Alchemy is ridiculous in every culture it has popped up in. It's pseudoscience (science hijacked by schizophrenics). If you apply it to tai chi or something, you have to apply it to everything. Hence, you must brush the crumbs off your pants five times, even though one swipe would have sufficed to clean the mess. If you're driving your car and you make a right turn, you'd better **** well turn that wheel five times fully and make five complete circles, because if you don't, you'll throw off your delicate internal chemical balances. You don't cook chemicals in your veins, or control the functions of your liver with breathing techniques, or do irreparable damage to your kidneys by having bad coordination during your single whip movements. You ward off and push to ward off a punch and push.
Sure, the alchemy predated Tai Chi, but I guaran****tee that it had precisely di
ck to do with the structural formulation of the art. I'm sure someone very invested in the alchemical society imposed upon the art his alchemical prejudices to make it more personalized. But come on.....you show me a chemical formula that delineates how the body should move during tai chi, which prescribes motions like ward offs, etc by the various movings and interminglings of hydrogens and carbons, and maybe I'll change my mind. Does hemoglobin react differently to four ward offs as opposed to five? And during which part of the fifth ward off does the hemoglobin begin to realize that something significant has happened?
Mathematics has nothing to do with the order (?....ever hear of entropy?
) of the universe. The universe works a certain way, but often doesn't work that way upon further analysis (I've always preferred Wheeler's description of a "higgledy-piggeldy" universe). You can describe it with mathematics (always fractionally imprecise--take Newton's gravitational principles and Einstein's observations of MErcury). You can describe ti with language. But mathematics is a languange man uses to describe numeric things---all of which are notions exclusive to man. Pythagoras was a wizard with numbers. But he was also a fool who believed numbers had a mystical, divine significance. His findings actually contradict TAoist numerology. So how does one prove which is correct? Pythagoras or Taoist numerology? Can you prove these things? Of course not? So how do you prove which is correct, when you have two unprovable, contradictory things?
Considering the applicablity of Pythagoras's mathematical findings, I'm sorry to inform you that he's far more relevant to today's society than any Taoist sect's numerological nonsense. Hell, I even like his philosophy better.
But I still regard him with mild amusement at his expense.