in Xingyi, breathing, grounding, being heavy and relaxed at the same time, emptying the mind. It was a comfortable way to practise even though the training with Luo was hard and punishing. He was a formidable teacher; we trained harder almost to win approval that rarely came, and that expectation destroyed some people. In a Daoist way, you shouldn’t expect anything — and that suited me.

Even though I wasn’t a kung fu nerd or very academic about it, I just liked it. That was enough to know early on that I wanted to continue.