Four-Character Secret

The Four-Character Secret (四字秘訣, Si Zi Mi Jue) is the shortest fighting manual in the Tai Chi canon: four verbs that name everything the art does to an opponent’s force. The text is attributed to Wu Yuxiang, founder of the Wu(Hao) style and co-presenter of the classical corpus. The archive’s English translation, prepared by Steffan de Graffenried, was published by the Golden Eagle schools.[1]

The four characters

敷 (Fu) — Spread. Cover the opponent’s attack across its whole face; meet the force with structure instead of a point.

蓋 (Gai) — Cover. Press over the opponent’s bridge so their technique has no room to be born.

對 (Dui) — Confront. Meet the force directly and answer it, when structure and timing favor the confrontation.

吞 (Tun) — Swallow. Receive the incoming force into your own frame, absorb it, and return it from within.

Reading the text

The four verbs are not four techniques; they are four timing decisions about how to relate to force — over it, across it, against it, inside it. The sequence also reads as escalation: spread and cover manage the opponent before commitment; confront and swallow answer commitment after. Read this way, the Secret is the fighting gloss on the Treatise’s principle of yielding and issuing.

Lineage note

The text survives through the Wu family transmission, and its four characters appear in commentaries across the Yang and Wu(Hao) lines. The 2018 archive publication of the translation with source text follows the editorial method: the Chinese is presented beside the English so the reading can be checked.

[1] “Four Word Secret Formula (四字秘訣),” attr. Wu Yu Xiang, trans. Steffan de Graffenried, published by the Golden Eagle schools, 2018.