The Practice

20. The Ten Essentials of Yang Chengfu

太極拳十要 (tàijíquán shí yào) — oral teaching of Yang Chengfu (楊澄甫, 1883–1936), recorded by his student Chen Weiming.

Before the list, the most important thing:

They are not postures. They are not movements. They are 要領 (yàolǐng) — requirements, conditions. Things that must be present continuously, inside every posture and every transition. You do not “take” them and then move; you move inside them.

It is like saying “keep the spine long while you walk” — it is not a pose, it is a parameter running in the background.

The trap: if you take them as shapes, you make them once and freeze. You become 僵 (jiāng, rigid) — the exact opposite of the asked-for.

1. 虛靈頂勁 — Empty, living force at the crown

What: the crown of the head “hangs” lightly upward, as if a thread held it from above. The chin tucks a little, the neck lengthens.

The key is 虛靈 — “empty and living”. If you put force into the neck, it is gone. It must be intention, not contraction.

Why: opens the Yuzhen gate; lets the shen “rise”; gives the upper pole of the spinal stretch.

Mistake: chin lifted, or the opposite — gaze nailed to the floor.

2. 含胸拔背 — The chest contains, the back opens

What it is not: hunching. The most common mistake is to “collapse” the chest and round the shoulders forward. That is collapse, not 含.

What it is: 含 means “to contain, hold inside” — like holding water in the mouth without swallowing. The sternum simply relaxes and sinks a little; it does not jut out. 拔背 is the complement: the spine lengthens, the shoulder blades spread lightly outward.

Front gathers, back opens. Simultaneously.

Why, three reasons:

1. 氣沉丹田. If you push the chest out (挺胸), the qi rises into the chest: top heavy, bottom light, you lose the root.
2. The torso bow. 拔背 turns the spine into a drawn bow — stored power (see ch. 21).
3. 力由脊發 — “power is emitted from the spine”. Without this, you emit from the shoulders.

How to feel it: stand with your back against a wall. Bring sacrum and shoulder blades into contact without squeezing. Feel the sternum “yield” a finger’s width and the back “fill”.

The deeper point: 含胸拔背 is not a property of the chest or of the back. It is their relation. You cannot do it only in front.

And it does not have a fixed value — it breathes:

• In 蓄 (xù, gathering) the 含 deepens, the bow draws tighter
• In 發 (fā, emission) the back opens more, the bow releases

The width changes continuously. The principle never leaves.

3. 鬆腰 — Relax the waist

What: the lower back releases; the sacrum “hangs” downward; the pelvis in neutral (尾閭中正).

Why: 腰為主宰 — “the waist is the ruler”. It is the transfer point between legs and torso. A tight waist = a broken chain; the force of the legs reaches nowhere.

The link to #2: 拔背 is not done with the back. It is impossible locally — if you try to “open” the shoulder blades with the muscles, you tighten. The spine stretches from the two ends: 尾閭中正 from below, 虛靈頂勁 from above.

And: once the sacrum drops correctly, the sternum cannot jut out — if you push it out, the lower back hollows and the sacrum locks. That is, you do not “do” 含胸; it appears.

That is why in the Ten Essentials #2 and #3 sit side by side. It is not a coincidence.

4. 分虛實 — Separate empty and full

What: at every moment, weight must be cleanly distributed. One leg 實 (full), the other 虛 (empty).

The opposite: 雙重 (shuāng zhòng) — “double weight”. 50-50. The classic error, explicitly denounced in the Taijiquan Classic: 偏沉則隨，雙重則滯 — “when you sink to one side, you follow; with double weight, you stick”.

Why: without separation there is no mobility. You cannot turn, you cannot empty, you cannot change. They push you and you fall.

The generalisation: it is not only about the legs. It applies to every pair: arms, sides, top-bottom. Separation must be present everywhere.

And here the basic teaching returns: the loaded leg is yang now, yin in three seconds. The same leg. This is yin/yang in action.

