Wudang Tai Chi Sword

I’ve posted on this form more than a dozen times. Pulling it all together now: This is a combined form with elements of both Wudang and Tai Chi sword. That is, it combines postures from the traditional Wudang sword routine with movements in the traditional Yang style Tai Chi sword form.

Master Liang's video is excellent.

Master Liang’s video is excellent.

Three YouTube videos were helpful to me in learning the form:

In addition, Jesse Tsao’s instructional video is invaluable for the excellent demonstration, for learning the names of the movements, getting the details right, and for multiple views of the form both front and back.

Best resource: Master Tsao's video

Best resource: Master Tsao’s video

Here is the List of names in Chinese (both characters and Pinyin). My friend and teacher Long Feng, who introduced me to the form and provided the essential in-person teaching time, uses a recording of some wild, tribal-sounding music that includes the names. I haven’t found this recording anywhere in the Web–don’t even know where to look. But if you can find it, it’s fun to do the form with the names. I like it better than the music in any of the videos I’ve seen.

The 49 steps in Standardized Wudang Sword form, handwritten

The 49 steps in Wudang Tai Chi Sword form, handwritten

I worked my way through Master Tsao’s instructions and posted notes on each of the eight lessons. I don’t know if these notes help anyone but me, but they are here:

Wudang Sword Notes: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8

All posts on this form are tagged Wudang Sword. And finally, below, click to see the traditional Wudang sword form for comparison. Exciting form, that! looks hard.

4 thoughts on “Wudang Tai Chi Sword

  1. Funny story, I saw a video of this form and just knew I had to learn it! I went out and found myself a San Feng Wudang tai chi master to learn sword from, and, well, surprise! Different form! Anyway, I’ve been happy with my Wudang forms and since went on to learn Yang 32 sword, only to very lately realize that the above form is Yang with some Wudang style in it. Glad to see someone else come out and say it, I wonder where it came from originally? I would still like to learn it one day. Thank you very much for all your notes and insight, I just found your website and love it.

    • Hi, KD. I’d like to learn the traditional Wudang sword form you learned. You were lucky to find a Wudang master to learn it from. I think that Wudang Tai Chi sword was probably the work of Li Deyin. He has made a good online instructional video. Thanks for stopping by.

      • Hi Elizabeth. I’m learning Wudang taichi and kung fu online from Master Bing at https://www.wudangdao.com/ (and yes, I am lucky!). He’s a thoughtful and patient teacher and provides lots of supplementary videos and notes to help with online learning. We’re doing fu chen and tai chi 108 until September 2021, I’m not sure what will be next, maybe dao? He has been consistently teaching 1 tai chi class, 1 kung fu class, and then there’s a monthly cultural tea time that’s open to everyone. Additionally, he has other masters teaching calligraphy and guqin.

        I will look up the Li Deyin tutorial!

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s