178 Fist Fighting and Self-Cultivation
up his post and retired to his home,” wrote Huang Zongxi. “Those who ad-
mired his skill thought that because he was poor he could easily be compro-
mised. The high-ranking military officials all paid their respects, but he was
completely unaffected and ignored them. He continued to dig in the fields and
haul manure as if unaware that he possessed a skill that could gain him an eas-
ier living.... May those who read this inscription, learn from his life.”^126
Huang Zongxi’s son, Baijia, had studied fighting with Wang Zhengnan,
whose techniques he recorded in his Internal School Fist Method (Neijia quanfa)
(1676). His interest in the Internal School was kindled, like his father’s, by
the Manchu conquest. In his adventurous youth, Huang fils sought to rely on
Wang’s military arts to defeat the invaders: “At the time I was hot-tempered
and impetuous,” he reminisced. “I believed that the affairs of the world could
not be entrusted to those contemptible Confucian scholars, but required
men who could jump on their horses and slay the enemy, jump off and cap-
ture the king. This is the only life worth living.”^127 The fervent nationalism of
father and son might suggest that by “internal” they were secretly alluding to
their native land. As Douglas Wile has noted, the Internal School that was as-
sociated with the indigenous Daoist religion might have represented China,
as opposed to the External School that was affiliated with the foreign Bud-
dhist faith, and by implication might have stood for the Manchu invaders.^128
Thus, if it were not for the Qing conquest, we might have known nothing
of Wang Zhengnan’s martial art. The Manchu invaders turned the attention of
scholars such as the Huangs to fighting techniques that, having originated
among the unlettered masses, had been previously considered unworthy of
documentation. In this respect, the Ming’s demise contributed inadvertently
to martial arts historiography. As members of the elite lamented their fatal dis-
dain for military training, they provided us for the first time with biographies
of uneducated martial artists such as the Internal School’s Wang. We will see
below that the collapse of the Ming has enriched our knowledge of Shaolin
fighting as well. Here, suffice it to note that as Qing scholars began to investi-
gate folk fighting techniques, they invested them with medical, philosophical,
and religious significance. The theorization impulse that characterized the
late imperial martial arts was due at least partially to their practice by members
of the elite. Even though the broadening of the martial arts into self-conscious
systems of thought was well under way during the last decades of Ming rule—as
evinced, for example, by the 1624 Sinews Transformation Classic—it was doubt-
less given a fresh impetus by the dynasty’s fall.
There might have been yet another motivation for the Zhang Sanfeng leg-
end. The Huangs might have attributed the Internal School to a Daoist immor-
tal to counterbalance the External School’s affiliation with a Buddhist saint.
Zhejiang natives like the “Purple Coagulation Man of the Way,” Huang Zongxi,
and Huang Baijia might have been familiar with the legend he had created of
Bodhidharma as the master of Shaolin fighting. The correlation between their
myth and his legend is, at any rate, striking. Whether or not this had been the