5. 沉肩墜肘 — Sunk shoulders, dropped elbows

What: the shoulders relaxed, dropped, not lifted toward the ears. The elbows always with a sense of weight downward, never flung outward and never higher than the wrist without reason.

Why: lifted shoulder = qi rises into the chest = the connection to the lower body is lost. Also: with lifted shoulders, a push goes straight to your centre. With sunk shoulders, it is transferred into the ground.

The link to #2: a sunk shoulder is a precondition for 拔背. If you tighten the shoulder, the shoulder blade locks and the Jiaji gate will not open.

6. 用意不用力 — Use intention, not force

Perhaps the hardest.

What: the movement is directed by 意 (yì, intention/mind), not by 力 (lì, muscular force).

The chain-phrase: 意到氣到，氣到勁到 — “where intention goes, qi goes; where qi goes, power goes”.

The distinction 力 vs 勁:

• 力 (lì) = raw, local, muscular force. You tighten the shoulder and push
• 勁 (jìn) = organised, through-going force of the whole body. Nothing tightens locally

Tai Chi does not say “do not have force”. It says: stop producing force locally, so it can be organised globally.

The classical mnemonic: look for 綿裡藏針 — “a needle hidden in cotton”. Soft outside, extremely hard at the core.

Why it works (without metaphysics): mental practice of motor patterns is measurably effective; relaxing the antagonist muscles increases net force production; force transfer through fascia requires the absence of local tightening. The old language and the newer biomechanics point to the same place.

7. 上下相隨 — Above and below follow each other

What: the body moves as one. If the hand moves, the waist and the leg move. No isolated movement.

The classical line: 其根在腳，發於腿，主宰於腰，形於手指 — “the root in the soles, issued from the legs, governed by the waist, expressed in the fingers”.

The test: if you can move your hand without a single thing changing at your waist, you are not doing it.

8. 內外相合 — Inside and outside unite

What: the outer shape and the inner intention do not live separately.

The classical scheme of the “six unions” (六合):

• Three outer: shoulder↔hip, elbow↔knee, wrist↔ankle
• Three inner: 心 (mind) ↔ 意 (intention), 意 ↔ 氣 (qi), 氣 ↔ 力/勁 (force)

Practically: if the form is right but your mind is elsewhere, you are doing gymnastics. If the mind is there but the structure is broken, you are fantasising. You need both.

9. 相連不斷 — Uninterrupted, continuous

What: no breaks. 綿綿不斷 — “continuous like a thread unwinding from a cocoon”. 如長江大河，滔滔不絕 — “like the Great River, flowing without end”.

Why: if there is a clean boundary between two movements, there is a dead point — a moment of zero movement where the structure collapses and is rebuilt. That is exactly where they throw you in push hands. This is 斷勁 (broken power), the basic defect.

The positive formulation: one phase begins before the other ends. The descent already contains the rise.

And this is yin/yang itself: 陰陽相濟 — yin and yang mutually feeding each other. There is no clean yin that then becomes yang. Yin at its peak already gives birth to yang. The overlap is not a technical detail — it is principle #2 of chapter 2, expressed by the body.

10. 動中求靜 — Seek stillness within movement

What: the body moves, the mind quiets. And in reverse: in static practice (zhan zhuang), the body is still but everything moves inside.

Why Tai Chi is slow: slow movement lets you maintain all of the preceding nine at the same time. At speed, the system falls back on habits. In slow movement, every tightening is exposed.

The quality criterion: breath 細、勻、深、長 — fine, even, deep, long.

And here belongs the maturity of the system:

由大圈到小圈，由小圈到無圈
“From the large circle to the small; from the small to none.”

The beginner makes large, visible movements. The advanced makes them smaller. The mature does not seem to be doing almost anything — not because he has stopped, but because the circle has moved inside.

