A short interview from 2011.
Master Tan
What is Chi?
“So, in the Chinese chi means air, gas or breath. So, the study of chi or Chi Kung, which is called, is how to breath to get maximum health and protect yourself from minor deceases. Yeah. So, we train in Chi Kung to protect ourselves from illness.
You ask me how I see Kung Fu in a hundred years time?
Well, so, people who study Kung Fu and take it as their art or there are people who just take it for fun. Well, if we are taking it seriously as that we’re promoting over here in Nam Yang, we are just like in a family and trying to study the art among ourselves helping each other to promote and improve on the art. So, if we keep on with this procedure I’m quite sure in a hundred years we still be doing a lot of things that we are doing now. Over here in Nam Yang we have kept to the original and traditional Shaolin Kung Fu that was practice maybe a thousand or more years ago, but, we are still practicing the original and traditional art here. So, we are not doing our way with a lot of things like young people are trying to do a way with and hopefully the effect of this will keep on and even in a hundred years time we’ll still be the same.
All right, after so many years teaching Kung Fu I find that a lot of people comes to learn Kung Fu with different objectives and some people simply don’t understand what they are going for. So anyone who wants to learn Kung Fu have to be very committed, they have to be very patient and it is a life-long art where by you can improve through the years. So the longer you do it the longer and the better you’ll have. Is not something that you can take in a year or two, be prepared to commit yourself to ten, twenty, or thirty years of training to expect a master of something important in Kung Fu.
In our training of Kung Fu we breath very differently from the ordinary breathing where people just breath in straight into the lungs, what we’re doing is to breath in into the diaphragm whereby the diaphragm is a very big volume in our body, very, very much bigger than the set of lungs that we have . We are breathing in fresh air which is maybe about five times more than what if we breath into the lung. Now, the habit of that as well as having the tongues against the palates will make our chi circulates in our body in a small micro cycle, so, even if we are not practicing Kung Fu we still can breath in this way. Even when you are swimming or jogging or whatever you’re doing this is a form of internal breathing whereby you get the most oxygen into your body which the heart needs and that brings you extra health.”