Wudang Qigong

武当气功

 

Black Dragon Wags its Tail 乌龙摆尾. Brandi 资自 doing the Dragon 龙行 from the Five Animals 五形气功

Qi Gong 气功 (chee-gong) is an ancient Chinese health cultivation practice, a set of slow exercises to maintain balance, improve flexibility, and stimulate the flow of internal energy.

At least that is how it is most commonly understood. In China we learned many varieties of qigong, from slow, therapeutic qigong sets like the Five Animal Frolics 五禽戏 to forms of martial qigong like Iron Body 桶子功, which involves intense, fiery breathing exercises and hitting yourself with bamboo sticks!

There are actually a lot of different varieties of qigong, and everyone classifies them differently. Here I will introduce the different types of qigong we studied to give a sense of what we practice and offer.

 

Curriculum 目录

 
 

健身气功 Healing Qigong

  • 五禽戏 Five Animal Frolics

  • 八段锦 Eight Brocades

  • 五形气功 Five Animals Qigong

  • 吐古纳新 Out with the Old and In with the New

武术气功 Martial Qigong

  • 桶子功 Iron Body

  • 铁砂掌 Iron Palm

  • 铁臂功 Iron Arm

  • 龙爪手 Dragon Claw

  • 太乙气功 Taiyi Qigong

神功 Spiritual Qigong

  • 鹤行桩 Crane Standing

  • 丹房八段錦 Elixir Chamber Eight Brocades

  • 悟性功 Realization Practice

Master Zhong 钟云龙 doing one of the preparatory stretches from the Tongzi Gong 童子功

 

Healing qigong 健身氣功

Qigong is actually a quite recent label, coined in the 1930’s as an umbrella term to refer to a huge variety of different mind-body practices that have come and gone through the ages. The term literally means Qi methods. As far as umbrella terms go, I think it is a pretty good one.

In our lineage we usually start off with the Eight Brocades 八段锦, a simple qigong set with a long and well-documented history. I categorize it as a healing qigong above, but it also has utility as a martial qigong, depending on how you practice it.

But by the time the Eight Brocades came on the scene, the Five Animal Frolics 五禽戏 were already a few hundred years old. Created by one of the fathers of the Chinese medical tradition, the physician Huatuo 华佗 (140-208 CE), they are probably the most commonly practiced form of qigong in China. The version we know actually came from master Yuan’s home village of Yangxin 阳新. It is a kind of folksy version of the practice. A qigong for The People.

But by the time Huatuo was doing his thing, another qigong style known as Out with the Old and In the the New 吐古纳新 had already been around for a few hundred years as attested in classical writers like Zhuangzi 庄子 (369-286 BCE) and Sima Qian 司马迁 (145-86 BCE). In this qigong as you bend down you imagine all your bad energy and emotions being pushed out of your hands and feet down into the earth. Then standing up and turning to face the sky you imagine bringing in good, clean freshness from heaven. Over and over again. It feels pretty great. Then there’s a second part where you swallow a ton of air 吞氣 and learn to use small muscles in your upper digestive tract to push it down into your stomach. This technique is useful for Daoists on meditation retreat where you don’t eat any food. You learn to inflate your stomach like a balloon so it wont start digesting itself, which is very painful. There is a third part too where you practice breathing without breathing, using internal coordination of small muscles in the torso to facilitate a very subtle kind of breath.

This section also includes five animals qigong 五形气功 which was actually created by our teacher, master Yuan. I kind of can’t believe he created it because it is such a cool qigong, but he seems to have been inspired by the five animal frolics 五禽戏 in combination with a form of qigong his teacher master Zhong does called bone-enlivening healing practice 活骨养生功. In this qigong you mimic the postures of the five animals: dragon, tiger, leopard, snake, and crane. This one is physically quite demanding, so there are a couple versions of it you can actually practice, some easier, some harder, so you can kind of tailor it to the body of the student.

This is something quite cool I found about Wudang. There is just qigong everywhere. Everyone is doing these strange movements, and there is actually a lot of freedom in how people practice and teach these things. Master Yuan was always reminding us that the qigong exists for us. We don’t exist for the qigong. It is alive and it is for us, so we can change things, adapt things. This is natural. So different masters creating their own qigong sets was very common. When you are there, in Wudang, you kind of get the sense that this is the way things have always been. It is a pretty wild, creative place. Sometimes masters just mix and match things from other forms of qigong they picked up here and there, but other times, as in the case of Brandi’s painting teacher, they learn the qigong from a dream. So in our system it is great to learn all these classical qigong styles, but really all these different forms are kind of like training wheels and you learn to move naturally, to just sort of do your own thing.

