History & styles

Shaolin and the "internal" and "external" arts

Few distinctions in the martial arts are repeated as often, or understood as loosely, as the one between "internal" and "external" styles. It has roots in a real history, a famous monastery and a political argument, and it is still useful, as long as it is not taken too literally.

The Shaolin Monastery

Wikipedia's article on the Shaolin Monastery describes a Buddhist monastic institution at the foot of the Mount Song range in Henan, recognised as the birthplace of Chan Buddhism and the cradle of Shaolin kung fu. Mount Song itself had long been counted among China's sacred peaks. The article records that the monastery's first abbot devoted himself to translating Buddhist texts, and that, according to legend, the Indian monk Bodhidharma later arrived, spent years meditating in a cave on a nearby peak and began the Chan tradition there.

The monastery became famous far beyond Buddhism for its martial arts, which the article describes as a living tradition that the monks have continued to develop. Its buildings are recognised for their historical and cultural value, and it draws large numbers of visitors.

The martial legend

Popular tradition goes further than the documents. In countless stories, films and school histories, Shaolin is the source of Chinese boxing itself, and Bodhidharma the patron of the monks' exercises. Historians treat much of this as legend, and Wikipedia's overview of tai chi is a useful reminder that the North China Plain, where both Shaolin and Chen village lie, nurtured a wide range of martial arts over centuries of unrest. Shaolin was one great centre among many, not the single root of everything.

None of this makes the legends worthless. They explain why so many schools, including many that have nothing to do with the monastery, trace their art symbolically to Shaolin, and why the image of the monk-warrior has lasted so long. For a student, the useful habit is to enjoy the story, note what it says about the values of the people who tell it, and look separately for what can be documented.

What "internal" means

Wikipedia's article on neijia describes it as the collective name for the internal Chinese martial arts, concerned with mental, spiritual or qi-related aspects, as opposed to an external approach focused on physiological ones. The group commonly named as internal is t'ai chi, xingyiquan and baguazhang, associated in popular legend with the Taoist monasteries of the Wudang Mountains; other arts, including qigong and yiquan, are often classified or classify themselves as internal too.

In practice, teachers of internal arts tend to emphasise:

• relaxation rather than muscular tension;
• whole-body movement driven from the legs and waist;
• alignment and structure over speed and strength;
• sensitivity to a partner's force, and yielding to it;
• slow, attentive training as the basis for later speed.

Where the distinction came from

The neijia article traces the distinction to a seventeenth-century epitaph by Huang Zongxi, and it reports a scholar's argument that identifying the internal arts with native Taoism and the external arts with the foreign Buddhism of Shaolin was an act of political defiance against the ruling Qing dynasty rather than a technical classification. The modern use of the terms, the article explains, owes much to Sun Lutang's publications in the early twentieth century, when he named t'ai chi, xingyiquan and baguazhang as the internal group.

So the neat line between internal and external began partly as a statement about identity. That alone is a reason to hold it lightly.

Why the division is a loose one

• Every art uses both. "Internal" styles train strength and conditioning; "external" styles cultivate relaxation, breathing and timing at advanced levels.
• Training order differs more than content. Internal arts often start soft and add power later; external arts often start with strength and refine it into softness.
• Styles borrowed from each other. Many famous teachers studied both kinds, including Kuo Lien-ying, whose early training was in Northern Shaolin.
• Religious labels do not fit neatly. Taoist and Buddhist ideas mixed freely in Chinese culture, and in the martial arts.

Many experienced practitioners end up saying that internal and external are stages of development rather than categories of art. For the internal arts themselves, see baguazhang and xingyiquan; for the religious background, see Taoism, Buddhism and the martial arts.