Wudangquan

Wudang quan is a class of Chinese martial arts.

In contemporary China, Chinese martial arts styles are generally classified into two major groups: Wudang (Wutang), named after the Wudang Mountains; and Shaolin, named after the Shaolin Monastery.Wudang quan (Chinese: 武当拳; pinyin: Wǔdāng quán; Wade–Giles: Wu³-tang¹ ch'üan²) translates as "Wudang fist." Whereas Shaolin includes many martial art styles, Wudangquan includes only a few arts that utilize the focused mind to control the waist, and therefore the body; this typically encompasses T'ai chi ch'uan, Xing-Yi chuan and Bagua zhang, but must also include Baji chuan and Wudang Sword. Although the name Wudang simply distinguishes the skills, theories and applications of the "internal arts" from those of the Shaolin styles, it falsely suggests these arts originated at the Wudang Mountains. The name Wudang comes from a popular Chinese legend that incorrectly purports the genesis of Tai chi chuan and Wudang Sword by an immortal, Taoist hermit named Zhang Sanfeng who lived in the monasteries of Wudang Mountain.

Wudangquan is often used synonymously with Neijia, but strictly speaking Neijia is a broader term that also encompasses, for example, Aikido and Qigong, which are not Wudangquan.

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.

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