physical strength to mark out the superior warrior. The greatfictional
hero Wu Song, fromThe Water Margin, displayed incredible strength on a
number of occasions. But an internal school of martial arts diminished the
obvious physical manifestation of martial arts prowess. A true martial arts
master could conceal himself, be physically unimpressive, or even old.
The explicit description of internal martial arts also amplified the pre-
existing connection between martial artists and medicine. There were two
aspects of this connection. Thefirst was the long-standing, at least since
the Song ifThe Water Marginis reliable in this regard, use of martial arts
performances in the marketplace to sell medicines. Medicine peddlers used
the martial arts not just to attract a crowd to their wares but to prove their
own vigorous health. A man who worked on his own health to the point
that he could perform impressive martial arts feats clearly understood
the workings of the body. His performance validated his medicines. The
second aspect was the connection between acupuncture and the martial arts.
Some medicine peddlers may have also practiced acupuncture as a broader
aspect of medical service, but, as we saw in the Ming, there was also a more
general belief that some martial artists could strike someone so as cause a
delayed death. This was literally internal martial arts, since the obvious
strike seemed to do nothing. A later biography of Zhang Songxi, a putative
Ming Dynasty practitioner of the internal art that would be transmitted to
Wang Zhengnan, specifically describes him as striking pressure points.^6
Skill of this nature was profound and mysterious.
Wang Zhengnan’s epitaph established the discourse of internal versus
external martial arts. The originators of Taijiquan (or Tai chi chuan, literally
“the Supreme Ultimate Fist,”now known for its extremely slow movements)
in the nineteenth century adopted Wang’s putative emphasis on internal
practice. Of course, practitioners of Shaolin martial arts did not necessarily
accept their own consignment to the external realm. To further complicate
matters, another martial arts discourse developed that was related to the
internal/external paradigm: the notion of practicing martial arts for self-
cultivation. This particular discourse is extremely powerful in twentieth- and
twenty-first-century perspectives on Chinese martial arts, to the extent of
badly mischaracterizing the history of Chinese martial arts as a whole.
Self-Cultivation
There is no precise definition of“self-cultivation”so it would seem that
some description of what the term means, if only for our current purposes,
is warranted. In the context of the martial arts, self-cultivation is a positive
Self-Cultivation 197