Master Yuan doing his Five Animals Qigong 五形气功

 

martial qigong 武术气功

Master Yuan doing the Taiyi Qigong 太乙气功

Also known as hard qigong 硬气功, these are methods of conditioning the limbs and body to prevent injury in fighting. Conditioning the hands is pretty self-explanatory. You begin with simple iron palm 铁砂掌 and iron arm 铁臂功, smashing the hands and arms against a bag of beans, then a bag of sand, then a bag of steel ball bearings, in concert with simple qigong breathing exercises. You start quite soft and slowly work your way up to full power, allowing the tendons, bones, and skin to acclimate to the exercise. There is a saying in Chinese about this training:

外炼筋骨皮Externally cultivating tendon, bone, and skin,

内炼一口气 Internally cultivating a single breath of air.

Then you move on to dragon claw 龙爪手, which has four parts including isometric qigong exercises, jar lifts, claw push ups and standing meditation. Additionally you condition your shins and forearms by hitting them with a bundle of small bamboo sticks, then moving up to an iron bar 铁条. These practices involve the use of a special herbal brew 跌打酒 that you apply to your hands, feet, forearms, and shins after conditioning.

Then you move on to iron body (literally called bucket method 桶子功). First there are three breathing exercises you do for about a month before even starting the practice. These are inhaling 吸气, expelling 排气, and circulating 运气. Once those are somewhat familiar you begin the striking practice 拍打, first with a bundle of small bamboo sticks to condition the skin. After about three months of that you move on to the sandbag 沙包, which delivers the force further into your body, conditioning your muscles and teaching them how to protect your internal organs. Then, again beyond the sandbag you move on to iron bar training 铁条.

The highest level of this practice is the Taiyi Qigong 太乙气功 which combines softness and hardness. This practice also involves learning to move your internal organs around.

 

Spiritual Qigong 神功

Master Zhu Chengde 朱诚德 doing his thing

As I have mentioned in other articles, there is a general structure to our lineage, where martial arts forms the foundation, qigong exercises make up the middle level, and our seated meditation tradition is the highest level. Similarly within our qigong, we begin with more physical and gymnastic exercises and slowly move into more subtle and internal exercises. The first of these is the Crane Standing 鹤行桩. This is such a wonderful practice. It corresponds with the wuji 无极 phase of our training and is divided into three parts. Part one is regulating the breath and entering stillness 调息入静. Part two is crane pacing the five elements 鹤踏五行, where you connect with the five directions and do a quite demanding physical exercise involving a one-legged squat into a very low stance, sliding the body very low across the ground to connect with the earth 纳地气. Part three is crane standing on one leg 鹤形独立. In this part you mimic a crane sleeping on one leg, and here you retake the monkey mind (and horse will) 收回心猿意马!

Next we have the Elixir Chamber Eight Brocades 丹房八段锦, more commonly just called the seated Eight Brocades 坐式八段锦. These are eight seated practices that are really preparatory exercises for our seated meditation tradition known as inner alchemy 内丹. I keep trying to write something about this practice but it just doesn’t come out right, so I’ll leave it at that! I’m writing these articles for a general audience, but certain things, I think, you have to have some foundation of knowledge to really talk about. Without a baseline of knowledge or experience I will just end up sounding like I’m spinning tall tales.

The highest level qigong practice is the Realization Practice 悟性功 that comes from master Zhu Chengde 朱誠德. This practice really blurs the lines between qigong and inner alchemy. It is divided into three sections. The first two sections are standing practices in 20 steps and the last section is a seated practice in 18 steps. It is very cool, has cool postures, circulation practices, inversions. Our class did not actually learn this one from shifu. Toward the end of the program you kind of had to “steal” the last few things from him. So I did that. I think shifu wanted us to steal the last practices, and this one in particular. But maybe I’m just rationalizing my thievery in a self-serving manner. In any case I spied on him doing the Realization Practice on a number of occasions and tracked down a text that contained some details about it. I translated that text, and in coordination with the stuff I spied shifu doing I have been practicing it for years now. There was even one time I was practicing this qigong in a corner of our temple, trying to do it on the down-low, and grandmaster Zhong just happened to visit the temple that day and he walked right by me. He saw me doing a few movements from the third section including the headstand and just stared for a minute and then walked away. I figure if it was really bad someone would have reprimanded me about it but I never heard anything. So I really think this kind of “stealing” is a form of Daoist pedagogy. So let us all steal together.