Tenth century A Punjabi weaver called Goraksha (a title of initiation; the
man’s actual name is unknown) renounces the world to become
a Tantric mystic of the Natha sect. Goraksha is remembered as
the creator of hatha yoga,which means the “yoking (of the
spirit) to the sun and the moon,” a system of breathing tech-
niques and calisthenics designed to teach practitioners how to
control their personal and psychic energies.
About 907 Following the collapse of the once-mighty Tang dynasty, Chi-
nese refugees settle in Japan. The Tôgakure-ryû ninjutsusystem
claims these Chinese refugees as its founders.
About 950 Japanese martial philosophers describe kyuba no michi(the
Way of Bow and Horse). This discussed the Japanese warrior’s
overriding concern for personal honor, and was the conceptual
grandparent of the Tokugawa-era code known as bushidô.(The
contemporary pronunciation of the two Chinese characters
meaning “warrior,” though, was “mononofu,” not “bushi.”)
About 960 Indo-Iranian merchants settle along China’s southeast coast,
leading to the creation of an ethnic Chinese Muslim population
known as the Hui. Chinese persecution occasionally led to Hui
insurrections, and several modern wushu(martial arts) spear
forms are attributed to the fighting arts of nineteenth-century
Hui rebels.
960 The Song dynasty is established in southern China. This dy-
nasty is remembered for its many technological innovations,
probably because it used scholars rather than warlords as its
governors and generals. Song-dynasty storytelling was divided
into eight categories, and topics included magical tales (yao
shu), sword stories (biao dao,or military tales), and cudgel sto-
ries (gan bang;these are essentially detective stories, and the al-
lusion is to police using clubs rather than swords to apprehend
and interrogate suspects). These categories were not too dis-
tinct, and were freely mixed in later works such as The Water
Margin.
About 967 Japanese officials describe their peers’ bodyguards as samurai,
or “ones who serve,” instead of “henchmen” or “minions.”
About 970 According to a twelfth-century writer named Zhang Bangji,
Chinese palace dancers begin binding their feet to make them-
selves more sexually attractive to men. The crippling practice
was widespread throughout southern China by the fourteenth
century and throughout all of China by the seventeenth, and is
remarked because foot binding prevented well-bred Han fe-
males from effectively practicing boxing or swordsmanship un-
til the twentieth century. (Some were noted archers, though,
generally with crossbows.) Still, into the 1360s, Hong Fu,
Hong Xian, Thirteenth Sister, and other Chinese martial hero-
ines (xia) were sometimes portrayed by women on Chinese
stages, and there was a seventeenth-century reference to a four-
teenth-century woman named Yang who was said to be peerless
in the fighting art of “pear-blossom spear.”
About 1040 Indian Buddhists fleeing the raids of the Muslim Muhammad
of Ghazna reestablish Tantric Buddhism in Tibet. One of their
earliest monasteries was the Shalu monastery at Shigatse. Its796 Chronological History of the Martial Arts