太極, Tai chi, Tai ji

Tai Chi,

It has spread far and wide with many people having seeing it in form or another.

To me own surprise many people only interpret it as that slow moving thing that old people do in the park. Some recognize it as a form of exercise you do to treat your body, some treat it as a martial art, and some treat it as a way of life.
All of these are correct.

From the time of its origin to the present time, Tai Chi has been interpreted, misinterpreted, altered and retained its forms. This is unavoidable so long as people are individuals. values, meanings and applications will change along with people as their environment changes too. Change itself is a universal constant after all.

One thing I wish to clarify is the misconception of the words 太極 themselves. It is read as Tai Chi, or Tai Ji, depending whether your vocalising in Mandarin or Cantonese or another Chinese dialect. But the translation itself is 'The Absolute'

Many people believe ,'Chi' is 'air' or 'energy' or spirit'.   If you purely just look at the word in terms of pure alphabet, its debatable as 'chi' is the phonetics of a different language system entirely, thus more than half the meaning is lost unless you look at it from the original language. However for several years, 'Chi' has been equated to spirit, and even 'ki' in Japanese for those who are familiar with it, and recently to avoid confusion they've adopted Qi instead.
China has been busy standardizing or modernizing pin yin...

But back to Tai Chi, " The Absolute", it is as it says, the absolute. However many will disagree about that, which is understandable as not many people are able to grasp the full meaning of Tai Chi, as it is one of the many mediums to understand the laws governing the universe. This is expressed by the common symbol 

which will be further elaborated in another post.