Internal and external: neijia, waijia and the epitaph of 1669

Author: Raymond Hackland · Last reviewed: 18 October 2026 · Reading time: about 10 minutes

In short

• What this is: The idea of “internal” (neijia, 内家, nèijiā) and “external” (waijia, 外家, wàijiā) martial arts first appears in writing in an epitaph that the scholar Huang Zongxi wrote in 1669 for the boxer Wang Zhengnan. This article reads that text and his son’s notes, follows the Zhang Sanfeng legend, and shows how Sun Lutang grouped taiji, xingyi and bagua as the internal arts in the 1920s. It is the seventh article of our neigong series.
• What the evidence says: The texts are well documented. The story that the Daoist immortal Zhang Sanfeng founded the internal school is a legend; historians also read the epitaph as a political statement by a Ming loyalist. Claims of “internal power” feats and no-touch knockouts go beyond what the sources or research show.
• What it means for your practice: “Internal” in martial training originally named a fighting strategy and a way of training, not a mystical force. The Six Healing Sounds are not a martial method, but they share an emphasis on breath, stillness and attention to the inside.

What tradition says

Label for this section: Tradition only (documented history).

The epitaph. Huang Zongxi (黄宗羲, 1610–1695) was a leading scholar of the late Ming and early Qing who had fought against the Manchu conquest and refused to serve the new dynasty [7, 8]. His “Epitaph for Wang Zhengnan” (王征南墓誌銘) opens with the passage that started the whole debate [1]:

“Shaolin is famous throughout the land for its boxing, but its method is centred on attacking people, so that others too can take advantage of it. There is a so-called internal school, which uses stillness to control movement (以靜制動): whoever attacks is thrown down at the first touch. That is why Shaolin is set apart as the external school” (少林以拳勇名天下，然主於搏人，人亦得以乘之。有所謂內家者，以靜制動，犯者應手即仆，故別少林為外家) [1].

Huang then gives the origin: the school “began with Zhang Sanfeng (張三峰) of the Song. Sanfeng was an alchemist of Wudang. Emperor Huizong summoned him, but the road was blocked and he could not come. That night he dreamed that the Dark Emperor taught him boxing, and at dawn he killed more than a hundred bandits single-handed” [1]. A lineage follows, from Wang Zong (王宗) in Shaanxi through Zhang Songxi (张松溪) in the Jiajing era (1522–1566) and Dan Sinan (单思南) to Wang Zhengnan (王征南) [1].

When it was written. The epitaph gives Wang’s birth in a dingsi year and his death on the ninth day of the second month of a jiyou year, aged 53 by Chinese reckoning; these correspond to 1617 and 1669 [1]. Huang wrote it after Wang’s death, at the request of Gao Chensi (高辰四) [1]. In the Sibu congkan edition of Huang’s collected prose, the Nanlei wen’an (南雷文案), the title itself carries the year note jiyou (己酉), that is 1669 [9], and scholars date it to 1669 [6, 8]. The dates are given only as cyclical years, without a Qing reign title: where a reign title would stand, the text has “a certain year” (某年) [1, 9]. The historian Stanley Henning reads this as a sign that Huang refused to recognise the Qing [8].

Who Wang Zhengnan was. The epitaph describes a soldier who served the Ming resistance, then lived by manual work and refused to sell his skill [1]. It tells fighting stories and mentions “death points, fainting points and mute points” struck “according to the bronze-figure charts” of acupuncture [1]. It also records Wang’s complaint: “People today find nothing in the internal school to show off, so they mix the external into it; this learning will decline” (今人以內家無可炫耀。於是以外家攙入之，此學行當衰矣) [1].

