A SHORT HISTORY OF THE REALITY OF

BA GUA ZHANG8 trigram palms

by Master Frank Allen (5th Generation)

The martial art of Ba Gua Zhang emerged from the Imperial Palace in Beijing, China during the mid 1800‘s, rising to become the chosen art of the Emperor’s nephew.

Prince Su Wang’s eunuch servant, tax collector, martial arts instructor, Dong Hai Chuan, bacame the premier Martial Arts teacher. As a servant, Dong found it pru-dent to remain vague about the origins of his continuous movement art, featuring coiling, twisting and circling, constantly changing.

He taught his beginning students a standard, Northern Shaolin style, and only the best of them went on to study Ba Gua Zhang. His two most famous and prolific dis-ciples were his first disciple Yin Fu and his fourth disciple, the former Shuai Jiao champion of Beijing, the eyeglass maker, Cheng Ting Hua. Most of the lineage Ba Gua Schools existing today come from either one of these styles or a compilation of the two.

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There are many legends of Ba Gua Zhang existing before the teaching of Dong Hai Chuan, but they remain just that, legends. Decades ago, the foremost martial arts scholar in China of the late 20th and early 21st centuries, Professor Kang Ge Wu wrote his master’s thesis on the history of Ba Gua Zhang. As a lifelong Ba Gua en-thusiast and a formal disciple of the living legend Sha Guo Zheng, Kang Ge Wu dili-gently traveled China searching out each and every lineage, to uncover the legend and story of Ba Gua Zhang.

In the end he found that there was no Ba Gua Zhang before Dong Hai Chuan, and that its origins before Dong remain ambiguous although the connections to the Chinese Classic of Change, the Yi Jing remain obvious due to the art being named “8 Trigram Palm” . The foundations of the art being primarily a set of 8 different ways to change direction while walking around a circle. Dong sometimes said that he learned the art from an old man on a mountain, no specific man, no specific mountain. Perhaps the origins of his art were gleaned from some circle walking meditation or another ? …. More on that later.

Prof. Kang saw a pattern that pointed to the theory that many of the legends of Ba Gua before Dong Hai Chuan, the Ermei, Wu Dang, Southern Palms, etc, schools seemed often to trace back to some of Dong Hai Chuan’s other disciples (72 of them are listed on his tomb) who became tired of being told they didn’t practice Dong’s Ba Gua, because their art was neither Yin Fu’s or Cheng Ting Hua’s …. So they created even Better lineages…. But there was NO evidence of Any lineage Ba Gua Zhang before Dong Hai Chuan.

Frank Allen & Tina Zhang Meeting with Prof. Kang Ge Wu, Jan. 2004

Almost all practitioners of Ba Gua Zhang agree that it is most likely that Dong Hai Chuan adapted his art from one of a variety of circle walking practices of the vari-ous schools of Daoism that existed at the time, leading candidates being the Dragon Gate Sect’s practice, “Rotating in Worship Of Heaven”, whose aim was to achieve stillness in motion. The there was the Celestial Master’s School of Daoism’s “Natu-ral supreme Empty Palm”, in which the practitioners focused on: Starting from nothing, Wu Ji, then begin gathering energy to evolve into a Harmony of Yin & Yang

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and Tai Ji, which was sometimes also referred to as balancing the inner with the outer. Notice how neither of these were called Ba Gua.. there may have been some other style of circling walking meditation that Dong Hai Chuan stumbled on and studied in his youth. No one knows for sure, but whatever it was, it was only the rough template upon which Dong Hai Chuan created the art of Ba Gua Zhang, with its trade mark circle walk and palm changes.

A study of the origins of one’s art is a normal progression of study and looking into the traditional Daoist circling walking practices and perhaps the shamanistic circle patterns that preceded the meditations is a healthy course of research for advanced practitioners of Ba Gua Zhang. Beginners need to focus on their foundation prac-tices, while intermediate level students are learning how to functionally use the movements of their art. Then they will be ready to decide which aspect of their art they want to specialize in, which might be understanding the origin of the practices that Dong Hai Chuan evolved into the art of Ba Gua Zhang.

Unfortunately recently there has arisen a variety of New Age, sometimes Yi Jing based and sometimes not, schools of circling walking practices calling themselves a variety titles involving Ba Gua Zhang or simply Ba Gua. They base their practices on nonsense like origins of meditations in Daoist Temples 4,000 years ago, some-how missing the basic fact of history that there were no Daoism or even Daoist tem-ples until the late Han Dynasty, i.e. the late 100’s and early 200’s AD. Some will even claim direct origins from China’s ancient shamans for their Ba Gua.

Often these new age hybrids have little to no lineage as there seems to be little past the current teacher, sometimes these teachers overlay a five element theory pat-tern onto their Ba Gua, either applying it to the entire system or picking their favor-ite element. Like the patterns of the Yi Jing, the 5 element pattern is also one of the foundation ideas of Chinese culture and can conceivably become an ordering pat-tern for just about anything.

But a study based on one of these patterns doesn’t then also add the other one like a general study might be over laid by any number of traditional patterns from basic yin/yang to 9 Palace and any number of the other patterns, but a basic study of One of The Patterns, will not contain another. Therefore things like 5 Element Shaman Ba Gua Zhang, Water Tradition Ba Gua, Ba Gua Yoga, etc., should not be confused with actual, historical schools of the art of Ba Gua Zhang as they are simply New Age Ba Gua Like Products.

It may also be informative to point out that traditional lineages contain more than one grandmaster (usually deceased) and the currently teaching master. Actual lineages trace back more than two generations in order to be considered classical, i.e. have been and will be around for a while. Traditional, classical lineages begin

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with a disciple ceremony for each member of the lineage family and contain living masters and lines of disciples. Beware of the New Age Lineage, with venerated Mas-ters who have no visible lines of decent and no complete system evolved from the classical model

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