I was fifteen when I started, in my home town, doing basic work under an old teacher called Zhang Yuren. For those first years it was just boxing. Nobody mentioned Laozi.
Zhang later recommended me to Taigu, in Shanxi, to Che Xiangqian. He was well on in years by then, so by the custom of the school one of his own disciples formally took me as a student, while the boxing came from him directly. The Che branch of Xingyiquan. My generation carries the character shang. I stayed with it for years.
Somewhere around 2008 something started moving.
I am not going to describe it. I could not describe it accurately at the time and I still cannot, and what I would produce is a paragraph assembled out of other people’s books, of which there is already an oversupply. I took the question to both teachers separately and got the same answer twice: the boxing takes you roughly this far, and past here you go and look in the Daoist material.
The dictionary was never ours
At the time that sounded like being shown the door politely. What they meant turned out to be practical.
Xingyiquan describes its own progression as lian jing hua qi, lian qi hua shen, lian shen huan xu, which comes into English as refining essence into breath, breath into spirit, spirit back into emptiness, in one of several renderings that all leak. Modern boxing books put those phrases everywhere, usually set against the three grades of force: obvious power, hidden power, transforming power. But the three phrases did not grow inside boxing. They are the stages of neidan, Daoist internal alchemy, and they had been in circulation in alchemical writing long before any Xingyi manual picked them up. Keep going down the list and it is the same story: qi, yi, shen, dantian, the Governing and Conception channels, the small circulation. Nearly every term a boxing manual uses for the inside of the body arrived from somewhere else. A manual tells you what to do with a word. It does not tell you what the word means, where it came from, or what problem it was built to solve. If you want that, you have to go to the source material. That is how I started reading Daoist texts. At the start it was only to find out what those words meant.
Use and cultivation
The two traditions share the vocabulary and want different things out of it. The cultivation half is what the alchemical books say they are after; it is not a claim I am making here about what any of it will do for anybody. Boxing wants use. Every movement in Xingyi eventually has to answer for itself in terms of distance, timing, whether the whole body arrived together, whether anything came out. Its time scale is one instant, and what it trains is the ability to gather a person into that instant on demand. Inner alchemy hits nobody. It works on the practitioner’s own body across decades. Same character for qi on both sides. One side treats it something like fuel, the other something like savings. What the alchemical texts ask for, over and over, is less of everything: less talking, less anger, fewer appetites, hours kept in step with the seasons. A boxer trains himself to gather the whole body and let it go on demand, over and over in a morning, for years.
Where I am not sure
So whether the qi in a boxing manual and the qi in an alchemical text are the same thing, I will not say. The word is identical and the usage does not match. I have heard people who know more than I do argue that it is one thing at different depths, and I have heard others argue that the boxers borrowed a shell, that the borrowing gave the training a tidy sequence and has little to do with what the alchemists were actually up to. Both hold together well enough. I have not read enough to settle it, and I am still on it.
If pressed today I can only say that the words were borrowed. How much of the thing underneath came across with them, I cannot tell you.
The Yijing detour
Reading the Daoist material dragged something else in. The alchemical texts talk about timing and heat, and they do it in the language of the Yijing: hexagram lines, the twelve sovereign hexagrams, lines matched to points in the cycle. Skip that and you have skipped the part carrying the content.
So I went back and taught myself the Yijing, and got stuck. The characters were not the problem. Nobody was there to say which line is structural and which is a later hand, or to explain the places where one book disagrees with itself, so you circle the same ground for a while.
In 2014 a Daoist priest, Faleidaoren, began looking me over. In 2016 he brought me into the tradition.
One small thing I have never resolved, while I am here. English usually renders dantian as “cinnabar field”, which is literal and hands the reader a picture of a plot of red earth somewhere below the navel. Chinese readers get no such picture, because the term reaches them worn smooth by use. I have not found an English word that behaves the same way. Mostly I leave it untranslated now and explain it once.
Back to the Dao De Jing
There is not a line in the Dao De Jing about striking anyone. It is a book about governing, conduct, and the behaviour of things in the world. After you have trained, the book has not changed; you have picked up a body of experience that quietly re-translates certain sentences for you.
Chapter seventy-six: the living are soft and yielding, the dead are stiff and hard, and so the stiff and hard belong to death while the soft and yielding belong to life. That is my own plain rendering, and every published translation differs, some of them by a lot. Laozi goes on from there to grass and trees and to armies. He is not talking about boxing. But someone who has stood in a posture until his legs shook, and has been put on the ground by a person clearly better than him, and knows what happens the moment he stiffens, reads those two lines and thinks first about his own arms. Chapter ten, asking whether you can concentrate the qi and reach softness like an infant, does the same thing.
The boxing hands you one key that happens to fit a few of the sentences. The rest of them you work at like everyone else.
Teaching here
I still teach the boxing in Sydney. Two questions come up more than any others. The first is whether it is the same as tai chi, which is easy enough to answer. The second is whether it is good for you, and the answer I give every time is the same: this is not treatment. If something in your body is wrong, see a doctor or a physiotherapist. Do not put it on a martial art.
Whether anyone goes on to the Daoist side after that is not something I push. Plenty of people train a lifetime without going near it and their boxing is fine. I went that way because of a question I was carrying at the time and could not get answered in the training hall. If a student asks I say that much, and if nobody asks I leave it alone.