He had apparently conditioned his body to the point that attempts by
his captors to break his neck failed, so he cursed them and challenged them
to break his legs. Failing this as well, they hacked him to death. The famous
artist Zheng Banqiao (1693–1765) records a similar case where a friend of
his learned the secret of “practicing qi and directing the spirit” from a
Shaolin monk (Wu and Liu 1982, 376). Zheng claimed his friend practiced
for several years to the point where his whole body became hard as steel
and, wherever he focused his qi, neither knife nor ax could wound him. At
the extreme superstitious end of the spectrum were the practices of some of
the Boxers in the uprising of 1900, who went into trances and mumbled in-
cantations believed to turn them into eight-day martial arts wonders and
immunize them from the effects of weapons.
The earliest and single most important document to hint at a martial
arts association with popular Daoism is Ming patriot Huang Zongxi’s
Epitaph for Wang Zhengnan(1669). Huang claimed that Shaolin was fa-
mous for its boxing, which emphasized attacking an opponent, but that
there was also an Internal School that stressed restraint to counter move-
ment. According to Huang, this school’s patriarch was a Daoist hygiene
practitioner from Mount Wudang named Zhang Sanfeng. In the political
context of the times, the opposing boxing schools in the epitaph can be
viewed as symbolizing Han Chinese (indigenous Daoism represented by
Zhang Sanfeng and Mount Wudang) opposition to Manchu (foreign Bud-
dhism represented by Shaolin Monastery) rule. In other words, the epi-
taph is actually a political statement, not a serious discourse on religion
or opposing boxing schools. At the beginning of the twentieth century
some boxing teachers attempted to categorize taijiquan (tai chi ch’uan),
xingyiquan (hsing i ch’uan), and baguazhang (pa kua ch’uan) as Internal
School styles and to identify taijiquan with Zhang Sanfeng and Daoism.
Around the same time, and persisting to the present day, a number of
newer martial arts forms have come to be identified with Mount Wudang
and Daoism.
Conclusion
As can be seen from the foregoing narrative, the connection between the
Chinese martial arts and religion is artificial at best. Individuals from all
walks of life and all beliefs, including China’s Muslims and other minori-
ties, practiced martial arts of one form or another for individual and col-
lective defense—but the martial arts were primarily secular, not religious,
activities. Attribution of a religious mystique to the Chinese martial arts is,
for the most part, a very recent phenomenon based on misunderstandings
of the past, but reflecting needs of the present.
Stanley E. Henning
Religion and Spiritual Development: China 461