[QUOTE=Anthony;718410]Interesting…but two things strike me as odd.
One, why would a daoist priest be called upon to teach troops, unless he was an ex-warrior or general what would he know?
Two, “Pei Xiuning categorized the internal and external styles of martial arts into two broad typesarmed or unarmed.”
“External” and “Internal” as categories of MA didn’t exist until the 1600’s.[/QUOTE]
[SIZE=“2”]I visit the China History Forum on occasion and I totally forgot that Brian L. Kennedy has posted on there before. Here is a section that is related to the internal/external thing:[/SIZE]
"[I]Internal versus External
This classification scheme causes lots of debate wherever and whenever it is used. According to this scheme, Chinese martial arts are either internal or external or, to use another set of words, soft styles or hard styles. The distinction is supposed to be based on whether the system gives priority to developing internal strength or external strength which generally gets reduced to: does the system place a great emphasis on qi development or not? Or in a slightly different version of the distinction, the internal arts are supposed to place an emphasis on defensive strategies while the external arts place their focus on offensive strategies.
In this classification scheme, the arts of Xingyi, Bagua and Taijiquan are the three major internal systems. Everything else is external. It parallels the Wudang versus Shaolin scheme.
The problem with the internal versus external scheme is that it is a false dichotomy. Xingyi practitioners do lots of push-ups and sit-ups; both of which are external strength exercises. In a similar vein, Hung Garostensibly an external systemhas an entire set, the Iron Wire set, devoted to internal development. In reality, any complete Chinese martial arts system has both internal and external elements. It is worth noting too that the internal-external classification scheme is of recent vintage, only first being used in the late Qing and Republican Period.
Shaolin versus Wudang
This classification scheme is kind of a mix of the above two with the added spin that some Chinese martial arts are Taoist in origin while others are Buddhist. What the scheme says is essentially that Taoist martial arts owe their origin and development to Taoist adepts living in the Wudang Mountain region. The three major Taoist-Wudang Mountain arts are Xingyi, Bagua and Taijiquan. In contrast, the Buddhist martial arts owe their origin to the Buddhist monks of the Shaolin temple or temples. In this scheme everything that is not specifically a Wudang art is a Shaolin art.
This classification scheme is long on romance and short on reality. While it is true that the Wudang Mountains were home to a great number of Taoist temples it is equally true that none of the three Wudang martial arts were invented there or owe much of their development to that area. Likewise, although there was a Shaolin temple, it is inaccurate to say that is was the birthplace or center of development of all Chinese martial arts that are not one of the three Wudang arts.
This classification scheme was first used by the National Guoshu Academy in the 1920s[/I] [1928 to be exact] way of dividing the many systems of martial arts that were being taught there into two major groups.
How the Wudang branch, consisting of Xingyi, Bagua and Taijiquan, came to be one group is a complicated story. A lot of it has to do with personal friendships between masters and hometown loyalties and links. The bottom line is, a group coalesced in the late 1800s and its members viewed themselves as teachers of Wudang martial arts.
The real basis for this division of Shaolin versus Wudang was simply the formation of a clique that included such luminaries as Sun Lu Tang and Li Cun Yi. They wanted a label to distinguish them and their martial arts systems from other groups and systems. The label itself is arbitrary and the classification scheme is the least informative of the three." (http://www.chinahistoryforum.com/index.php?s=&showtopic=13527&view=findpost&p=4855867)
[SIZE=“2”]Although this supports your stance on the division between “internal and external” styles (despite them being just “classifications” as explained above), one must rely solely on the information that is given in the article about the manuals. If they do truly hale from the Song Dynasty, then there was some sort of internal and external martial arts back then, whether it be yin and yang theory or martial arts from within and outside of China.
We cant make conclusions on what these internal and external styles were until the manuals are posted online or are published in a printed source. Maybe the news agency who originally reported this misunderstood something that Master Fan Keping said. We can only speculate at this point.
If someone who writes Chinese can get in contact with the Nanjing Daily or, better yet, Master Fan Keping, Im sure something more can be learned about these manuals.[/SIZE]