176 Fist Fighting and Self-Cultivation
However, its techniques are chiefly offensive, which creates opportunities for
an opponent to exploit. Now there is another school that is called ‘internal,’
which overcomes movement with stillness. Attackers are effortlessly repulsed.
Thus we distinguish Shaolin as ‘external.’”^118
The Huangs attributed Wang Zhengnan’s seventeenth-century Internal
School to a mysterious Daoist immortal named Zhang Sanfeng (fl. 1380), who
had lived two and a half centuries earlier. According to Huang fils, Zhang had
studied the Shaolin style before creating his own more sophisticated method.
“The External School flourished at Shaolin,” wrote Huang Baijia. “Zhang San-
feng, having mastered Shaolin, reversed its principles, and this is called the
Internal School.”^119 Very little is known of the historical Zhang Sanfeng (whose
name was originally written with a different character for feng), except that he
had been active during the early Ming in the Daoist monastic complex on
Fig. 36. “The Primordial Unity of the Three Religions and the Nine Schools” as
depicted in a Shaolin stele dated 1565.