Neijia
Chinese internal martial arts
Neijia (內家) is the collective name for the internal Chinese martial arts. It relates to those martial arts occupied with spiritual, mental or qi-related aspects, as opposed to an "external" approach focused on physiological aspects. The distinction dates to the 17th century, but its modern application is due to publications by Sun Lutang, dating to the period of 1915 to 1928. Neijin is developed by using neigong or "internal changes", contrasted with waigong (外功; wàigōng) or "external exercises".
Wudangquan is a more specific grouping of internal martial arts named for their association in popular Chinese legend with the Taoist monasteries of the Wudang Mountains in Hubei province. These styles were enumerated by Sun Lutang as tai chi, xingyiquan and baguazhang, but most also include bajiquan and the legendary Wudang Sword.
Some other Chinese arts, not in the wudangquan group, such as qigong, liuhebafa, Bak Mei Pai, ziranmen (Nature Boxing), Bok Foo Pai and yiquan are frequently classified (or classify themselves) as "internal".
History
Qing China
The term neijia and the distinction between internal and external martial arts first appears in Huang Zongxi's 1669 Epitaph for Wang Zhengnan. Stanley Henning proposes that the Epitaph's identification of the internal martial arts with the Taoism indigenous to China and of the external martial arts with the foreign Buddhism of Shaolin—and the Manchu Qing Dynasty to which Huang Zongxi was opposed—was an act of political defiance rather than one of technical classification.
In 1676 Huang Zongxi's son, Huang Baijia, who learned martial arts from Wang Zhengnan, compiled the earliest extant manual of internal martial arts, the Neijia Quanfa.
The public source identifies “Neijia” as chinese internal martial arts. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Neijia, Chinese and internal.
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This entry incorporates text from “Neijia” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.