Gymnastics 179
Huangs’ intention, the Zhang Sanfeng genealogy matched the Bodhidharma
ancestry in a perfectly harmonious structure. On the one hand was an “Exter-
nal” school associated with Buddhism and attributed to an Indian patriarch
who supposedly meditated on the sacred Mt. Song; on the other hand was an
“Internal” school affiliated with Daoism and ascribed to an immortal who re-
putedly secluded himself on the holy Mt. Wudang. This flawless symmetry of
directions (external and internal), religions (Buddhism and Daoism), saints
(Bodhidharma and Zhang Sanfeng), and sacred peaks (Song and Wudang)
was joined, on the geographical axis, by a correlation of north and south (fig-
ure 37). Because Mt. Song was the more northern of the two peaks, the “Exter-
nal” School was named the “Northern,” whereas its “Internal” rival came to be
known as the “Southern.” Like Chan Buddhism a thousand years earlier, the
martial arts were gradually imagined in terms of a “Northern School” and a
“Southern School.”^129
Claude Lévi-Strauss has argued that the meaning of individual mythologi-
cal motifs is determined by the structure into which they combine, just as in
music the significance of particular tones is embedded in the melody they con-
stitute.^130 The Bodhidharma legend and the Zhang Sanfeng myth matched in
a perfectly harmonious melody, which was likely the source of their ongoing
appeal, long after the fighting techniques themselves were forgotten. Huang
Baijia lamented that with Wang Zhengnan’s demise his fighting techniques
Fig. 37. The structure of martial arts mythology (drawing by Noga Zhang-Hui
Shahar).