Liuhebafa — the Fourth Internal Style and Its Water Image
Liuhebafa counts as the fourth internal style and is also called water boxing. It is documented from Wu Yihui, who taught it publicly in the 1930s.
Contents
Liuhebafa (六合八法拳, “six harmonies and eight methods boxing”) is frequently listed as the fourth internal style alongside taijiquan, xingyiquan and baguazhang. Its second name is more informative than the first: water boxing (水拳).
The image is not decoration but instruction. Water yields without losing its direction; it takes any shape and keeps its volume; it acts not through hardness but through mass in motion. Anyone watching the forms of liuhebafa sees exactly that: an uninterrupted, dense movement in which no beginning or end of a technique is marked.
History
The art is traced to Chen Tuan (陳摶, c. 871–989), a Daoist scholar of the Song period associated with Mount Hua in Shaanxi. Chen Tuan is a historical figure and well attested in intellectual history — as a martial founder, however, he is not. As with most attributions of this kind, roughly a thousand undocumented years lie between the named figure and the first tangible teaching.
Liuhebafa becomes tangible with Wu Yihui (吳翼翬, 1887–1961). He named three teachers — Yan Guoxing, Chen Guangdi and Chen Helu — and began teaching publicly in the late 1920s, during the phase when the Republic was deliberately bringing martial arts masters into the large cities. In 1936 he took a senior post at the martial arts college in Nanjing; in the late 1930s the basic form Zhu Ji was taught in Nanjing and Shanghai. After the war he taught in Shanghai again.
One detail of the transmission explains much of today’s variety: many of his students came from other systems and carried their material into their own versions. Liuhebafa is therefore not a uniformly fixed style but a family of readings with a common core.
Technical basis
The name is a syllabus. The six harmonies describe what should act together; the eight methods, how one practises.
| Group | Content |
|---|---|
| Six harmonies (六合) | the accord of body and mind, intent and force, inner and outer — the enumeration varies by lineage |
| Eight methods (八法) | qi (氣), bone (骨), shape (形), following (隨), lifting (提), returning (還), restraining (勒), concealing (伏) |
In practice this means:
- No visible technical beat. Unlike xingyiquan, which has clear individual strikes, the movements run into one another. That is the main difference in appearance.
- Movement from the spine. Power is carried as a wave, from the ground through hip and back into the hand, without a stop.
- Changing heights. The form goes markedly lower and higher again than taijiquan — hence the impression of rising and falling water.
- Soft transitions, firm endings. The conclusion of a movement is quite sharp; only the path there is not interrupted.
Core techniques
- Zhu Ji (築基) — the basic form, in which the movement principle is fully laid out
- Circling hand paths — deflection and strike fall into a single movement
- Stance changes with weight shift — distance is governed through the stance, not the arm
- Returning (還) — the movement running out becomes the next one instead of ending; this is what most readily identifies the style
- Concealing (伏) — intent is not made visible until the last moment
The state of the evidence
It is worth being as precise here as the sources allow:
Secure is the person of Wu Yihui, his teaching from the late 1920s, his position in Nanjing from 1936 and his instruction in Shanghai before and after the war. From there a traceable chain leads to today’s schools.
Not secure is everything before that. The attribution to Chen Tuan is an origin story of the same construction as Zhang Sanfeng for taijiquan — it confers age and Daoist dignity without a source to carry it. Wu Yihui’s three named teachers, too, are hard to pin down beyond his own account.
This does not make liuhebafa less interesting. It makes it a 20th-century art with older roots of unknown depth — which is true of a whole series of Chinese systems, but is rarely stated so openly.
Connections to other martial arts
- Taijiquan — the closest relative in appearance; liuhebafa is faster, changes height more and marks the ends of techniques more clearly
- Xingyiquan — the opposite pole within the internal styles: straight lines and clearly separated strikes
- Baguazhang — shares the circling footwork and the rotation about one’s own axis
- Wudang — the category into which liuhebafa is filed as a fourth style, and where that classification came from
- Ki, Chi and Prana — the conceptual apparatus of the eight methods
Today
Liuhebafa is rare. It is taught in China, Hong Kong, Taiwan and on a smaller scale in Europe and North America, mostly by teachers who also represent one of the three better-known internal systems. There is no competition and barely an umbrella body.
For practitioners coming from taijiquan it is the obvious next step: the same basic idea, but with more speed, more change of height and a clearer conclusion to the movements. Anyone looking for a teacher should ask about the lineage — given the state of transmission described above, it says more about the content than the style name does.