Xingyiquan

This page introduces the art as a whole and explains how the rest of this section is organised. The detailed treatments of its history, its two technical systems and its principles are on the pages that follow.

What the name says

The name is usually rendered "form-intention boxing" or "shape-intention boxing." The two halves are doing different work. Xing, form or shape, refers to the physical configurations the art trains: the five fists and the twelve animals, each of which is a shape the body takes and a way it moves. Yi, intention, refers to the mental component — the directed attention that is supposed to precede and organise the movement rather than accompany it as an afterthought. The compound claims that in this art the shape and the intention are not two things happening at once but one thing, and that training either without the other produces something that is not xingyiquan.

An older and in some ways more informative name is xinyi liuhe quan, heart-mind intention six-harmonies boxing, which is still used for the Henan branch of the art. The six harmonies are the same coordination requirements you will meet in the other internal arts: three external pairings of the joints and three internal ones concerning intention, breath and force. The change from xin, heart-mind, to xing, form, appears to have happened gradually and regionally rather than by anyone's decision, and both names remained in use for a long time. It is a small point but a useful one, because it shows the naming of these arts to be a good deal less settled and less doctrinally significant than later accounts suggest.

Where it sits among the internal arts

The grouping of taijiquan, baguazhang and xingyiquan under one heading is about a hundred and thirty years old and was the work of a small number of teachers in and around Beijing, formalised in print by Sun Lutang in the 1910s and 1920s. Sun himself trained in all three. The grouping is real in the sense that these teachers genuinely exchanged material and taught each other's students, and the three arts do share a pedagogy — relaxation under load, whole-body connection, priority of intention, and a preference for receiving force rather than meeting it. It is not real in the sense of describing a common ancestor. The three arts have separate and independently documented origins.

Within the grouping, xingyiquan is the one that best preserves a clearly military parentage, and it is usually the fastest of the three to produce a student who can hit hard. This has given it a reputation, discussed below, that is partly earned and partly a matter of how it is taught.

The spear behind the boxing

The most useful single fact about xingyiquan is that its movements derive from spear technique. Ji Jike, the seventeenth-century Shanxi man to whom the documented lineage traces, was known as a spear specialist, and the tradition's own account is that he developed the boxing by adapting what he knew of the spear to the empty hand. This is unusual: most martial legends run in the other direction, claiming a divine or monastic origin for something that in fact came from soldiers. Here the tradition itself says the art came from a weapon, and the technical evidence supports it.

Once you know this, a great deal about the art becomes obvious. The advancing step that closes distance in one movement is how a spearman steps. The habit of keeping the hands on the centreline is how you hold a spear. The five element fists are recognisably five ways of moving a spear tip — splitting downward, drilling upward and through, crushing straight forward, deflecting up and striking, and cutting across. The strong forward pressure and the reluctance to retreat are the tactics of a weapon that is far more dangerous when advancing than when giving ground. Xingyiquan is, to a first approximation, a spear system played without the spear, and every serious account of the art says so.

The five element fists

The technical core of the art is a set of five basic strikes, conventionally named after the five phases: splitting, drilling, crushing, pounding and crossing. These are not five techniques in the sense of five tricks. They are five ways of organising the whole body to deliver force, each with its own direction and its own quality, and the entire remaining content of the art can be described as combinations and variations of them. A xingyiquan student may spend the first year or two doing very little but walking up and down a training space repeating these five movements.

The five-phase associations attached to them — splitting with metal, drilling with water, crushing with wood, pounding with fire, crossing with earth — are worth understanding but also worth holding loosely. They are dealt with at length on the page devoted to the five fists. The short version is that the associations are genuinely useful as a memory system and as a way of thinking about how the movements generate and counter one another, and are not useful as physiology.

The twelve animals

Beyond the five fists the art contains a set of animal forms, usually numbered twelve, though the list varies between branches and some branches teach ten. Each animal is a short sequence expressing a characteristic quality: the directness of the horse, the tearing of the eagle, the coiling of the snake, the sudden lightness of the swallow. The animals are not imitations. Nobody is pretending to be a bear. They are mnemonic labels attached to particular ways of using the body, and the label is chosen because the animal makes the quality easy to remember.

