physical or mental benefit of practice. These positive effects are the product
of the specific training regimen of a martial art. The martial arts were
mostly studied to enhance an individual’s ability tofight, regardless of
the cause to which those skills were applied. This remains the case even
today, but a significant number of martial artists beginning in the nine-
teenth century, or possibly somewhat earlier, gave increasing attention to
the other effects of training. Those martial artists wrote about their partic-
ular styles in an environment where improvedfirearms were rendering
boxing and hand-to-hand combat weapons less relevant to actualfighting.
This shift in emphasis among a certain group of literate practitioners had
a disproportionate effect on the overall understanding of the martial arts
because, unlike most illiterate martial artists, their accounts of the martial
arts were widely disseminated inside and outside China. Consequently,
there has been a major effort on the part of martial arts scholars to uncover
or recover the tradition of self-cultivation in the martial arts.
Retrospectively, the idea of an internal school of martial arts was critical
to the discourse of self-cultivation. Another strand was added with the
inclusion of the practices of Daoist“medical gymnastics”(daoyin導引)in
some martial arts. Both of these practices strongly associated themselves
with the central value ofqi(vital energy) in enhancing bodily health. For
the internal school, this was further extended to developing power and
skill infighting. It was an easy enough next step to see that if medical
gymnastics developed one’sqi, then its practices would be very helpful to
martial artists. The historiographical question is whether the later system
of practice that relied upon ideas of the internal school and then connected
up with medical gymnastics created a false lineage to legitimize itself, or
whether it uncovered a progressive development of synthesized practice.
Here we again return to the few texts that addressed these issues in the
absence of any other evidence for actual practice.
Huang Zongxi and his son’s introduction of the idea of an internal school
of martial arts highlighted the possibility that there could be something more
to martial arts mastery than an outward display of proficient violence. The
martial arts might be pursued in the context of self-cultivation, or seeking a
deeper understanding of oneself through the practice of the techniques of
fighting. If the Huangs’discussion of the internal school of martial arts raised
this issue to prominence, it is not clear that this was their intent or even a new
idea. The importance of practicing martial arts for self-cultivation, or at
least good health, became increasingly important conceptually as better
firearms reduced the value of hand-to-hand combat skills on the battlefield.
Industrialized warfare rendered most traditional martial arts moot, but many
198 The Qing Dynasty