Zi Ran Men (Natural Boxing)
自然門A Chinese style without forms. Principles of movement are trained rather than kata, so two students of one school look different. Its base is running a one-metre circle.
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About Zi Ran Men (Natural Boxing)
Ziranmen, literally the gate of naturalness, is a Chinese style arranged in the 1890s by Du Xinwu, who lived from 1869 to 1953. Du learned from a wandering master known as Xu Ai, nicknamed Dwarf Xu, and what he took over kept its character: an art without fixed forms. That is precisely the defining mark of ziranmen. It has no kata and no prescribed order of techniques; instead, principles of movement are trained together with the free expression that follows from them, so that two students of the same school look different. From this comes the name too — what is natural should be what a person does, not what he has memorised. The training has all the harder a foundation for it. The central exercise is running around a circle roughly a metre across, performed in a crouch and with weights that are gradually added; to this belongs the walking called guibu, the ghost step, whose aim is to move fast and at the same time unreadably. Du Xinwu became known outside the martial arts as well: he served as a bodyguard to Sun Yat-sen. The style is still transmitted in Hunan and Hubei and is among those that are hard to describe precisely because no form can be shown in them.
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