Huang Zongxi
黃宗羲
Chinese Neo-Confucian philosopher (1610-1695), whose 1669 epitaph for Wang Zhengnan was the first to introduce the term neijia, meaning internal martial arts.
Quick Facts
ChinaBiography
Huang Zongxi was born on 24 September 1610 in Yuyao, Zhejiang province, and died there on 12 August 1695 at the age of 84. He was a Neo-Confucian philosopher, political theorist, naturalist, and also a soldier. In martial arts he is known as the author of the text that first distinguished internal from external martial arts. We have not been able to verify in the sources whether he practiced martial arts himself.
His writings include Waiting for the Dawn (Ming yi dai fang lu), a critique of arbitrary autocratic rule, and Record of the Ming Scholars (Ming ru xue an), a systematic survey of the schools of thought of the Ming dynasty. In 1633 he completed the Shilu, the "Veritable Records" of the Ming dynasty.
In 1669 he wrote the Epitaph for Wang Zhengnan (王征南墓志銘). The text was the first to introduce the term neijia and to divide martial arts into internal and external. His son Huang Baijia, who studied under Wang Zhengnan, compiled the oldest surviving manual of internal martial arts, the Neijia Quanfa, in 1676.
The meaning of this division is disputed. According to the scholar Stanley Henning, it was more an act of political defiance toward the Qing dynasty than a technical classification.