Issues surrounding the beginning of the YMAA form and Grasp Sparrow's Tails/Wardoffs in other long forms have come up a few times:
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Thanks to brer_momonga and Greg Jah for reminding me of this
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I wanted to ask what "Grasp Sparrow's Tail" means in the system you practice. Is it one move or a sequence of several? Is there a left one and a right one? If so do they have different applications or are they mirror-opposites of each other? That kind of thing.
Can you give a description of what's going on structurally, energetically, and in the applications? Maybe a link to the movement(s) being done in a youtube video?
To be clear, I'm not really interested in what the original way is, or who changed it and when. I realize that this is an interesting topic to people, but it's not what I'm asking about
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So that's the question. Below is my initial thinking on the question.
It looks to me like part of the issue which hasn't been fully addressed yet is the following:
In the YMAA system Grasp Sparrow's Tail Right and Left are two different moves, each with its own set of applications. The moves do contain a few energies each (I'm not describing this to save space), but those energies don't make up the sequence Peng, Lu, Ji, An. It looks like in a lot of other systems "Grasp Sparrow's Tail" is used to refer to the sequence of Peng, Lu, Ji, and An.
In the YMAA form, the Peng, Lu, Ji, An sequence is called "Wardoff, Rollback, Press, and Push Forward", or "Peng, Lu, Ji, An". Kind of weirdly, one thing that contributes to the 108/113 issue Greg mentioned is that the Peng, Lu, Ji, An sequence counts as 4 separate moves in Part 1 of the form, and only one move each time it happens after that. I think most forms with 108 moves always count this sequence as one move.
There is no Wardoff Left in the YMAA form. Grasp Sparrow's Tail Left in the YMAA form looks a bit like what's going on in Wardoff Left from some other forms though.
Here's someone who says they do Yang Family Style showing GST, which appears to consist of Peng, Lu, Ji, and An: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Njz6S62lpTc
And another person showing GST as those four energies, who only says it's Yang Style: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=noK1mc5dWaM
Here's someone in the YMAA system (Dr. Yang) doing GSTR (2:26), GSTL (2:28), and the Wardoff, Rollback, Press, Push Forward sequence (2:30). During Wardoff the right forearm is usually parallel to the ground- this doesn't come out clearly in this video where the form is being done with Fa Jin, and the elbow quickly sinks as Rollback starts.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wnc12Xl59Uw#t=2m24s
Thanks for your input.