How Internal Martial Artists Understood Qi Cultivation During the First Golden age of Wushu.
One of my students who follows IS and my facebook page asked for more information about how internal martial artists understand Qi cultivation, so I’d like to share a short article to explain my thoughts on the matter.
First, we need to be completely clear, there is no one doctrine of Qi cultivation in the internal arts, in fact there are many different ideas which lead to different outcomes.
Since today there are more ideas than you can shake a stick at, I want to go back a century to the first golden age of Chinese internal arts during the Chinese republic.
At that time, most martial artists who wrote books that touched on Qi agreed that the Qi cultivation of martial arts comes from the Yi Jin Jing with only a few claiming a more direct link to Daoism.
I have not read everything in this genre, so I’m not qualified to talk about styles like Yin style Bagua Chen Taiji etc... I will just tell you what I know from Xingyi and Bagua manuscripts with which I am familiar.
Xingyi:
Xingyi is split into Hebei and Shanxi styles and they sometimes use different documents.
The big inner cultivation document of Shanxi style is called Nei Gong Si Jing/Four Classics of Nei Gong, which incidentally Tom Bisio and Josh Paynter translated back in the day and is still available on Amazon.
The Nei Gong Si Jing is especially concerned with prerequisites of body method and goes into great detail about position and use of body parts according to specific geographical features such as acupoints (Called cavities in martial arts). It also has an essay on circulating the small heavenly orbit by imagining various paths of Qi which move around the gallbladder and other channels.
In Hebei style there are few documents dealing directly with Qi cultivation, but several which detail the relationship between inner cultivation and Xingyi.
I’m a Hebei stylist so I’m more familiar with those, let’s have a look:
1: Quan Yi Shu Zhen: a book by Sun Lutang which purports to present a number of essays by famous masters, but some of which are actually fakes. This text suggests that Daoist practice comes from stillness and goes to movement, while martial arts go from movement to stillness. It suggests that there are three primary levels of martial arts inner cultivation:
change the bones,
change the sinews,
wash the marrow,
and:
refine jing and transform Qi,
refine Qi and transform Shen,
refine Shen and transform void,
It does not say how to achieve these levels.
2: Xue Dian’s book:
Xue Dian actually left behind Neidan instructions for martial artists called the Dantian filling method. I taught this course which dealt with that document (it also covers lots of martial Neigong and direct postures from the 19th century version of the Yi Jin Jing which was most popular):
https://immortalitystudy.gumroad.com/l/neigongintro
There are doubtless others, but texts like the Xingyi Quan Pu etc.. do not contain much information on the Qi cultivation topic.
2: Bagua:
Sun Xikun wrote a very important book about Bagua with a section on Qi cultivation and Daoism, he essentially echoes Sun Lutang’s idea that Daoism goes from static to moving and martial arts go from moving to static. He elaborates that these are meant to be paired practices.
Sun was an Yiguan Dao follower and a student of the Neidan master Zhao Bichen, so his method was deeply influenced by this. Sun recommended people practice slowly at first to develop Qi, then quickly later, he also has slightly more detailed Qi cultivation material than others, but only by a slim margin.
Other Bagua books from the era such as Jiang Weiqiao’s text and Huang Bonian’s document about dragon shape Bagua do not have much information about Qi cultivation at all.
Summary:
from what I’ve read in period texts (which is far from exhaustive) there is no well documented system for cultivating Qi in the internal arts from that time. Now, here is the part that some of you will not like, but it is very important:
internal martial arts do not come from Boddhidharma, the Five Animal Frolics were not created in Shaolin, and most of these stories are innacurate. The internal styles mostly developed from external styles which predated them and those external styles largely originated on the battlefield.
Initially many martial arts in China came from Henan province as a result of its centrality and the importance of the militaries there. Shaolin temples was influential on Henan martial arts, but we need to be circumspect.
The internal arts saw their greatest periods of development between 1850 and 1950, then between 1950 and the 1990s. For the last couple decades internal martial arts masters have been maintaining practice, but few improvements have been made to the styles.
Here is my breakdown of the most important eras of progress:
1850- 1911:
Just as a general phase, this is when the styles became popular and the initial famous masters of each style took disciples.
1911 – 1949:
publishing became very popular in the KMT government supported martial arts as a national strengthening exercise,
1950 – 1980:
martial arts continued to develop with many famous masters during that era. Many important books were written in the PRC and Republic of China which added more complex theory than earlier books.
