ABSTRACT
T’ai chi ch’uan (translated as ‘supreme ultimate fist’) is a Chinese martial art which became prominent in China and later in Europe during the twentieth century. The art is conceptually linked to the Yin Yang theory of cosmic emergence in the Confucian text IChing, later developed in Taoism and Neo-Confucianism. Despite some gaps in the known lines of transmission, most practitioners believe the founder of the art to have been a fourteenth-century Taoist boxer named Chang San-feng from the Wudang mountain region.
