Are XinYi and XingYi really two different arts?

All Chinese martial arts that are considered "traditional" have interesting and disputed histories. The history of XingYi (one of the three main Chinese internal martial arts) is particularly interesting because its verifiable history is so incredibly long. We can (pretty) accurately trace it hundreds of years back to the 1600s when a man named Ji Long Feng was recorded as practicing Xin Yi... and that's where another particular problem starts - are Xin Yi and XingYi really two different arts, or the same thing?

Image by amy-wong.com via Flickr

Ji Long Feng practiced the precursor style to XingYi known as "Xin Yi Liu He" (Heart/mind 6 harmony boxing), not "Xin Yi" (Heart/mind boxing) or "XingYi" (shape/intent boxing) Everybody knows that XingYi was created in Shanxi by Li Neng Ran (1809 - 1890) out of Dai family Xin Yi - but is that accepted wisdom really the whole story?

Well... maybe. Maybe not. It depends how you look at it. Hold your righteous indignation in check for a few minutes while I draw a comparison to a completely unrelated human endeavour, that shows how human beings like to classify things in a certain way that doesn't really reflect reality: religion.

Image by Kees van Mansom via Flickr

There are considered to be 3 main world religions*: Judaism, Christianity and Islam. While the ideologies are wildly different, they all come from the same source. I don't mean God, I mean a human souce. While proclamations of belief have changed radically over time and along different branches, there's still an unbroken lineage of teacher to student going back in all of them to the same place and time. While a Jew, a Christian and a Muslim might not consider they have much in common with each other (and indeed have been in perpetual states of conflict with each other for centuries now), if an alien from outer space landed on earth and somehow managed to download the entire history of the Judeo-Christian religion into his brain, he might consider them to simply be 3 different branches of the same family tree. Look within Christianity itself - there are multiple divisions. Take the cataclysmic Catholic/Protestant split so evident in Northern Ireland. In 1988, when Pope John Paul II delivered a speech to the European Parliament, a Presbyterian Minister Ian Paisley shouted "I Denounce you as the AntiChrist!" and held up a red poster reading "Pope John Paul II ANTICHRIST" in black letters. Yet would a Muslim living in one of the Arab states recognise a real difference between a Presbyterian Minister and a Roman Catholic Priest? Aren't they both just "Christians"? Yet, here we have one Christian telling another that he is not a Christian in big black letters on a red poster.

The point I'm making is that categorisation of martial arts (or religions) can depend more upon your point of view, politics and your emotional investment as much as anything else.

The accepted reading of XingYi's history is that it was created at a certain point in time. At that point in time the art stopped being called "Xin Yi" and it become known as "XingYi". It later split off into Hebei and Shanxi divisions, so it also, at a certain point in time it stopped being just "XingYi" and became "Hebei XingYi" or "Shanxi XingYi". Hopefully the ridiculous nature of this "putting reality in boxes" view is starting to become apparent. Of course, people need to use these "boxes" to meaningfully discuss things, which is why we use them in all walks of life, but the problem is we then start thinking of the walls of these boxes as being real, firm and solid, and we get very upset when other people want to re-arrange reality into different sized parcels than our own. My teacher had 3 Chinese nationals as teachers and (contrary to the accepted wisdom of the Internet), none of those 3 drew a real distinction between Xin Yi and XingYi. They were both "different names for the same thing".

Image by appelogen.be via Flickr

I don't dispute the difference in emphasis between styles. Dai Xin Yi, for instance, makes use of a training method called Squatting Monkey, where the spine is bowed and then forcibly straightened in a violent expand/contract motion as the practitioner steps forward into a forward weighted posture. Hebei XingYi in contrast is known for its use of a rear weighted San Ti posture where the weight is kept on the back leg, even when stepping forward. But do these differences mean that it's a different art? Or is it the same art with a different emphasis? I'd contend that the difference isn't as hard and fast, or as black and white, as it is made out to be.  If you look for differences there will always be differences even between two students of the same school and same style, but if you stop focusing on the differences and look for the similarities then you see things in a different way.

if you look at my previous post in which I compare photos of myself performing postures from our line of Hebei XingYi to photos of Master Yan Long Cheng performing the 10 Animals of Dai XingYi you can see the immediate similarities between the postures, even though the stance used is often different.

So, are XingYi and Xin Yi two completely different arts or should they be regarded as one art that has been passed through the hands of many thousands of practitioners over several hundreds of years? Let me know what you think in the Comments section.

* If you look at religion in terms of sheer numbers I'm not so sure these would be the top 3, but that's tangental to the point I'm making, so let's let it ride for now.

Related blogs:

The XingYi classics

XingYi: Hititng bodies and Beng Chuan