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Sinews Transformation Classic, for instance, outlines a method of hardening the
body that is supposed to be equally effective against martial adversaries and
disease. By a combination of qi circulation, massage, and self-pounding, the
practitioner is expected to gain “internal robustness” (neizhuang) that would
eliminate all illness. Medication figures in this training regimen. The Sinews
Transformation Classic provides specific recipes for “internal robustness medi-
cines” to be consumed in conjunction with physical exercises.^49 Other military
treatises likewise delve into medical theory and drug production. The second
fascicle of Xuanji’s Secret Transmission of Acupuncture Points’ Hand Combat Formu-
las is titled “The Secret Volume of Treating Weapon Cuts, Fighting Injuries,
and Broken Bones.” In addition to outlining emergency treatments for a vari-
ety of wounds, it also discusses moxibustion and pulse taking.^50
The handbooks’ medical orientations were matched by the practitioners’
therapeutic expectations. We have opened this chapter with the nineteenth-
century Wang Zuyuan, whose martial journey to the Shaolin Temple originated
in his father’s concern for his health. A century earlier, Cao Huandou’s practice
of Shaolin fighting was motivated at least partially by medical considerations. In
his preface to the Hand Combat Classic (1784), Cao alludes to repeated illness.^51
If, however, Cao’s martial training provided him with a self-cure, then he could
just as easily treat others. The seventeenth century witnessed the appearance of
the martial artist–cum–physician. He who could take the body apart could pre-
sumably put it back together. In some instances only the martial artist could re-
store his victims to their health, for he alone possessed the antidote to their
injury. We are told that one of Wang Zhengnan’s adversaries regained the abil-
ity to urinate only after he apologized to the master, who cured him.^52 Biogra-
phies of other martial artists similarly allude to therapeutic activities. Gan
Fengchi (fl. 1730) was a famous Nanjing martial artist who was believed to be ca-
pable of squeezing lead into liquid with his bare hands. According to the Draft
Qing History, Gan cured patients by sitting with them back to back and emitting
his internal energy into their bodies. A few decades later, the leader of the 1774
White Lotus uprising, Wang Lun, earned an itinerant livelihood by teaching
the martial arts and healing.^53 The Qing martial artist was an expert on the
human body, which he could equally injure and cure.
The formulation of fighting techniques in terms borrowed from Chinese
medicine was one aspect of the theorization impulse that characterized the late
imperial martial arts. Beginning in the late Ming, many authors were no longer
satisfied to describe limb movements only. Instead, they embedded fighting
postures in the rich vocabularies of medicine, religion, and philosophy. Martial
artists identified within their own bodies the universal forces of yin and yang,
the five elements, and eight trigrams, investing the martial arts with a cosmo-
logical dimension. The intricate interplay of yin and yang serves in all quan styles
to illuminate the twin concepts of defense and offense, contract and expand,
close and open, soft and hard. Xingyi Quan identifies the five striking tech-
niques of Splitting Fist (Piquan), Drilling Fist (Zuanquan), Crashing Fist