What are the six harmonies?

Some good comments have been coming in recently since I’ve been talking about a few hot button subjects and readers want to share opinions. I try not to write long responses in the comments since it is more useful to make them into articles for everyone to enjoy if they wish to.

This article is about the six harmonies in Xingyi practice.

Let me start by stating where I fit into the Xingyi world:

I’m a student of Hai Yang who is a lineage holder and standard bearer of a number of lineages of Hebei style Xingyi, especially Zhang Zhaodong’s style which was passed to him by his grandfather Yang Qinglin, an inner door disciple of Zhang.

I have also been lucky enough to be introduced to and practice with major masters from Tianjin and Hebei province from Sun style, Fu Jianqiu branch, Li Nengran and Liu Qilan branches. In 2011 I was invited by by Shifu to Hengshui city Hebei on a group trip to make a proper tomb for Li Nengran as well as participate in a Bai Shi student receiving ceremony held by master Cui Jieli, one major inheritor of the old Li Nengran style of Xingyi. During that time I also met Li Nengran’s living descendant, so while I am not a practitioner of all these branches of Hebei style, I have seen many of the representative masters of Hebei style in person and had a chance to talk to many of them about practice.

The reason I mention this is not to try to position myself, but instead just verify that I’m qualified to talk about Hebei style Xingyi from an educated perspective, having followed master Yang since 2005 and seriously studied the Li Cunyi, Zhang Zhaodong and Xue Dian branches with him and spent hundreds of hours in private conversation about the subject.

The topic today is about how to interpret the concept of the six harmonies and behind the paywall we will keep going with the Huang Dabai chapter of Fang Dao Yu Lu a famous twentieth century internal alchemy document consisting of interviews with living masters in Taiwan.

1: Liu He Origin:

Zhuangzi talks about the six harmonies as effectively being six directions occurring in nature. They are forward and back, left and right and up and down.

These are the basic planes of movement and can also be used to define heaven, earth, and the four cardinal directions among other things. Chinese culture is highly symbolic and the six harmonies are too.

2: Liu He in martial arts in general:

Liu He is used in various martial arts, not just Xingyi, but of course it is well known in the ancestor style of Xingyi called Xin Yi Liu He Quan (heart and mind six harmonies fist) which is practiced by Hui Muslims in Henan province (many in my wife’s home town actually, they make great lamb soup).

The Xinyi Liu He Quan Pu (martial manual passed down to lineage holders in old time) says of the six harmonies:

“the hands and feet harmonize, the shoulders and space between the inguinal region harmonize, the elbows and knees harmonize, the eyes and heart harmonize, the heart and Qi harmonize, the Qi and strength harmonize.” In the text they do not explain what Qi means, we’ll get around to that in a bit.

Another martial art which uses the Liu He is Hua Yue Liu He Ba Fa Quan which believes the six harmonies are:

• the body harmonizes with the heart,

• the heart harmonizes with the mind,

• the mind harmonizes with the Qi,

• the Qi harmonizes with the Shen,

• the Shen harmonizes with movement,

• movement harmonizes with emptiness.

I’m lucky enough to have studied with Albert Chen, an indoor disciple of Chen Yiren, the most important modern teacher of Liu He Ba Fa after Wu Yihui who introduced the style to the general public. I asked him how to interpret the term Qi and he told me that it should be thought of as 气势 to have an imposing manner, not as Qi in the meridians.

Now let’s talk about Xingyi:

In Xingyi the Liu He are understood as:

Three external harmonies:

• the hands harmonize with the feet,

• the elbows harmonize with the knees,

• the shoulders harmonize with the inguinal region,

Three external harmonies:

• the heart harmonizes with the mind,

• the mind harmonizes with the Qi,

• the Qi harmonizes with strength.

Again, in the Xingyi literature there are not very many good definitions of Qi, but there is one from the Xingyi Quan Pu Jiang Yi (explanation of the Xingyi Quan Pu) which says “freely disolving the two Qi, extreme stillness generates movement, violently shaking the four limbs, penetrating the entire body, in the pre-heaven this is contained in stillness, in the post heaven it is contained as movement.”

In other words, movement and stillness are the two types of Qi used in the martial art of Xingyi Quan.

It also says: “during the winter solstice nurture Yang, during the summer solstice nurture Yin, I like to nurture the benevolent upright Qi of the universe. This is how to nurture the upright Qi.”

It goes on to explain that a posture which is excessively Yang tends to break and a posture which is excessively Yin tends to be weak, so a balance must be reached between Yin and Yang.

In other words, their understanding of Qi in this context was about the concept of Xiao Xi I mentioned in the last post. The Qi of Yin and Yang passes between two extreme poles and they each transform into one another. This is the classic Daoist and Confucian idea about Qi as a metaphysical concept, it has nothing to do with Qigong practice at all.

Now that we have that out of the way, let’s interpret the six harmonies:

The three external harmonies are about physical coordination, they don’t mean that the body parts all arrive at the same time, they mean that the body is connected so it can generate strong power during movements.

The three inner harmonies are about how the mind is used to generate power.

The heart in classical Chinese thought is the seat of awareness and the center of emotions and feelings, the mind is considered to be generated by perception and is thus the minister of the heart who carries out its commands. If we use the above definition of Qi, it is the Yin and Yang dynamics of stillness and movement and their correspondent transition back and forth. In other words, the mind is directed from within the center of our perceptual faculties to give instructions to the body about how to behave, then the Yin and Yang Qi become unified into the “true one Qi” according to the above mentioned document. This true one Qi carries the force to the end of the limbs.

