On the Historical Mystery of Zhang Sanfeng

In Buddhism there is a wonderful figure known as Nagarjuna, fondly remembered as the father of Madhyamaka, the highest form of Buddhist logic.  He was a professor at the North Indian university of Nalanda where he gave virtuosic lectures on the intricacies of Buddhist philosophy.  At a certain point in his career he made a trip to the bottom of the ocean where he encountered a pair of Nagarajas, or Dragon Kings, who provided him with a scroll which contained a totally new form of philosophy known as the Perfection of Wisdom.  It was this novel form of philosophical inquiry that helped spur a new, international form of Buddhism known as the Mahayana or Great Vehicle.  Hundreds of years later, the Chinese pilgrim-monk Xuanzang 玄奘 (602-664) visited Nalanda and encountered a very old monk named Nagarjuna who was still teaching there.  His focus had shifted over the centuries, and the monk Xuanzang encountered was mostly concerned with alchemy.  Was this the same figure who had fathered Buddhist logic hundreds of years before?  Had he used his alchemical prowess to prolong his life all these centuries?  

Over the thirteen hundred years that have transpired between Xuanzang’s time and our own, the Nagarjuna problem has only grown in complexity.  As David Gordon White summed it up in his book The Alchemical Body,

There are so many Nagarjunas to choose from...Nagarjuna the Madhyamika philosopher, Nagarjuna the tantric Buddhist author and commentator, Nagarjuna the Hindu tantric sorcerer, Nagarjuna the Nath Siddha, Nagarjuna the north Indian medical author, Nagarjuna the south Indian medical author, Nagarjuna the Buddhist alchemist, Nagarjuna the Jain alchemist, Nagarjuna the northern Hindu alchemist, Nagarjuna the southern Hindu alchemist, Nagarjuna the eye doctor, Nagarjuna the sexologist, Nagarjuna the parfumeur—so many Nagarjunas, so little time!

Sometimes called the Faust of Buddhism, scholars uncomfortable with the mercurial ambiguity of the figure dissolve the problem by rendering Nagarjuna entirely fictitious.  The Tibetans creatively harmonize all these Nagarjunas by taking the Xuanzang view and seeing a single figure who alchemically prolonged his life to last a millennium, plenty of time to master all of the above fields.  

When it comes to the historical figure of Zhang Sanfeng we find ourselves in an identical position.  There are so many Zhang Sanfengs it is difficult to even know where to begin.  Chronologically we might start with the Zhang Sanfeng 张三峰 of the Six Dynasties period (220-589), master of Daoist sexual practices whose name, Zhang of the Three Peaks, refers to his mastery of the three erogenous zones of the lips, nipples, and genitals.  He left behind numerous sexological texts that extend through the centuries such as the innocuously titled Rootless Tree 无根树 or the Secret Principles of Gathering the True Essence 采真机要. 

This is certainly an interesting starting point.  From him we might jump to the Zhang San Feng 张三丰 or Thrice Crazy Zhang of the Song dynasty (960-1126), wandering poet and calligrapher whose flamboyant “drunken” Dragon Style 龙行大草 of calligraphy is recorded in later stelae and cliff-carvings.

When it comes to Wudang mountain, we are most interested in the Yuan dynasty (1279-1368) Zhang San Feng who shares the name of the Song Dynasty fellow.  Both evince a calculated madness worthy of the Thrice Crazy name.  Yet with the more recent Zhang Sanfeng, according to the oral tradition at Wudang, his name gestured toward an esoteric reading, where the characters Three 三 and Crazy 丰(疯) symbolized the Heaven ☰ and Earth ☷ trigrams from the Yijing, signifying his grasp of the interplay of Yin and Yang.  The combination of the exoteric “Thrice Crazy” reading and the esoteric “Heaven and Earth” reading is a perfect encapsulation of the role of crazy wisdom in the Daoist tradition.  It always conceals profundity. 

This Zhang Sanfeng was an alchemist who led the reconstruction of the dilapidated temples of Wudang following the Red Turban Rebellion (1368).  As a folk hero popular amongst the people, his favor was sought by the usurping third emperor of the Ming Dynasty Zhudi 朱棣 (1360-1424) who famously failed to recognize the immortal when they finally met, an encounter he memorialized through the 1412 construction of the Temple of Encountering Perfection 遇真宫.  There are at least two Bronze statues of this Zhang Sanfeng that date from this period still on the mountain, most notably the large one at Purple Cloud palace.

The story hardly ends with our Ming Dynasty Zhang Sanfeng.  As a folk hero, he would go on to become quite popular in theatrical, literary, and mediumistic domains.  The channeled wisdom of Zhang Sanfeng would continue to speak through local spirit mediums throughout China through the Qing dynasty (1644-1911) into the twentieth century.  Honestly I would not be surprised if there were still spirit mediums in some backwater villages in northern China who continue to channel the wisdom of this persistent and troublesome trickster-immortal.

His collected writings were published in 1844 by the Chengdu-based alchemist Li Xiyue 李西月 (1806-1856) who was a master of Planchette Writing 扶乩 (think of a Chinese version of a Ouija board) through which he received many messages from Zhang Sanfeng.  True to form the eight scrolls that make up the Collected Works of Zhang Sanfeng 张三丰全集 are an inscrutable mix of genuinely ancient texts, later alchemical texts, and more recent spirit communications channeled by Li Xiyue and his circle that treat everything from 19th century politics to poetry and Neoconfucian metaphysics.  It is a beautiful mess.  

