conversations.from: human
conversations.value: What is a description for a book titled Mastering Yang Style Taijiquan about Chinese, Louis, Swaim with the genre: Sports & Outdoors, Individual Sports?
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: Louis Swaim lives and practices in Oakland, California. He has also translated an earlier taijiquan manual, Yang Chengfu: The Essence and Applications of Taijiquan (North Atlantic Books, 2005). He received his masters degree in Chinese history, Mandarin, and Classical Chinese at U.C. Berkeley, and did additional language study at the Inter-University Program for Chinese Language Studies. He has been a taijiquan practitioner for over thirty years.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: What is the first three paragraphs for this book?
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: Mastering Yang Style Taijiquan
  The Taiji Classics are beguiling and at times profound documents. Together, they appear to be made up of carefully written expository pieces and recorded bits of oral tradition. Parts of the oral tradition survive as rhymed verse that was probably chanted and memorized by the earliest masters, some of whom may have commanded marginal literacy. Some of the expository writings appear to have remnants of these mnemonic formulae within them, and these remnants sometimes present the greatest challenges for translation.
  Other translation issues are somewhat less arcane than those addressed above. I will now discuss some of the issues of structure, words, and phrases as they appear in each of the five classics.
  Confucius, according to Zhu Xi, saw that Zengzi had understood the individual principles in things and events, but was concerned that Zengzi might not have known that all these individual principles formed a unity as the "oneness" of Principle.... Comparing the "oneness" of Confucius' Way to "a piece of thread" and the principles that Zengzi perceived in things and events to traditional Chinese coins which had a hole in the center, Zhu Xi said, "One must first accumulate a bunch of loose coins before one can proceed to string them together with a piece of thread."31
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: What is another paragraph?
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: The same passage regarding the balance scale contains the famous admonition to avoid being "double weighted." There is a great deal of discussion among Taijiquan practitioners about exactly what this means, but the most helpful commentary that I've read is Meng Naichang's:
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: What is the last four paragraphs?
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: The same passage regarding the balance scale contains the famous admonition to avoid being "double weighted." There is a great deal of discussion among Taijiquan practitioners about exactly what this means, but the most helpful commentary that I've read is Meng Naichang's:
  Thus, of the myriad transformations of things, there is none that he cannot match; of the hundred changes of affairs, there is none to which he cannot respond.53
  The last text to consider is commonly known as "The Song of Pushing Hands."56 This text is a grouping of six seven-character phrases. The wording is extremely economical. The phrase about upper and lower following one another refers to the integration of one's upper and lower body. Meng Naichang's commentary on this line is:
  Conversely, of course, if one avoids this weak point, one's partner or opponent has difficulty advancing and seizing the advantage.