Cai
採
Literally: pluck
Cai, pluck, is one of the eight gates of taijiquan: a sharp wrist tug that pulls the opponent's feet off the ground.
Quick Facts
About
Cai (採), in English pluck, is one of the eight gates of taijiquan. The source taiji-forum.com attributes to it a plucking quality similar to pulling a plant out of the ground, while egreenway.com compares it to tearing fruit from a tree with a sharp tug of the wrist. It is used the moment the opponent responds to received pressure by moving upward: the practitioner latches onto that force and pulls the opponent's feet off the ground. In the classical system of the Thirteen Postures, cai belongs with lie, zhou and kao among the four corner gates and corresponds to the trigram xun (wind). Unlike the basic gate peng, which must underlie the other three main gates lu, ji and an, the corner gates appear only in specific forms of the sequence; for cai, egreenway.com gives the posture Needle at Sea Bottom as an example. In tui shou practice, the eight gates serve to unbalance, displace or fell the opponent.