Starting in the 17th century Zhang Sanfeng began to be remembered as the father of a unique Daoist internal style of martial arts 内家拳 that was juxtaposed against the Buddhist external style 外家拳.  Much excellent scholarship has been done on the political dimensions of this narrative.  I encourage everyone to read Douglas Wile’s books on the history and mythology of internal boxing and its later offspring, Tai Chi.  

The Zhang Sanfeng mythos enters the mainstream during the Republican era (1912-1949) through the proliferation of the martial art Tai Chi (taijiquan 太极拳).  Being a very dense historian I have searched high and low for the first time this martial art is actually mentioned in an unimpeachably datable document and I have run into a rather embarrassing situation.  The first time the phrase “Tai Chi Fist” appears is in the unexpectedly late 1912 Taiji Fist Classics 太极拳经 published by the archaeologist Guan Baiyi 关百益 (1882-1956) through the Beijing Physical Education Research Institute 京师体育研究社 (though recently uncovered manuscripts stand to make this story much more interesting).  Guan was an archaeologist and practitioner of Yang style Tai Chi 杨式太极拳.  His book traces the art back to a Song dynasty Zhang Sanfeng on Wudang mountain, a clear conflation of some of the Zhang Sanfengs mentioned above.  Numerous further Tai Chi books are published through the 1920’s that contain this same mythology.  Then in the 1930’s we begin to see another narrative, that the Tai Chi style comes not from Wudang but from Chen village 陈家沟.  And from there a great historical battle was set in motion that is still being fought to this day.  If you go to Wudang you will see signs everywhere – on the sides of taxi cabs, billboards above stores – that say “All Tai Chi Under Heaven Comes from Wudang  天下太极出武当.”  Similarly if you go to Chen Village you will encounter placards and calligraphic engravings letting you know it is in fact “The Origin Place of Tai Chi Fist 太极拳发源地.”  

Something most interesting I encountered in Wudang, and something quite unexpected, was that among the Daoists of Wudang’s San Feng lineage (i.e. not the bureau of tourism), this Zhang Sanfeng character is not actually remembered as the father of Tai Chi at all.  In this context he is remembered as the creator of a practice known simply as the Thirteen Postures 十三式, some version of which is still practiced in the lineage to this day.  It is not really much of a martial art. I think most people would more reasonably classify it more under the rubric of qigong, inner-cultivation, or health practice.  And this is not just a modern observation either.  Again within this oral tradition Zhang Sanfeng’s disciples are remembered as the ones who created martial arts inspired by his thirteen postures.  His head student Qiu Xuanqing 邱玄清 (1327-1393), a master of weather and war magics, served as the head minister of state ceremonies in Beijing at the White Cloud temple 白云观, and is credited with expanding the practice into the more martial 108 postures 一百零八式. A couple generations down the line the Wudang Daoist Zhang Shouxing 張守性 created an art known as Taiyi five elements grappling in 23 postures 太乙五行擒撲二十三式 that was supposedly inspired by a combination of the Thirteen Postures of Zhang Sanfeng and the Five Animals Frolics 五禽戏 of the Han dynasty physician Hua Tuo 华佗.

It seems like Tai Chi was really a Republican era (1912-1949) category that became a sort of umbrella term for various Chinese martial arts that are practiced slowly, containing such multitudes as the ancient martial arts of Chen village, the later arts of the Yang family, and the weird things people were doing at Wudang, in Zhaobao village, and even the government-created variations on these styles.  From this view, asking which style started it all is rather meaningless.  The historical connections simply aren’t there.  From the densest of historical positions, there is no evidence anyone practiced anything called Tai Chi Fist before the 20th century. It arises as a high prestige category in the context of post-Qing Chinese nationalism. Every slow-ish martial art in China seems to have been automatically re-branded as a form of Tai Chi.

According to the Yang Family oral tradition, Yang Luchan 杨露禅 (1799-1872), the founder of the style, called his art variously Cotton Fist 綿拳 or Transforming Fist 化拳, and it was only during his time in Beijing that a Confucian scholar Weng Tonghe 翁同龢 (1830-1904) witnessed him demonstrating his style and wrote a poem about how it embodied the principles of Tai Chi.  According to this oral tradition it was after this event that the art came to be known as Tai Chi Fist.  This story was first published in the 1930’s and is almost certainly apocryphal.  But even if we take it at face value, we arrive at the inevitable conclusion that Tai Chi Fist was an appellation applied first to Yang family martial arts and then later, during the first decades of the 20th century, expanded to include Wudang and Chen styles.

I came to this view of the situation after a few years of teaching Tai Chi in Houston where I had two students who were very accomplished Chen stylists. One a practitioner of Chen Fake’s 陈发科 branch, another a student of Chen Zhonghua’s 陈中华 Practical Method. It was incredibly enriching sharing notes with them, looking for differences and similarities in what we knew. We basically came to the conclusion that what I learned as Taijiquan in Wudang and what they were practicing as Taijiquan in Chen circles were two completely different martial arts. If you take a sober look at the history of the category of Tai Chi you can see how these different martial arts came to be lumped together under the same umbrella in the decades following the fall of the Qing dynasty.