leaving these loyalists with two options. Thefirst was to stay out of cities
and towns, living in the countryside away from government authority. Some
literati combined this with the long-standing Confucian or Daoist role of
secluded hermit. The second option was to become, or at least adopt the
raiment of, a Buddhist monk. Since Buddhist monks shaved their heads, the
issue of hairstyle was moot.
Buddhism, despite over a millennium of practice in China by the early
Qing, was still regarded as a foreign religion. Some people were more
troubled by this association than others, of course, but in the tightly censored
environment of the early Qing Dynasty, Buddhism could stand in for the
Manchus. A foreign religion was equivalent to a foreign people. A Ming
loyalist could discuss Buddhism without incurring the wrath of the Qing
authorities, while his audience understood that he was really talking about
the Manchus. Daoism, on the other hand, was an impeccably Chinese belief
system. In either its philosophical or religious form, Daoism posed as the
native Chinese counterpart to the foreign Buddhism.
These themes, of Ming loyalty, Buddhist foreignness, and Daoist
Chineseness, all came together in the realm of martial arts with the 1669
epitaph for Wang Zhengnan ( 1617 – 69 ) written by Huang Zongxi ( 1610 – 95 )
and the account of Wang’s martial arts by his son Huang Baijia ( 1643 – ?).
This epitaph is thefirst articulation of an internal school of martial arts in
contradistinction to an external school of martial arts. Wang’s internal school
purportedly originated with a Daoist saint, Zhang Sanfeng. Huang Zongxi’s
epitaph opens:
Shaolin is famous for its boxers. 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.”
The Internal School was founded by Zhang Sanfeng of the Song Dynasty,
Sanfeng was a Daoist alchemist of the Wudang Mountains. He was summoned
by Emperor Huizong of the Song, but the road was impassable. That night he
dreamt that the God of War transmitted the art of boxing to him and the following
morning [he] single-handedly killed over a hundred bandits.^3
Huang Baijia’s account of the origin of Wang Zhengnan’s internal art was
somewhat different from his father’s:
Wang Zhengnan was a master of two skills: one was pugilism and the other
archery. From ancient times great archers have been many, but when it comes to
pugilism, truly Master Wang was the foremost.
The external school of pugilism reached its highest development with Shaolin.
Zhang Sanfeng, having mastered Shaolin, reversed its principles, and this is called
192 The Qing Dynasty