Huang Baijia’s notes. Huang Zongxi’s son Huang Baijia (黄百家, 1643–?) studied with Wang Zhengnan and wrote a “Biography of Master Wang Zhengnan” (王征南先生傳) about seven years after Wang’s death (“今先生之死止七年”) [2, 9]. Its boxing part, later printed on its own as Neijia quanfa (內家拳法, Boxing Methods of the Internal School), is the earliest surviving manual of the internal school [6]. It goes further than the epitaph: “Zhang Sanfeng, having mastered Shaolin, reversed it; this is called the internal school” (張三峰既精於少林，復從而翻之，是名內家) [2]. It lists training for the hands and steps, gathered into two sequences, the “six routes” and the “ten sections of brocade” [2]. Wang’s own advice is practical: “Boxing is not about having many techniques but about knowing them thoroughly” (拳不在多，惟在熟), and in the end all is reduced to “five words kept in the heart” [2]. Huang Baijia admits that, at his father’s wish, he gave it up to study for the civil-service examinations, and that, since he was Wang’s only student, “this art has become a lost melody” [2].

Later retellings. The Qing dynastic history, drafted in the early 20th century, summarises the epitaph almost word for word but turns Wang Zong into “Wang Zongyue” (王宗岳) [3], the name attached to the most famous taijiquan treatise. Henning shows that the same substitution in a taijiquan book of 1921 was part of a conscious effort to write the Zhang Sanfeng legend into taijiquan history [8].

The Zhang Sanfeng legend

Label for this section: Tradition only (documented history).

The official History of the Ming has a biography of Zhang Sanfeng (written 張三丰). It describes an eccentric wandering Daoist on Mount Wudang, sought in vain by the Hongwu and Yongle emperors and honoured with a title in 1459; claims about when he lived “cannot be verified” (皆不可考) [4]. It does not mention boxing [4]. Huang’s epitaph also places Zhang in the Song, centuries earlier than the Ming accounts [1, 4].

Historians therefore regard the founding story as legend:

• Tang Hao (唐豪), in his Shaolin Wudang kao (Study of Shaolin and Wudang) of the early 1930s, led the modern, evidence-based study of martial arts history; Douglas Wile quotes him criticising earlier writers for “inventing mythic origins and romanticizing the biographies of historical masters” [7]. Wile describes the long dispute between traditionalists, who credit Zhang Sanfeng with taijiquan, and modernisers, who trace it to the Chen family [7].
• Stanley Henning shows that the earliest reference to Zhang as a boxing master is Huang’s epitaph, and that the first published work linking him with taijiquan appeared only in 1912 [8].
• A political reading. Henning argues that the contrast was a piece of anti-Manchu symbolism: the “external” school of Shaolin stood for foreign Buddhism and the Manchu conquerors, the “internal” school of the Daoist Zhang Sanfeng for the Chinese [8]. Wile notes that Huang, “late Ming philosopher and anti-Manchu resistance fighter”, wrote “the first soft style theory” [7].
• Shaolin was real. Shahar lists at least forty 16th- and 17th-century sources on Shaolin monks’ martial practice; the weapon that made the monastery famous was the staff [6]. Huang’s “external school” was a contrast he drew, not a description of one style.

Sun Lutang and the three internal arts

Label for this section: Tradition only (documented history).

The grouping familiar today came much later. In the author’s preface to his Quanyi shuzhen (拳意述真, True Explanations of the Meaning of Boxing), dated 1923 and published in 1924, Sun Lutang (孙禄堂, also Sun Fuquan 孙福全) writes: “In boxing it is called internal strength (內勁); hence the internal school of boxing has three branches, xingyi, bagua and taiji, different in form, but in their ultimate way of returning to emptiness they are one” (所以內家拳術，有形意、八卦、太極三派，形式不同，其極還虛之道則一也) [5]. His book links martial training directly to inner alchemy: the stages of “obvious”, “hidden” and “transforming” strength are matched with “refining essence into qi, qi into spirit, spirit back to emptiness” [5]. See “Jing, qi and shen: the three treasures of inner alchemy” in this series.

What “internal” means in martial training

Label for this section: Tradition only (traditional concepts).

