This work explores the fundamental questions surrounding the proposals of tai chi chuan with a tone and perspective that have not been tried until now.

Thirty years have passed since Peter Sloterdijk asked: “Isn’t the Tao, in the mouths of Western authors, a kind of wild card that is played when it comes to promising more than one can deliver?” The same amount of time that tai chi chuan has needed to become the most popular form of exercise imported from Asia in the West.

Without avoiding the fact that “the East represents one of the highest and most inaccessible forms of European romanticism” (E. Said), and based on the fact that “to know is to ask”, this work explores the fundamental questions surrounding the proposals of tai chi chuan (body, health and martial arts) with a tone and perspective that have not been tried until now.

Raising the gaze addresses these major issues from the outside in order to encounter the paradoxes that run through them, daring to seek clues, criteria and elements of translation from within their practical proposals.