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Chapter 6
Gymnastics
L ate Ming Shaolin monks did not turn their attention to hand combat be-
cause it was militarily effective. In real combat, bare-handed fighting was not as
useful as the staff that the monks had been practicing for centuries, not nearly
as lethal as swords and spears that they had always employed in battle, and cer-
tainly not as dangerous as firearms that, having been invented in China several
centuries earlier, were being reintroduced to it by the Portuguese in the six-
teenth century.^1 Rather, Shaolin monks were intrigued by the philosophical
and medical dimensions of the new bare-handed styles. The late Ming and
early Qing techniques of Shaolin Quan, Taiji Quan, and Xingyi Quan were
couched in a rich vocabulary of physiological and spiritual self-cultivation.
They were marked by a unique synthesis of martial, therapeutic, and religious
goals. Practitioners were no longer interested in fighting only. They were moti-
vated instead by considerations of health, at the same time that they sought
spiritual realization.
In this chapter we examine the late Ming and early Qing synthesis of fight-
ing, healing, and religious self-cultivation. We begin with a Qing aficionado of
Shaolin fighting whose passion for the art had been spurred by therapeutic
concerns, and we proceed to examine the origins of the exercises he had stud-
ied at the monastery. Our investigation leads us backward in time to an ancient
gymnastic tradition called daoyin, which during the late Ming had been inte-
grated into hand combat. Daoyin calisthenics had largely evolved within a Daoist
context, and they served as a vehicle for the religion’s impact on the martial arts.
Unlike the techniques of the Shaolin staff, which were enwrapped in a Buddhist
mythological framework, hand combat drew on Daoist self-cultivation. During
the late imperial period, Buddhist monks at the Shaolin Monastery were
trained in empty-handed styles that harked back to Daoist physiological and
meditative methods.