Read together, the sources give “internal” several meanings, none of them a hidden force:

• A strategy. “Using stillness to control movement” means waiting for the opponent and using the opponent’s action [1]. Henning notes that the idea was not new: a staff manual of 1565 and the Art of War already advocate it [8].
• A training method. Huang Baijia lists techniques, vital points and “faults to be avoided”, but says that “the essential lies in practice”: once practice is thorough, “you respond as the hand moves, without looking or planning” [2]. Wang reduced seventy-two throws and thirty-five locks step by step to eighteen and twelve methods, and finally to a few words [2].
• A state of mind. Those last “five words kept in the heart” (存心之五字) sum up the training [2]; in the Sibu congkan edition a small-print note gives them as jing 敬, jin 緊, jing 徑, jin 勁 and qie 切 [9]. We leave them untranslated, since each word has several possible meanings. At the deepest level of Guo Yunshen’s training, recorded by Sun, the heart is “empty and open” (心中空空洞洞) [5].
• Breath. In Sun’s book, Guo Yunshen describes three levels of breathing in xingyiquan. At the first, the tongue touches the palate and “breathing is left to itself; do not fix the attention on breathing” (呼吸任其自然。不可着意於呼吸) [5]. At the deepest level breathing “seems present and yet absent”, and, describing the same stage elsewhere, he adds: “this is not holding the breath” (非閉氣也) [5]. He warns against forcing the lower belly “as hard as stone” [5].

“What is neigong? An introduction“, earlier in this series, places martial neigong among the other meanings of the word.

What science says

Label for this section: Tradition only (no research on the historical questions).

The questions here are historical and are answered from texts, not experiments. Research on taijiquan and Qigong as exercise is a separate matter; our article Qigong and tai chi: what systematic reviews say summarises it. No research we know of measures an “internal” force distinct from ordinary strength, skill, timing and coordination.

Where popular claims go beyond the evidence

Label for this section: Speculative.

• “Zhang Sanfeng invented taijiquan.” No source before 1669 makes Zhang a boxer, the Ming history does not, and the link with taijiquan was first published in 1912 [4, 8].
• “Internal styles are Daoist and external styles are Buddhist.” The contrast goes back to one epitaph that historians read partly as political allegory [1, 8]. Shaolin monks did practise martial arts, above all the staff [6]; “external” was Huang’s label for them, not theirs [1, 8].
• “Internal power” feats. The old sources themselves contain feat stories: attackers fall at a touch, a struck man cannot urinate for days, five strong men pushing poles into a master’s belly are thrown through the air [1, 5]. These are stories in praise of teachers, not tested observations.
• No-touch knockouts and “death touch”. The epitaph’s “death points” are struck in a fight: “whenever he struck people, he used their points” (凡搏人皆以其穴) [1]. The stories we quote all involve contact, and we know of no controlled test showing that a person can be knocked down without it.

How this relates to the Six Healing Sounds, Qigong and neigong

Label for this section: Tradition only (documented history); Raymond’s own approach is marked as his, and its link to the science of vibration is labelled Speculative.

The internal martial arts and the Six Healing Sounds are separate traditions. The six sounds first appear in the Yangxing yanming lu, a text traditionally attributed to Tao Hongjing (died 536) and first recorded between the 6th and 8th centuries, many centuries before the epitaph; see the history of Liu Zi Jue. They are not a fighting method, and the internal-school texts quoted here do not mention them [1, 2, 5]. Today the six sounds are taught as a Qigong form, and modern Qigong books count a martial strand alongside medical, Daoist, Buddhist and Confucian ones; see What is Qigong?. What connects the two traditions is a shared emphasis: on breath that is left natural and not held [5], on stillness [1], and on attention to the inside rather than display, as in Wang Zhengnan’s complaint [1]. Our next article, “Stillness and posture: sitting and standing practice in the internal traditions“, looks at that shared ground.

How my practice relates to this. My practice is breath-led: you breathe in quietly through the nose and breathe the six sounds out through the mouth, “voiced through the breath”, not sung, working over time towards a silent exhalation. The breathing stays slow and controlled throughout, with no breath holds and no fast breathing. It is not a martial art, and it does not include neidan or its refining stages (refining essence into qi, and so on).

