Walking the Circle

Almost everything baguazhang does is built out of one thing: continuous walking around a circle. The practitioner moves around a centre, turning the body toward it, and changes direction and position through a set of palm changes. Stances are transitional rather than held, and the art's characteristic movement is spiral and evasive rather than linear.

The name means eight trigram palm, and the palm changes are named for and mapped onto the eight trigrams of the Yijing. That is the claim the atlas is recording, and it is the reason a martial art appears in a catalogue of religion at all. The eight trigrams are a cosmological scheme with a long life in Chinese divination, ritual and philosophy, and baguazhang presents itself as that scheme performed with a body rather than illustrated with a diagram. Whether the mapping is structural or applied afterwards is a question practitioners themselves discuss.

The circle is also where the art touches Daoist practice most directly. Walking a circuit while turning the gaze inward is attested in Daoist meditative and ritual traditions, and the connection is claimed in the art's own account of itself. What the historical record supports about that connection is a separate matter, treated in the second article on this page.