The relationship between the five fists and the twelve animals differs by branch. In most Hebei-derived lines the fists come first and are treated as more fundamental, with the animals introduced later as elaboration. In parts of the Henan tradition the animals are the primary material. This is one of the clearer markers of which line a given teacher comes from.

Santi shi and the standing practice

Almost every xingyiquan curriculum begins with santi shi, the three-body posture: a stable, slightly offset standing position with the weight predominantly on the rear leg and one hand extended. Students hold it, initially for a minute or two and eventually for much longer. From this posture the five fists issue, and to it they return.

The reason the art invests so heavily in one static posture is that santi shi contains, in a form that can be checked and corrected at leisure, nearly every structural requirement the moving practice will demand. If the shoulders are raised, the standing will reveal it. If the weight is not properly conducted into the ground, the leg will complain in a diagnostic way. Standing practice is boring and is the part most often abandoned, which is why teachers talk about it so much.

The reputation for effectiveness

Xingyiquan has a long-standing reputation as the most directly combative of the three internal arts, and it is worth being precise about what supports this and what does not. What supports it is the historical record: xingyiquan practitioners were disproportionately represented among professional bodyguards and caravan escorts in the nineteenth century, the art was a core subject at the Central Guoshu Institute in the Republican period, and its practitioners performed creditably in the full-contact competitions of that era. Its training also contains features that tend to produce functional fighters — repetitive power development, forward pressure under resistance, and comparatively early contact work.

What does not support it is the reasoning most often offered, which is that the art is effective because it is simple and direct. Plenty of simple and direct systems are ineffective. Xingyiquan's record, where it is good, reflects how it was trained rather than any inherent property of its movements. A xingyiquan class that has removed the resistance and kept the forms has removed the thing that produced the reputation, and there are many such classes.

Branches and where they came from

Three main regional branches are usually distinguished. The Shanxi line is generally more compact, with smaller frames and a somewhat lighter quality. The Hebei line, stemming from Li Luoneng in the nineteenth century, is the most widespread and the version most people outside China encounter; it has larger frames and the most systematised five-fist curriculum. The Henan line, called xinyi rather than xingyi, developed largely within Muslim communities in and around Luoyang, is animal-centred rather than fist-centred, and looks noticeably different from the other two.

These branches are not schools in the sense of institutions. They are family and regional transmissions that diverged over roughly two centuries, and the differences between them are substantial enough that a practitioner of one can find another initially unrecognisable.

Common misunderstandings

The first is that xingyiquan is the "hard" one among the internal arts. It is not hard in the sense of using muscular tension against muscular tension; its power generation depends on the same relaxation and whole-body connection as the others. What it lacks is softness as a tactic. The body is soft and the strategy is direct, and these are separate matters that the word "hard" runs together.

The second is that its five-phase theory is a functioning technical system that tells a fighter what to do. In practice the generating and overcoming cycles are taught, drilled as paired exercises, and then largely set aside in free practice, because a real exchange does not wait for you to identify which phase your opponent has just used.

The third is that it is simple. The material is few in number, which is not the same thing. Five movements practised for twenty years is not a simple art; it is an art that has chosen depth over breadth, and it is unforgiving of students who mistake having learned the movements for having acquired the skill.

How to use this section

The page on origins and history sets out what can be documented about Ji Jike, the Yue Fei attribution and the branching into regional lines, and is the place to start if you want to know how reliable the standard account is. The pages on the five element fists and the twelve animal forms cover the technical content. The page on principles deals with directness, intention and the six harmonies, and with what the art means by advancing. The final page lists sources and indicates which are reliable.

Key points

• Xingyiquan is the third internal art, distinguished by straight-line advance and forward pressure rather than by circling or slowness.
• Its movements derive from spear technique, which explains its footwork, its centreline habit and its tactical preference for advancing.
• The technical core is five basic strikes named for the five phases, supplemented by a set of usually twelve animal forms.
• Training conventionally begins with santi shi, a static standing posture that encodes the structural requirements of everything that follows.
• Its reputation for combat effectiveness rests on a real historical record, but reflects how it was trained rather than anything inherent in the movements.
• Three regional branches — Shanxi, Hebei and Henan — differ enough that they are best treated as related arts rather than variants of one.