Label for the next paragraph: Speculative, based on Raymond’s own description. Raymond links the sounds to the science of sound and vibration: in theory, the voiced breath may reach the organs and set them vibrating. This has not been shown, and he does not claim that it works; what can be felt is the vibration of your own voice, as What is resonance? explains, and we know of no measurements of a particular sound vibrating a particular organ (see our article on vowels and formants). He also uses a visualisation in the spirit of neigong: you imagine yourself as the resonance, travelling with each sound to its organ, and with xi through the whole body (the triple burner). This rests on his own experience and that of his participants, not on a scientific finding; he describes his work as bridging the gap between the science and the experience. None of this is a health claim. If you have a health condition, please read who should be careful with breathing practices first.

Resonance Heritage Qi is a personal, music-assisted practice inspired by Liu Zi Jue: connected to it, not a replacement for the traditional form or for study with a teacher of that tradition.

Where this series goes next

Next in our neigong series: “Stillness and posture: sitting and standing practice in the internal traditions”.

Sources

1. Huang Zongxi 黃宗羲. 王征南墓誌銘 Wang Zhengnan muzhi ming (Epitaph for Wang Zhengnan). Chinese text, Wikisource edition (from 黃梨洲文集, juan 4), accessed 18 October 2026. https://zh.wikisource.org/wiki/王征南墓誌銘
2. Huang Baijia 黃百家. 王征南先生傳 Wang Zhengnan xiansheng zhuan (Biography of Master Wang Zhengnan), in 學箕初稿 Xueji chugao. Chinese text, Shidian guji (識典古籍) digital edition, accessed 18 October 2026. https://www.shidianguji.com/book/HY1115/chapter/1kuzynglwvui0
3. 清史稿 Qingshi gao (Draft History of the Qing), juan 505, biography of Wang Laixian 王來咸 (Wang Zhengnan). Chinese text, Wikisource edition, accessed 18 October 2026. https://zh.wikisource.org/wiki/清史稿/卷505
4. 明史 Mingshi (History of the Ming), juan 299, 方伎傳, biography of Zhang Sanfeng 張三丰. Chinese text, Wikisource edition, accessed 18 October 2026. https://zh.wikisource.org/wiki/明史/卷299
5. Sun Lutang 孫祿堂 (Sun Fuquan 孫福全), 1924. 拳意述真 Quanyi shuzhen: author’s preface (dated 1923) and chapters on xingyiquan (Guo Yunshen). Chinese text with English translation by Paul Brennan, Brennan Translation, 2013, accessed 18 October 2026. https://brennantranslation.wordpress.com/2013/04/29/the-voices-of-sun-lutangs-teachers/
6. Shahar M, 2001. Ming-period evidence of Shaolin martial practice. Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 61(2):359–413 (pp. 364–366 and the appendix of sources, pp. 412–413). https://doi.org/10.2307/3558572
7. Wile D, 2017. Fighting words: four new document finds reignite old debates in taijiquan historiography. Martial Arts Studies 4:17–35. https://doi.org/10.18573/j.2017.10184
8. Henning SE, 1994. Ignorance, legend and taijiquan. Journal of the Chen Style Taijiquan Research Association of Hawaii 2(3):1–7. Online reprint, accessed 18 October 2026. http://bgtent.com/naturalcma/henning.html
9. Huang Zongxi 黃宗羲. 南雷文案 Nanlei wen’an, juan 6 (王征南墓誌銘, title note 己酉), with Huang Baijia’s 學箕初稿 Xueji chugao appended, juan 1 (王征南先生傳). Sibu congkan edition, Kanripo digital text KR4f0008, accessed 18 October 2026. https://github.com/kanripo/KR4f0008

Source quality note: [1], [3] and [4] are primary Chinese texts read in Wikisource editions; the translations are our own working translations. [2] is a primary text read in the Shidian guji digital edition; we checked [1] and [2] against the Sibu congkan edition [9], which has only minor variant characters; [5] is read in the Chinese text reproduced alongside an independent English translation. For the historical interpretation we rely on [6]–[8]: two peer-reviewed articles and one short article by a historian of Chinese martial arts. We did not read Tang Hao’s own work or Douglas Wile’s books for this article; where we mention their views, we say through which source. Sources disagree on Tang Hao’s birth year, so we do not give his dates.