No, I am not going to promote Tai Chi Chuan as either a cult or religion. Sadly, Tai Chi sometimes becomes a little bit cultish. Sometimes a little bit more than just a little. Some teachers seem to love being the center of the world, and sometimes they preach about the Dao like Tai Chi was a religion.

There’s a whole lot to discuss about the state of some Tai Chi schools and organizations, but I won’t linger in this spiritual swamp. Maybe this is something for another time. Here and now, I want to give some food for thought, namely by giving a few points about how religion has influenced Chinese martial arts and Tai Chi in particular.

You see, the art of Tai Chi is more a product of religion than most practitioners would be willing to accept. When people think about Chinese thought, they think mostly about intellectual philosophy and logic thinking completely separated from religion. And Tai Chi people prefer to look at Tai Chi as philosophy and to keep religion far apart. This is probably the best approach today, but history tells another story.

Chinese philosophers are mostly well know as “thinkers”, and not as practitioners of religion. But this assumption that Chinese were more philosophers and thinkers, than people of religion, is a flawed assumption. Even Zhu Xi (1130—1200), the philosopher who resurrected Confucianism as a state doctrine, was deeply religious. There are documents showing that he prayed in a Buddhist temple, in front of a Confucius altar and performed Taoist rituals on the very same day.

Yes, all of the three big schools of thought in one and the same day. In China, people didn’t really belong to one religion, instead religions were mixed, forming a sort of a big family of religions. And the philosophies mostly known as intellectual thought, as confucian, were, at least partially, understood and practiced as religions. (For instance, in this article I mention briefly how the Taoist concept of “Tai Yi”, the primordial One, or Great Unity, comes from religion.)

Sometimes I call Tai Chi “a physical expression” of Daoism or of Chinese philosophy, and sometimes I call it “Daoism in movement”. When you practice Tai Chi, you don’t need to understand philosophical concepts intellectually, you don’t even need to even have heard about “qi”. Tai Chi is an exercise, training, it’s your body that does the philosophical practice.

But how about religion, if you practice Tai Chi, do you practice religion? In a sense – yes. In China, health practice, spiritual practice as meditation, prayers and rituals and search for enlightenment, also melted together. And in martial arts, health practice and religious rites melted together with military exercises.

This might be hard for western people to understand, we like to keep everything separated. So how could this happen? Well, generals and soldiers were obviously religious as well. Here in the west, when we study Chinese history and culture, we often underestimate how religious people were in the old China.

But before getting deeper into the “how”, in how people were religious, we should go back a step. Remember that I said they were mixed. Chinese philosophy and different religion were all mixed. This is also something you need to understand when we speak about Tai Chi as philosophy and expression of philosophy. The common appreciation of Tai Chi is that this is a Daoist art. I am sorry, but this is just not true. Tai Chi is very much a blend of Daoist, Buddhist and Confucian thought. It’s a blend not because someone wanted to mix things together, this blend is not about anything other than that this blend is the nature of traditional Chinese thought. As Tai Chi developed it developed by people that were already influenced by different types of exercises from different traditions.

However, if we speak about Confucianism in Tai Chi, the influence is not religious, but philosophical and theoretical. Not only morality and ethics are very much influenced by confucianism, but also the attitude of keeping a straight face and not to show emotions. After all, Tai Chi is called the Gentleman’s art of Chinese pugilism, and there’s a reason. In China, this ideal of “Junzi” or being and acting as a “gentleman,” was a very strong ideal that all people with some kind of education strived towards.

And on the other side, the concept of emptiness and the mind-state in Tai Chi and in Daoist practice in general, is actually very much influenced by Buddhism and Buddhism meditation. And of course, the main concepts and the “scientific” approach of how we apply balance, structure and different angles against an opponent come from Daoist science and numerology. So again, Tai Chi is very much a blend of different thoughts and traditions, both older and more modern.

In ancient China, different religions impacted people in different differently. All of these systems of thought, both in their philosophical and religious versions, had quite an impact on people, on how they thought and how they acted.

Confucianism had a great impact on how people met and communicated with each other. Taoism had an impact of how people treated the nature and the surroundings, and also how they treated and took care of themselves. Buddhism had an impact on all of this.

But Buddhism also taught one aspect of ethics much stricter than any other religion. This is about the fact that Buddhism teaches that you should not kill, that you should not hurt and not cause suffering.

So how does this impact Chinese martial arts? Martial arts is about fighting and violence, are they not? No, not exactly. If you for instance look at the character “wu”( 武) in “Wushu” (武术 ), or “war/martial art”. The character wu, 武, means protect. There’s a difference between fighting and protection. The Chinese martial arts were created for protection, to protect yourself, your family, your house, and to protect others.

China is a big country, and people could not not always get protection from the state or the cities. Soldiers and people of law were not always available and it could take time to get help. So people had rely on themselves and on each other. Tai Chi Chuan is an art that different types of people have relied on for protective purposes. It has been used by upper class people protecting their mansions from burglars, it has been used by bodyguards and by security personnel protecting people, roads and markets.

I have mentioned this before: Sun style Tai Chi creator Sun Lutang had a school in Beijing training body guards and one of his more well known students, Gu Ruzhang, was one of them. Like some other Tai Chi teachers he ended up as a military martial arts instructor.

But this was just meant as a side-note to give some context. Let’s continue discussing Tai Chi as a martial art and the influence of religion. So the nature of Chinese martial arts is protection. Now, if you look at Tai Chi Chuan as well as many other Chinese martial arts, they rely heavily on Qinna, or “seize and control”, takedowns, throws etc.

Tai Chi Chuan especially is all about control, how to control and manipulates the opponent’s balance and structure. Sure, we have punches and kicks, but the main emphasis is about control. Joint manipulation is preferred over striking, takedowns and tripping is preferred over hard throws.

I mentioned Buddhism and Tai Chi in this article. Buddhism was very widespread in the Chen village and the whole area, and it was also not far from the Shaolin temple. In the old days, before the civil war in the beginning of the 20th century, there were many Buddhist temples around the Chen village. So we can say that, despite being labeled “Daoist”, Buddhism influenced Tai Chi quite a lot, especially around that time when Yang Luchan learned Tai Chi Chuan from the Chen family.

Again, Buddhism teaches that you should not kill, not hurt and not cause suffering. This was also what the body guards and the security personnel was taught, and maybe this is the reason why Tai Chi was especially popular amongst people with this kind of profession, as it combined the use of weapons with seizing and controlling an assailant as main focus instead of killing.

But people protecting silk and gold along the Silk Road would still rather prefer to catch robbers than kill them so they could bring them in front of a local judge and receive a reward. Tai Chi knowledge would make it easier to not kill and maim. The system of the Chinese society was designed to emphasize and maintain law and order in quite a strict manner, as well as to help the people maintain the ideals by the religions they believed in.

So to conclude this article, the mind-set, the meditative practice, as well as the prominent attitude of gently controlling an opponent rather than damaging and hurting, are all different aspects that can be linked to Chinese religions. That doesn’t mean that you should treat or practice Tai Chi as a religion, but this knowledge will give you a better context and understanding of many things that could feel a bit strange or mystical for a western practitioner.