Beware the Jabberwock, my son!
The jaws that bite, the claws that catch!
~ Lewis Carroll
A while back I was asked why we don’t use the tiger claw hand in Tai Chi. Well the simple answer is we do!
Largely we hold our hands in what Cheng Man Ching called “The Beautiful Hand” or the “Tile Palm” because the fingers overlap like the tiles on a roof.
The tile palm is Yin (and hence sung) it allows energy to be drawn naturally to the hands sensitizing them, which of course improves Tai Chi movement overall and really rockets push hands sensing energy.
But if we add a little Yang energy into the tile palm it instantly tenses forming a tiger claw, you see always there but hidden from sight.
That claw can rip, rake, grasp and even palm strike with many applications. Some of the more obvious in the CMC form are roll down, fist under elbow, and drag hands. With a little fun experimentation the claws quickly reveal themselves (even more so in Chen style with its basis in silk reeling).
In push hands it’s so easy to flow straight into a tiger claw application. This shouldn’t be surprising claws were once one of our primary primeval weapons and as I found out with Natalie one we still naturally fall back on.
A few years ago we were training in the ‘Emperor Chin Combat Method’, part of which is throwing out applications to random attacks till physical exhaustion fogs the mind and you discover what works most naturally for you. In both our cases constant tiger claw ripping, as old as the hills and as atavistic as it gets!
A great way to physically practice with your claws would be on a Tai Chi single armed wooden dummy, you don’t see them so much now but they were popular back in the 1920s.
A little esoterica:
Back In The 1960s Grandmaster Alan Lee wrote an article about ‘Jhiu Sa So’ or ‘The Poison Hand’. A training process where a mix of various herbs (up to seventy) are massaged into the hands and nails for a very long time, the practitioner counteracting this poison by taking a daily antidote eventually gaining immunity.
As the hands take in the herbal mix the fingernails are allowed to grow long, gradually they change colour due to the poison, turning a smoky grey. As a part of this process the nails become hard like steel.
If such person were to scratch you drawing blood the poison in their skin and fingernails mixes with your blood causing quick or delayed death depending on the mix.
He speaks of a famous “Lady of the Poison Hand” in mid-China some seventy years before who was reputed to have slapped twenty bandits, later upon their unscheduled flight home died of what doctors described as a kind of muscle cancer. It’s a story evidently well known and often repeated in China.
Make of that what you will...but beware of ladies with grey nail varnish!
Thanks for reading
Mathew
Facebook post 13/07/24
Additional note:
“They were unbelievable, these tiger people! And she was lovely, but so terribly deadly!”
If you’re curious about the strangely beautiful and otherworldly oil painting it’s ‘The Tiger Woman Of Shadow Valley’ by Harold W McCauley, used to illustrate Berkley Livingston's 1949 story of the same name.
McCauley (1913-1977) illustrated pulp fiction magazines and for a while the pioneering Nightstand Library. The era was a little more puritanical than it is now and receiving a police raid tip off many of his best works were incinerated in a basement furnace.
If he looks familiar it’s probably because after the army he worked in Sundbloms studio and to help out posed as the model for the original Quaker Oats Man.
