Bagua Zhang or The Eight Trigrams Palm is a martial art based on the ancient Chinese book "The I Ching" and it's philosophy. It uses the eight trigrams, the sixty-four hexagrams, and its theories of Yin and Yang to describe fighting tactics, postures, forces used in fighting, and the health exercises that are contained inside Bagua Zhang.
The art of Bagua Zhang is an Internal martial art, meaning that the training begins from the inside of the body working outward. All movements must be coordinated so that they originate in the center of the body at the waist. This develops a unified whole-body power, or the intrinsic strength of the body, which is referred to as internal power. Internal arts also develop the health as well as the strength of an individual.
Bagua Zhang is based on fighting against multiple opponents, it is meant to eliminate an opponent quickly so that you can defend against another. The attacks are deceptive and lethal, circling in from many different angles and making use of subtle feints to set up the opponent for the final devastating blow. Bagua could be described as guerilla warfare, as compared to other martial arts that use the traditional military tactics of fighting in straight line formations.
Bagua is circular in nature, it attacks and defends on the diagonal. When you are attacking or defending, you always try to outflank them by moving to their right or left side.
Bagua is known for its circle walking, in which a person continually walks around an imaginary center, building leg strength, balance while moving, and speed and agility while stepping, which are integral in Bagua Zhang. It makes use of all that the human body can offer up as a weapon. Using fists, open palms, back of the wrists, elbows, shoulder, hips, knees and feet to deliver strikes. In order to generate the lethal strikes, Bagua uses numerous methods of generating power, practicing all of the methods repeatedly to harness and focus power.
Bagua Zhang when known in its entirety is an enormous system, not because its originator Dong Haichuan wanted it to seem overly glorious or sound extreme when you start talking about the number of forms, but simply because if you truly want to explore the art of fighting and Chinese boxing then it seems logical that you would eventually want to learn every way that your body can be used as a weapon, how to attack and defend from every possible angle and position, and how to make every strike extremely effective by only using the natural intrinsic power of the human body through application of the principles of internal power and training.
This website discusses Yin Style Bagua Zhang as taught by Dr. Xie Peiqi
a fourth generation practitioner of Bagua Zhang and his student and inheritor
He Jinbao. The resources for this website come from studying with Dr.
Xie Peiqi and He Jinbao, notes taken from seminars and lectures, as well
as information contained in the videos,books, and articles about Yin Style
Bagua.
1- Upholding - The tip of the tongue is held up to the roof of the mouth pressing towards the teeth.
2- Upright - The head, the body, and the heart must all be kept upright.
3- The Three Points - When the tip of the hand, the tip of the foot, and the tip of the nose are all pointed in the same direction then there is alignment. When there is alignment then there is uprightness.
4- The Four Extremities - This means that one must be able to put strength into the four extremities, which are the bones, tendons, flesh, and blood. The bones are represented by condition of the teeth, the strength of the tendons is seen in the nails of the hands and feet, the tongue is a window to the flesh, and vitality of the blood is seen in the condition of a persons hair.
5- The Five Uniques -
6- The Six Harmonies - Being in harmony means being unified. The eyes and heart are unified, where you look is where your thoughts are, what you think about is what you're looking at. The waist and body are unified, wherever the body turns the waist must turn there as well. The hands and feet are unified, one cannot put a hand forward without a foot or put a foot forward without a hand.
7- The Seven Stars - Are what the Chinese call the call the Big Dipper. Which represents the basic standing and stepping posture of the feet while turning the circle. Seven Star stepping is the basis of changing footwork. It also refers to the 7 energies or styles of attacking while turning the circle.
8- The Eight Trigrams - Bagua Zhang means The Eight Trigrams Palm and is based on the Yi Jing or Book of Changes, which is a book which describes the cycles of nature and the changes that happen through the passage of time. It uses the theory of Yin and Yang to express those changes. Using a solid line to represent Yang (the strong masculine energy) and a broken line to represent Yin (the soft feminine energy). When you arrange the lines together in groups of three you come up with eight combinations or the eight trigrams. The trigrams combined give you the sixty-four hexagrams. There are four Yang trigrams and four Yin trigrams. An animal and a natural energy were chosen to represent the combinations of Yin and Yang in each of the eight trigrams, which is the foundation for the fighting systems of Yin Style Bagua.
Bagua Zhang
八卦掌