Wudangquan
武當拳A collective name for the internal arts associated with the Wudang mountains and Daoism. The external-internal divide is a seventeenth-century construct, not an ancient classification.
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About Wudangquan
Wudangquan is not one particular style but a collective name for the so-called internal arts associated with the Wudang mountains in Hubei province and with the Daoist tradition. The arts usually placed under it are taijiquan, xingyiquan and baguazhang. Tradition attributes their origin to the Daoist monk Zhang Sanfeng, said to have been inspired by a fight between a snake and a crane. The documented history looks different: the division into "external" Shaolin arts and "internal" Wudang arts first appears in 1669, in the epitaph for Wang Zhengnan written by the scholar Huang Zongxi. It was therefore a literary and intellectual construct of the seventeenth century rather than an ancient classification, and it is honest to say so plainly. Even so, the division still captures a real difference of approach: the Wudang arts work with relaxation, with movement led from the centre of the body, with evading and redirecting force instead of blocking it, and with breath and postural structure as the training foundation. In the Wudang mountains themselves there are monasteries and schools today teaching their own sequences, among them taiyi wuxingquan and a range of sword forms. Heavy visitor traffic and tourist interest mean that very varied content is taught under the Wudang name and school quality differs.
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