有圈之意，無圈之形 — “the intention of the circle is there, the shape of it is not”.

That is why the smaller the movement, the greater its effect: the energy is not dissipated in outer amplitude; it stays concentrated in the transfer route.

The essential about the Essentials

They are not ten. They are one, seen from ten angles.

#2 does not stand without #3. #9 does not stand without #4. #6 is impossible without #5.

If you break one, you have already broken the other nine.

21. The Five Bows

五弓 (wǔ gōng) — one of the most useful images for unifying everything above.

The body as five drawn bows:

The chief bow is the torso. The other four are subordinate to it. A bow that is not drawn stores nothing — and an over-drawn one breaks.

The link: 含胸拔背 (#2) + 鬆腰 (#3) is exactly how the central bow is drawn. 沉肩墜肘 (#5) draws the arm bows. 分虛實 (#4) determines which of the two leg bows is loaded.

And the 蓄/發: you gather = you draw the bows; you emit = you release. 蓄勁如張弓，發勁如放箭 — “gather power as if drawing a bow; emit it as if releasing an arrow”.

22. How it all ties together

Let us pull the text into one path.

1. One thing, two sides. The hill. Yin and yang are not forces that fight — they are the way of talking about a difference inside a unity.

2. So nothing has a fixed identity. The thigh, the leg, the Heart inside the back. Always “in relation to what”.

3. The body is read with this map. Back yang, belly yin. Outside yang, inside yin. And the meridians are nothing other than the drawn shape of this reading — yin rises, yang descends, closed loop.

4. The two midlines are the axis. Ren Mai in front, sea of the yin. Du Mai behind, sea of the yang. The small celestial orbit joins them: up the back, down the front, with the tongue bridging.

5. On the back there are three points where it sticks. Weilü, Jiaji, Yuzhen — and these are exactly the points at which three of the Ten Essentials aim: 鬆腰/尾閭中正, 拔背, 虛靈頂勁.

6. The organs give the functional dimension. Zang full and yin, Fu hollow and yang, five phases in two cycles — generation and control, positive and negative feedback. And the Triple Burner, which is not an organ but a relation — the final proof that the system thinks in relations, not in things.

7. And the Ten Essentials are all of this, executed.

• #4 (分虛實) is yin/yang in motion
• #9 (相連不斷) is the law of transformation: yin already generates yang
• #2 (含胸拔背) is the opening of the middle gate
• #1 and #3 are the two ends of the axis
• #6 (用意不用力) is the chain Shen → Qi → Jin
• #10 is the end of the road: the circle that has moved inside

The last thought

The system does not ask you to believe anything. It asks you to observe.

The phrase that holds the whole edifice is not metaphysical; it is methodological:

The question is never “what is this?” It is always “in relation to what, right now?”

If you keep only that, you can rebuild the rest on your own.

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APPENDIX — Glossary

Main sources of the tradition

• 黃帝內經 Huangdi Neijing (Inner Canon of the Yellow Emperor) — its two parts 素問 Su Wen and 靈樞 Ling Shu, c. 2nd century BCE. See the companion reader’s guide and the expanded reading of Suwen 1–5 on this site.
• 難經 Nan Jing (Classic of Difficult Issues), c. 1st–2nd century CE.
• 太極拳論 Taijiquan Lun (attributed to Wang Zongyue).
• 太極拳十要 The Ten Essentials, Yang Chengfu / Chen Weiming, early 20th century.

Related reading on this site

• What Is Chi? A Systems Engineer’s Reframing — the main site argument for reading qi as the flow of organization, which maps directly onto several claims in this guide.
• Mencius and Haoran Zhi Qi — the Confucian passage where qi becomes explicitly moral.
• The Neiye — the oldest Chinese inner-cultivation text.
• The Convergence Asymmetry — on where this tradition’s claims hold up and where they do not, in comparison with the others.
• Body Knowledge — the full set of guides and essays.