The Six harmonies of Xingyi Quan are about how the power is developed in the body, but you can’t just practice based on those ideas, they need detailed teachings of every aspect of posture and movement dynamics as well as self defense applications.

This is the nature of traditional Chinese martial arts, they are based on physical instruction, verbal instruction, heart transmission (in other words the teacher shows you something that can’t be easily spoken) and only then through the classics. The classics are useless if you don’t have specific lineage based transmission.

3: The possibility of Liu He as Qi dynamics:

I mentioned to you that I’ve spent hundreds of hours talking to Master Yang about this stuff and have also had some engagement with other relevant teachers in the field who have mostly communicated pretty similar ideas. I was very surprised when I spoke with master Chan of Liu He Ba Fa fame since I did not anticipate that his answer would conform more or less precisely to what others told me. I guess that I thought since it is associated directly with a famous Daoist figure and the language of its classics have so many Neidan ideas that it would be a kind of energy martial art, but I found out that it is very practical and the ideas are meant to be applied in a martial way.

This really gets down to the core of learning Chinese culture, since the culture is so influenced by ancient philosophy you have to be careful to consider context. Terms like “empty the chest and fill the abdomen” take on totally different meanings depending on where you apply them. In ancient Daoism it means to keep the people happy and peaceful by providing sufficiency for them and not complicating them with state ideology, while in Neidan it means to silence the mind and fill the lower Dantian with primordial Qi, and in the martial arts it could mean anything contextually related to how the art uses the chest and abdomen or the mind and breath, or etc... you get the point.

If you want to think about Liu He as an energy dynamic there are a few choices:

1: six directions of movement: Qi can be defined as the activity of physical movement, so that is fine. This is one way Liu He Ba Fa thinks of Liu He.

2: Coordination of mind and body: Xingyi thinks of Liu He in this way and uses it to cultivate martial power.

3: A way to unify mind and body to generate oneness: this is my preferred interpretation since it indicates the coordination already becomes “pre-heaven” which in the martial art means trained to the point of being automatic.

No one in old documents made any claims about Qi connecting in meridians or outside the body as we do in Qigong. That makes sense since Qigong post-dates the period in which most of the martial classics were written by about fifty years. Qigong is a radical new way of understanding Qi which is hugely influenced by Western ideas about physics, somatics, and other areas which are mentioned discretely in the literature and not mentioned in the martial arts.

In the martial arts you sometimes see ideas like the hundred vessels connecting, but you should understand that vessel refers to blood circulation, not to an energy meridian and Qi in blood is one very authentic way to explain Qi in the martial arts which especially started showing up in documents after the 1950s.

People also talk about the rise of the Du and descent of the Ren meridians.

This has two major meanings:

1: internal martial artists copy the back of a defensive cat when they practice since they believe the spine is a good way to generate martial power and that when it takes on the shape of a bow it is more powerful. The upper back naturally rises up while the chest cavity naturally descends, thus the Ren and Du meridian follow a descending and rising activity.

2: the circulation of Qi passes around the microcosmic orbit: This is a legitimate reading of this concept in internal arts and can simultaneously be true with the other meaning I just mentioned. In that particular context, usually it is the adjustment of the back and front of the body along with sinking to the lower Dantian over a long period of time that opens the orbit. Some schools have extra Neigong exercises to help fulfil this, but this is lineage dependent and the practices vary wildly as I mentioned in my last article.

No one is claiming that martial arts don’t also have energetic qualities, or even that new ideas can’t be absorbed into the martial arts over time, but it is very important to get the meaning of the older generations of the styles straight. Martial arts styles do not appear fully developed, they develop over time just like every cultural form. During the Li Nengran, Dong Haichuan and Yang Luchan era of internal arts the styles were not performed the same way they are today. As I mentioned, I met two lineage holders from Li Nengran style Xingyi (including Li’s family descendant) and practitioners of Liu Qilan style. Their approach to Xingyi looks totally different to any style you would see in Beijing or Tianjin today. They use squatting monkey to provide launching power to the lower Dantian and then practice big Dantian rotation and a kind of stuttering hopping motion to generate force. This is a very old way to practice martial power and is primative compared to later Xingyi styles from the main Hebei and Shanxi lineages, most of which are considerably more subtle and nuanced.

Assuming that these inheritors are practicing approximately the same way that Li Nengran and Liu Qilan did and knowing that the first time sophisticate discussion of Daoist style energy cultivation entered the documents of Hebei style Xingyi was during the Chinese republic (1911-1949) and that it tended to either use Daoist language (Xue Dian’s Dantian Chongshi Fa which is based on Neidan) or concepts from the Yi Jin Jing (Sun Lutang’s Quan Yi Shu Zhen) which do not directly appeal to Liu He as an energy method, it is safe to say that the ancestors of the style also did not intend it to be so, otherwise this would be passed down in the lineage transmission over the generations and would have been included in the literature.

Anyway, I guess you can see that I basically have a thesis about this and have been developing it for a while with the assistance not only of my own reading, but also by talking to and visiting as many relevant lineage representatives as possible. I can’t guarantee 100% that it is right and you are welcome to keep probing since it provides me with good content to write about. Having said that, I’m about to be in transit to China starting next week so I may not have time to follow up for a bit.

The good news is I’ll visit with Master Yin, so I’ll definitely follow up with some questions about Yang style Taiji from the Yang Jianhou lineage.

Now for this week’s installment of Fang Dao Yu Lu. I’ve put together sections three and four which are an explanation of Huang’s thirty six levels of achieving Neidan. Basically they are ways to practice in order to go from the start of practice to the final level from his experience. This is a very special document and not so many people have shared so openly so make sure to subscribe if you aren’t already, because I’ll be posting the whole book over the next several months!!