1980 -2000: many of the old masters who were disciples during the first golden age began to die off, but many also wrote books and made other media content, advancing the arts and even introducing new ideas.
2000 – present: some disciples of old masters are still very good, but the internet has changed internal martial arts practice and what is popular today is far from the golden age of martial arts in China. Many new ideas are emerging, but many of them are designed for marketing purposes rather than protecting the heritage of the internal styles.
With that timeline, let’s talk about what we can definitely verify about Qi practice:
1: In the old days this was not well explained:
There is only scant explanation of Qi practice in old documents and sometimes when we see Daoist language the meaning may not be about Qi. For instance, the ren and du meridian falling and rising may refer to actual physical movement in the front and back of the body rather than the flow of Qi along a meridian. If you read classical Chinese and understand how symbolism changes subject by subject you will see that this idea has merit.
2: third generation masters began to talk about Qi in more detail as a result of their interactions and respect for Daoism:
Especially people like Sun Lutang and Sun Xikun (no relation) focused on Daoist approaches to practice, but it was because they were interested in Daoism, not because their masters passed down those methods. Xue Dian is the only author of an internal martial arts document that I’ve seen from that time who actually presents a Neidan method which can be positively compared to Daoism. The method in the Nei Gong Si Jing is totally wrong from the Neidan perspective, although it is interesting from the Dao Yin perspective.
4: Qi doctrines began to be elaborated on after cultural opening, but they are not complete:
There were many competing doctrines in books from the 80s and 90s, but most of them only explain the function of the Qi according to Chinese Medicine or Daoist ideas, without making a convincing direct explanation.
5: This does not mean that they didn’t or don’t practice Qi:
However, what is taught in books and what is taught to students are totally different matters.
Many martial arts schools have inner cultivation methods, maybe even most of them, but different teachers define them differently.
6: There is no standard cultivation method, so we have to judge them according to our own understanding:
We all have different metrics to judge practice, but the one I use is whether or not a convincing doctrine is established to explain Qi, then how robust it is under different circumstances.
For instance, I find that many texts either mention Qi in the context of blood circulation, or Neidan, but few combine both effectively.
Many present day practitioners also fancy themselves Neidan masters, but sadly they waste their time on practices that will only lead to superficial sensations and no deep change.
7: How should we practice:
In my opinion it is far better to learn martial arts on their own terms first and not mix them with Daoism unless you learn enough about Daoism to make it work. Having said that, if you want to cultivate Qi, the first and most important topic is calming your mind and unifying your intention with the postures since this is the most direct way to cultivate the “great harmonious one Qi,” a subject which is mentioned in the Xingyi Quanpu. After that the Qi in blood will naturally circulate and relax your body. This will lead to specific Qi sensations which can be variable, but especially feelings of the body “waking up” and perhaps sensations of Qi in the head, Dantians and even meridians. In my opinion this must be from the spine relaxing and nerve signals firing more effectively since I always experience those sensations when my spine relaxes in practice and they are different from those that occur in Neidan.
It is better not to lead the Qi in the body, I’ve heard so many masters say that, it is really important.
Let it spread out naturally and eventually it will penetrate the Baihui and move to the whole body, but that takes time and patience, it isn’t something you can do by pulling up your anus when you breath.
There is at least one martial arts Qi method from Neidan, that is Xue Dian’s method and I suspect Sun Xikun’s method also has a lot of Neidan in it, but every master at that time understood that Daoism is separate, but complimentary to martial practice, not that martial arts are Daoist.
Now just to hedge against some people who might say “Rob, you work for a Daoist non-profit which promotes the martial arts, are you saying martial arts are not Daoist?” We can understand Daoism at many levels, one of which is a cultural understanding. The Daoist religion or the Daoism of internal alchemy are subsets of a broader cultural Daoism which includes many facets of Chinese culture which are studied as Dao. It is important to get these ideas right as they will greatly help you attain clarity in practice, then you can get more of what you want and waste less of your time.
Behind the paywall today is an article about the relationship of Xingyi Quan to the cosmology of the five elements which is attributed to Liu Xiaolan, a famous past practitioner. That article could help you understand how ideas like the Dao and five elements can be used in many different ways, not exclusively in Daoism.