Xingyiquan

The five fists of xingyiquan are mapped onto the five phases one to one: splitting to metal, drilling to water, crushing to wood, pounding to fire and crossing to earth. The mapping is not a label attached to a finished technique. The generating and overcoming cycles that bind the five phases together are used to explain how one fist answers another, so that a practitioner is taught the relations between techniques in the vocabulary of a cosmological scheme.

That is why a fighting art belongs in an atlas of religion. The five phases organise Chinese medicine, divination, music and the calendar, and xingyiquan is the clearest surviving case of the same scheme applied to a body practice, worked out in detail rather than gestured at. The art explains itself in these terms; it does not have the terms applied to it from outside.

Alongside the five fists stand the twelve animal forms, which vary somewhat between branches and are organised by resemblance and behaviour rather than by the phases. The two schemes coexist without being reduced to one another, which is characteristic of Chinese classificatory practice generally: more than one grid can be laid over the same material, and the art holds both.

The art is traditionally traced to Yue Fei, the Song general executed in the twelfth century and later revered as a model of loyalty. The attribution first appears centuries after his death and is not supported by the record. It is nonetheless doing recognisable work: attaching a martial art to a national hero of unimpeachable virtue gives it a pedigree and a moral character at once.

The documented beginnings are with Ji Jike in seventeenth century Shanxi, and three branches descend from that line. The Shanxi and Hebei branches are the ones usually meant by xingyiquan today. The Henan branch, generally called by its own name, was transmitted substantially within Hui Muslim communities, which is a reminder that the religious settings of Chinese martial transmission were not only Daoist and Buddhist.

The internal family into which the art is now placed, with taijiquan and baguazhang, was made current by Sun Lutang in the early twentieth century, and the internal category itself descends from a 1669 epitaph by Huang Zongxi setting an internal school against Shaolin. Meir Shahar's history of the Shaolin monastery examines how that opposition was constructed and what it was doing, and Douglas Wile's work on the late Qing literature shows how much of the philosophical apparatus of these arts was written down in a period much closer to the present than the arts themselves claim.