ABSTRACT
Taiji (太极/太極, supreme ultimate/polarity) 1 is also spelled as T’ai Chi in Wade-Giles romanization using an apostrophe as aspiration mark, or more popularly as Tai Chi without this mark, or as Tai-chi or Taichi. It is used by most people to refer to taijiquan (太极拳/太極拳, also spelled as Tai Chi Chuan, T’ai Chi Ch’uan or Tai Ji Quan; literally, “taiji fist”), a popular form of nowadays physical exercise that has evolved from an ancient form of Chinese martial arts. As a term, however, it is in fact used to refer to several closely related notions of Chinese culture and philosophy that need stringent differentiation. So is taijiquan. In order to facilitate our discussion below in a rigorous way as desired, we follow ISO 7098:2015 (ISO 2015) to use taiji and taijiquan as their standard spellings. Note that ISO has adopted Hanyu Pinyin as the standard romanization of modern Chinese since 1982. We will follow this practice throughout this chapter to transcribe Chinese terms as necessary, especially for those that can find no equivalent counterparts in English, e.g., yin (阴/陰, shade) and yang (阳/陽, sun/sunshine). However, we also respect the convention of using taichi (mostly as tai chi in the past) as the short form for taijiquan and adopt taiji, instead, for the sake of brevity in a clear context that would cause no confusion between the two.
