Chinese Martial Art

Since the 1970s, when the brilliant Chinese movie star Bruce Lee made five wonderful films, the Chinese style martial art films have broke into the worldwide market and some of them became very famous. Consequently, the foreign people who have never actually been to China might get the superhuman concept of Chinese people from the Chinese swordsmen films or from their misunderstandings of Chinese martial art, kungfu.

Kungfu is the traditional Chinese style martial art which has appeared over a thousand years. It requires long-term training follows some specific guidelines. Originally, kungfu is designed for practice and self-defense.

By the time of the period of disunion, China was divided and the living condition was terrible because of the frequent wars. Therefore, some monks who lived on a mountain to avoid wars had to learn kungfu to protect themselves. That is the origin of Shaolin monks and Shaolin temple.

In some people's opinion, kungfu are the fighting skills intend to defeat the antagonist, and there are no differences between individual kungfu styles. Actually, it is no true. Kungfu can be grouped to two major styles: external martial arts and internal martial arts.

External martial arts kungfu concentrates on the strength and power. Shaolin kungfu is their representative. Shaolin kungfu has seventy two kungfu forms, called seventy two Shaolin arts, which include special categories of bare-hand, with weapon, qinggong, and breathing skills. Therefore, the name of external martial arts may come from its purpose: to increase the human body's hardness. For the Shaolin monks, kungfu is not only a fighting technique but also a religious requirement, because they believe that better health can provides them better brain and purer soul for meditation.

Internal martial arts have three characteristics. First, they require in-depth understanding of the leverage in the human body. Differ with external martial arts; it doesn't hurt the antagonist with direct force. That is why internal martial arts are also called soft style arts. Second, they concentrate to the use and the process of qi, which means the specific breathing skills. I think this may be the reason why they are called internal martial art. Third, the way they represent the usage of daoyin and qigong.

From the above contents, we can tell that Chinese martial art is misunderstood in some level. First, kungfu's major purpose is not for fighting and it can benefit on emotional improvement. Second, no matter which style of kungfu, they both require long-term training. If you want to defeat an annoying guy immediately, please make a scary face.

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