Wudang Eight Trigrams Palm

武当三丰派八卦掌

Eight Trigrams Palm (baguazhang 八卦掌) is a traditional Chinese martial art centered on circle walking 走圈, a form of moving meditation where you walk repeatedly in a circle of eight steps. After treading enough circles to settle the mind and energy, you move on to the eight palm changes, patterns of linking martial movements interspersed between bouts of meditative circle walking. In this style there is really this yin-yang relationship between the calming circle walking, which shifu likened to stirring a glass of juice, mixing all the energies of the body 搅气, and the highly active palm changes, which send all your power and energy into your limbs. So there's this expansion and contraction of energy — separating and harmonizing.

The martial applications stem from the circular theory. In this style, which probably has the most advanced applications of any of the unarmed styles in our system, the feet are in constant motion as you are always moving around the opponent. The arms as well employ turning, piercing techniques centered on a specific type of motion called “helix power” 螺旋力. Pretty much every strike in the eight palm changes is either toward the eyes, throat, or groin. It features a lot of grappling 擒拿 and vital point striking 点穴位 as well.

Our Bagua style is divided into three sections. First you begin with a very simple form of walking meditation called mud stepping 趟泥步, which you combine with the eight fixed postures 定式八法. Then you move on to circle walking 走圈 and the eight palm changes, also known as the old eight palms 老八掌. The highest level, called revolving the nine palaces 转九宫 involves practicing the eight palms in a sort of freestyle manner amidst nine posts planted in the ground. In Wudang, this practice was traditionally done in the bamboo grove behind Purple Cloud Palace.

China has its own myth of an ancient deluge that flooded the entire planet. Instead of building a ship like Noah, however, the hero Yu the Great 大禹 initiated the first great irrigation project in Chinese history, circumambulating the world, carving “earth meridians” 地脉 in his wake to mitigate the effects of the flood. He worked so hard in this process that he became lame on one side, and is remembered as a limping shaman who restores harmony to a world out of balance. The “mud stepping” we practice in Bagua is a way of miming Yu trudging through the mud, and each circle we walk is a harmonizing voyage through the entire cosmos.

Dragon Gate Dragon Style Bagua 龙门龙形八卦掌, what we practice in the San Feng lineage, comes from 24th generation Dragon Gate master Liu Chengxi 刘诚喜 (1910-2008) who learned it from 23rd generation Dragon Gate master Zhang Zongcheng 张宗诚 in the 1930’s at Jade Emperor Monastery 西高都玉皇庙, a little urban temple in Hebei province. Our current grand master Zhong Yunlong 钟云龙 studied this style under Master Liu in the Zhongnan mountains 终南山 during his years of cloud wandering in the 1980’s. I never actually heard any more about its oral history, though I did hear shifu telling people the classic Wudang tale, that it came like all internal styles ultimately from Zhang San Feng.

The literary history of Baguazhang is quite fascinating, however. Our earliest historical references to this art stem from the Eight Trigrams Rebellions 八卦教起义 of 1786 and 1813. In the depositions of captured rebels we find reference to a variety of secret martial arts they learned with which they would overthrow the Qing dynasty, and from those documents we can see that their arts were also based around an eight-step walking pattern. The Eight Trigrams were a spinoff of the earlier White Lotus Society 白莲教 that fused Daoism, Buddhism, and the Persian religion Manichaeism into a potent ideology that roused the nation in the 1351 Red Turban Rebellion 红巾军起义 which ousted the Mongol Yuan Dynasty. The Eight Trigrams rebels were not successful, but the martial arts they developed would live on beyond their cause and flourish even after their movement had dissolved.

Most lineages of Baguazhang today trace their line back through Dong Haichuan 董海川 (1797-1882), a Hebei province native from a town just a few hours from the temple where our style was being practiced in the early 20th century. Both Dong’s hometown and the Jade Emperor Monastery are right at the center of where the Eight Trigrams rebels were based, and if you read about the rebellions, for which we actually have a quite astonishing body of primary source material, it seems pretty likely that these styles of martial arts are just later versions of the martial arts developed by the Eight Trigrams rebels from the area. The practices of the rebels, however, were full of astrological and divinatory symbolism, stuff that became pretty unfashionable after the Boxer Rebellion (1899-1901), and is largely lost from the secularized forms of Bagua that survive today. Our style is no exception. It’s a pretty barebones form of the art.

Curriculum 目录

Traditionally you begin by learning the mud stepping, fixed postures, and circle walking, then practice just those techniques for three years. After three years you’re ready to learn the palm changes, and the palm changes naturally lead into the Nine Palaces practice. There are also weapons - in our style the double axes 双钺 and from a sister lineage I learned the comically large Bagua broadsword 玄武派八卦刀.

基本功 Basics

1. Warm ups 热身

2. Stances 步法

3. 16 Hand Techniques 手法

4. Eight fixed postures 定式八法

5. Mud Stepping 趟泥步

6. Circle Walking 走圈

7. Standing Meditation 桩功

8. Conditioning 强身訓煉

套路 Forms

1. Dragon Gate Dragon-style Eight Trigrams Palm 龍門龍行八卦掌

2. Circling the Nine Palaces 转九宫

3. Xuanwu Sect Eight Trigrams Broadsword 玄武派八卦刀

4. Dragon-style Mandarin Duck Axes 龍行八卦鸳鸯鉞 

散手 Partner Training

1. 16 Dragon Palms 龍行十六掌 

2. Eight Trigrams Sword - Eight Methods 八卦刀八法 

历史与传统 History and Tradition

1. Dragon Gate Dragon Style Eight Trigrams Palm History 龍門龍行八卦历史 

2. Eight Trigrams Theory 八卦理论