Wudang Mountain Past and Present

Wudang San Feng Pai History
武当三丰派历史

Due to a health crisis and my long-standing love for GongFu, I traveled to Wudang for the first time in April 2004. After my first stay, I thought on the way home, that was awesome but I don't think I'll come back.
Since 2008 we, my wife Noa and I, have been traveling to Wudang every year or two to learn from my master Yuan Xiu Gang.
In 2012, I was accepted into the 16th generation Zhang SangFeng Pai as a personal disciple of Master Yuan Xiu Gang and took the Daoi name ZiXu.

Our current Grandmaster Zhong Yun Long 钟云龙 has defined San Feng Pai as a system of martial arts 武术, health cultivation practices 养生功 and inner alchemy 内丹. These form the three blocks 三乘, from the lowest (martial arts) to the highest (internal alchemy). This sect was passed down to our Grand Master through the leader of the 13th generation, Wang Guang De 王光德 (1947-2001), who became the head of Wudang Mountain after the religious practice was legalized in 1979. Master Wang was a local from the nearby city of Danjiangkou 丹江口 who had studied with various Daoist masters since childhood – after accepting Dragon Gate Master Li Cheng Yu 李诚玉 (1885-2003) as a master at a very young age. Later, he studied with Xiao Yao Wan 萧耀宛 (1911-1997), the head of the 12th generation of the Wudang San Feng sect, from whom Master Wang received our lineage.

Great Grand Master Zhong Yun Long

14. Gen. Zhang San Feng Pai

Grand Master Yuan Xiu Gang

15. Gen. Zhang San Feng Pai

Master Ralf ZiXu

16. Gen. Zhang San Feng Pai
Disciple Ceremonie

The collection of martial arts, traditional Taoist health techniques, and alchemical knowledge amassed by Master Zhong was organized under the umbrella of Wudang San Feng Pai, which emerged from the 1980s with a curriculum that was much more extensive and structured than before the Cultural Revolution. In fact, the whole atmosphere of Wudang Daoism shifted in a much more layered and structured direction. Where a large number of informal lineages lived in a relatively undifferentiated milieu in the Wudangshan of the late Qing, today there are a handful of lineages that possess huge curricula and issue licenses through official student ceremonies 拜师. Master Zhong once told us nostalgically that things weren't like that in the past.

I personally became a disciple of Master Yuang Xiu Gang 袁修刚, who came to Wudang in 1991 to learn internal martial arts from Master Zhong. Shortly after Master Yuan's arrival, Masters Zhong and Wang initiated a Daoist study program at the Purple Cloud Palace, in which eight of Master Zhong's disciples performed the duties of full-time priests in the temple while training intensively in the physical cultivation practices of the San Feng sect. The idea was to provide these 8 students with all the Daoist knowledge that Zhong and Wang had accumulated through their efforts in the 1980s – music, knowledge of the Holy Scriptures, techniques of health cultivation, martial arts, inner alchemy, etc. The group was nicknamed the Eight Great Vajrasattvas 八大金刚. The eldest of them was my teacher, Master Yuan, who later became the chief priest of chanting 高功 in the Purple Cloud Palace.

Sources: On the one hand, I quote from my career and my many trips to Wudang. In addition, by my colleagues Simon and Brandy, who lived there for several years and wrote in great detail about the history and teaching of the Zhang San Feng Pai sect. Web https://www.okanaganvalleywudang.com/texts-of-the-wudang-san-feng-pai

Texts of the Wudang San Feng Pai

武当三丰派经书

A central feature of every form of traditional Daoism I know is the "adherence to the three treasures" 皈依三宝. When you go through the formal process of becoming a disciple of San Feng Pai, part of the ceremony is to take refuge in the three treasures and take an oath to follow them through life, age, illness, and death. The term "three treasures" has a wide range of meanings in Daoism – it refers to the energies in the body – Jing, Qi and Shen 精气神 on one level, while on another level it refers to the three primary celestial phenomena – the sun, the moon and the stars 日月星 or even the three main elements – wind, water and fire 风水火. In the context of the student ceremony, "three treasures" refer specifically to the three sources of Daoist teachings – the Dao, the scriptures, and the master 道经师.

In a traditional Daoist context, all three must be present in the study of the Dao. "Master" 师 means one's own teacher and integration into a line. Within our lineage, this is by far the most important source, as most of the teachings of the San Feng sect cannot be expressed either linguistically or textually. The detailed coordination required to properly perform martial arts movements, or the more complex internal coordination required in the various forms of qigong, not to mention the secrets of internal alchemy, require person-to-person instruction through what is traditionally called secret transmission 密传, heart transmission 心传 or oral secrets 口诀.

"Writings" 经 refers to the large corpus of texts of the Daoist tradition. Within the San Feng sect, there are only a handful of texts that are really important. On the one hand, the line itself is very practice-oriented, so that there is comparatively little emphasis on science and scripture studies in general. On the other hand, our Master in particular despised learning too many books that came from his years in the temple, where, as he told us, he knew many monks with a deep understanding of the intricacies of Daoist philosophy, but who did not put this into practice. So he drew this important distinction between knowledge 知识 and wisdom 智慧 – where the study of the scriptures, although it undoubtedly benefits one's knowledge, is translated into wisdom only when tempered by experience (this is a play on words in Chinese, since "scriptures" is jing经 and "experience" is jingyan 经验).