Neijia
Encyclopedia : N : NE : NEI : Neijia
Nèijiā (Chinese: 內家; "internal family", Wade-Giles nei4 chia1) denotes the internal or soft styles of Chinese martial arts, as opposed to wàijiā (外家; "external family"), the external or hard styles, which are associated with Shaolinquan and its many derivatives. The use of this term in this context traces back to Sun Lutang who in the 1920s identified the three arts of T'ai Chi Ch'üan, Bāguàzhǎng, and Xíngyìquán as internal (Sun Lutang himself created a system fusing principles from all three of these arts). Other styles have since claimed the designation as well (e.g. see Liuhebafa and Yiquan).
Although Nèijiā was coined only in the past century, the distinction between "internal" and "external" reaches further back into Chinese martial history.
Stanley Henning presents the Epitaph for Wang Zhengnan (1669) by Huang Zongxi as the source of the dualism between the internal and external martial arts. Huang Zongxi was an opponent of the Manchu Qing Dynasty, as was Wang Zhengnan, the man the Epitaph eulogizes. The Epitaph's identification of the internal martial arts with the Taoism indigenous to China and its identification of the external martial arts with the foreign Buddhism of Shaolin (and incidentally the Manchu) may have been an act of political defiance rather than one of technical classification (Henning).
The Yang family of T'ai Chi Ch'üan is known to have possessed documents describing the distinction between internal and external martial practice at least as far back as the second half of the 19th century.
In the 1920s the nèijiā master Sun Lutang identified the following as the principles that distinguish an internal martial art:
- An emphasis on the use of the mind to coordinate the leverage of the relaxed body as opposed to the use of brute strength.
- The internal development, circulation, and expression of qì.
- The application of Taoist dǎoyǐn, qìgōng, and nèigōng (內功) principles of external movement.
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