Lineage

Lineage is an important thing in tai chi in that your instructor's lineage will have a direct impact on what exactly he or she is teaching. Whatever it is you are learning will be the product of that lineage, or rather whatever branch of the greater lineage it happens to be. Of course, when it comes to styles, this is just commonsense. But even within a given style, differences develop through time as teachers combine what they have learned from their master with what they have learned from other instructors or from the experiences of life or their students. Sometimes a teacher or a family will move from one place to another, and that distance itself brings about changes. A good example is in Wu style taichi (the other Wu style- 吳Wú, not the one we mainly deal with in this blog). That Wu was founded in the north, centered in Beijing, but at a certain point in time, 2nd generation master Yuan Jianquan moved his family youth to Shanghai, and through time the form that stayed behind and that developed down south grew noticeably different, thus leading to a Northern Wu and Southern (or Shanghai) Wu style.

The More You Look, the Less You Know?

Knowing the lineage of your own teacher can, however, be a somewhat blinding experience. Why? Because most instructors explain their lineage in terms of how they fit on a given line, thus keeping you blind to other masters and/or lineages that might be related to yours. For example, if you look at the lineage provided on Liu Jinshu's website, you could would think that Master Liu and Pu Gong-da were the only heirs to Hao Shaoru's Wu Hao line, that would not be correct. Hao Yinru and Li Weiming were also both not only students of Hao Shaoru's, but both adopted by the childless Hao Shaoru, Hao Yinru even being given his name, Hao Yinru, by Hao Shaoru. Of course, Hao Shaoru had many other students as well. 

So, is Liu Jinshu trying to pull a fast one on people? No, he is giving the information people need to know where he stands in the Wu Hao lineage tree. It is what all masters/instructors do. To do otherwise would produce trees so complicated and gigantic that you'd be hard pressed to make things out. Most people, after all, just want to know the lineage of their teacher. They don't want or need to know about relatives, so to speak. If I want to know what lineage Hao Yinru is, I don't really need to know what lineage Liu Jinshu or Zhong Zhenshan is. To include more than the necessary basics makes things complicated. Sure, some people are curious about such things, but there are a lot of people to work into a tree. Just look at the simplified but somewhat more expansive tree I tried to make below:

I left numerous teachers and their lineages out, trying to just leave lineages that lead to masters who are well known these days, thus allowing you to see how they are related to one another and, at the same time, letting you see how distance creates differences. Let's see this in action by comparing examples from three different lineages. We'll start with Hao Pingshun's 96 style:

Hao Pingshun's style is quite similar to Hao Yinru's, and yet it is a bit different as his lineage is slightly different from Hao Yinru's. I guess you could call them tai chi first cousins. Now, look at the video below of Jimmy K Wong's form. JK Wong's lineage is still in the Hao branch, but rather than having a common ancestor in Hao Yueru, as Hao Pinghsun does, JK Won'g common ancestor goes back one more generation to the originator of the Hao line, Hao Weizhen. JK Wong's ancestry is a bit different, which you can spot right off the bat in the way he opens in the more traditional tai chi way, rather than the more closed Hao Yueru style. Below is a video of him doing the first 24 movements:

As you can see, the there are similarities between the first video and the 2nd, but the differences are noticeable. If you look at the following video of Zhong Zhenshan, the differences will be even greater since his lineage did not go through Hao Weizhen and thus remains a solidly Li family style, which thus makes the Yang heritage a bit more obvious, though different. This line logically enough does not use the word "Hao" in its name.

Just so you can compare, below I include a short video of Hao Shaoru doing the form:

As you can see, lineage matters even within the same tai chi style. If you wanted to learn the form in the style that Hao Shaoru did it, then you would want to learn from someone in that direct lineage, such as Hao Yinru, for example. Likewise, with that stylistic target, the further away you moved lineage wise, the less sense it would make. Why study the style of Zhong Zhenshan if you want to learn the form of Hao Shaoru. 

It is good, however, to see and understand, at least to some degree, the forms and movements of some of the related lineages. Sometimes you can better learn the mechanics of move better when you see it done in a different way by a more indirectly related line. A good example is Cloud Hands. It is one movement that is a bit murky in terms of recognizing, and thus learning, in the Hao Shaoru line. If you watch it done by Zhong Zhenshan, of the Li lineage, it seems to make more sense as it still retains some of the more universal that one sees in its Yang style incarnation while still retaining the flavor of its Wu3 incarnation.