Scott Meredith - Tai Chi PENG Root Power Rising

Don't preach at me! I have no love
For images, old gods, or prophetic words.
I want to talk to Utnapishtim!
Tell me how.

- The Epic of Gilgamesh

Why another book, right on the heels of JUICE Radical Taiji Energetics? And, is this book merely a recapitulation of the video companion, Tai Chi PENG Surfing the Soft Wave? This book differs from its elder brother, JUICE, in three main qualities:

• Traditional
• Focused
• Practical

Thats not saying its better just different.

Traditional: In JUICE, I coined neologisms, cooked up weird acronyms, and played games with the language. I felt it was amusing, and it was my baby version of the crazy wisdom thing where you jolt people by presenting venerable truth in offbeat terms. Some readers didnt agree, but whats the use of a book that merely parrots the same old stuff? Anyway, in this book I use only normal words that will be reassuringly familiar to even the most head-in-the-sand Tai Chi traditionalist.

Focused: The first book was full of incredible anecdotes, hilarious asides, intimate personal memoirs, scathing cultural commentary, scintillating humor, profound quotations whereas this book is pretty straight up. Its just the facts (sprinkled with a little glitter here and there).

Practical: JUICE is style independent, and treats broad stuff like mindset and epistemology of internal martial arts, but this book presents working drills based on a particular style of Tai Chi the 37-pose sequence created from the Yang family system by grandmaster Zheng Manqing (ZMQ37). Even in JUICE, I used that as my display window mannequin for examples of a specific pose or practice, but overall JUICE is above the style wars. And so is this book. I just present the work-a-day practice drills that have done the heavy lifting for me, and you can take it or leave it. In any case, theres more hands-on work for your daily routine than youll find in JUICE, all based on the standard ZMQ37 framework.

This book is more closely aligned with my video: Tai Chi PENG Surfing the Soft Wave. The video is also traditional, focused, and practical. But this book isnt merely a blind transcription of the video. Rather, its a superset, covering more detail on many interesting points than would be possible without doubling the videos length. And though the drills presented here are identical to those on the video, the different format makes it a useful secondary reference for people with different learning styles. Some things I could only touch on in JUICE were expanded and shown graphically in the video, and now in turn, some things I only mentioned briefly in the video are developed further in this book.

Im still talking about exactly the same thing, in the video and in both books. Its all one thing. The different approaches and terminologies (across JUICE, on the one hand, and this PENG book and its companion video on the other) are two fingers pointing at the same moon. I could say theyre divergent routes up different faces of the same mountain to a single summit, but even that doesnt go far enough. In fact, all of these materials are talking about exactly the same thing.

In JUICE, I used my own spin on the language of the Taoist energy hierarchy, specifically that of Xingyiquan master Guo Yunshen. With this PENG stuff, Im sticking to the plain terms of traditional Tai Chi PENG energy in particular. But the experience of it is consistent either way. Its three things: a hard wave transitioning to a soft wave that ends in an empty state - no matter how you slice it. It isnt two tracks up the same mountain, its differing views of the same track and the same scenery. Its like photographing that one landscape using ultraviolet, then again using night enhancement, and then again with infrared. Three different-looking pictures result - but they are all one place. There is nowhere else to be.