WUDANG 武 當 : SWORD, SOLO AND TWO-MAN SETS.
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The Wudang tradition is famous, in China, as well as for Taiji, Bagua, Xingyi and innumerable smaller arts,  for the sword techniques . The forms of Wudang sword are innumerable,  I have learned a certain number of them, but while the apprentices are almost everywhere found to have to  do sooner or later with a form of solo sword, few of them have practised the forms of two-man sword . I have practised  Wudang sword with various teachers among whom  Pei Wujun of Shanghai ( Pei Xirong's son) and Fu Meilan and Fu Wenlong of Guangzhou (not to quote then other forms of  Taiji sword or the form of  bagua sword of Liu Jingru). Recently (end July 2003) I have had the pleasure to teach the first of  five forms of sword two man set at Rencontres Jasnieres, in France, near Marçon (next to Chateau du Loire), a place where every year happens an international festival of Taiji and similar arts. I say 'to like' because it has been pleasant indeed and because personally I am impassioned with wudang sword. I have taught  first the single techniques and their use as an introduction, then in the first form we have united together them in the same form. This is according my thinking the correct way to teach: before the techniques and their use and only after the form. In two days the students that participated have been able to learn so the whole form in a way, we can say, acceptable. Here  under some sequences of the  two-man form.
 

ORIGINS OF THE WUDANG SWORD .
The  wudang sword is credited to go back , as the other  wudang forms, to Zhang Sanfeng (so already Wu Junshan in 1932, in his book Wudang jian pu ). Sanfeng would have handed down it to the  famous Zhang Songxi 張 松 溪, Daoist founder  of the Zhang Songxi neijia quan "the internal boxing of Zhang Songxi"; he was a man of  Dengfeng xian district in Henan that then lived  on the  Simingshan mountain in  Zhejiang area; for this, his sword forms  also took the name of siming jian . He is credited as the first generation.  The second generation is constituted by Zhao Dabin that  originated from  Shandong and  resided on the sacred mountain Taishan .  The third generation was formed by Wang Jiucheng that  lived on the Wudangshan. To the fourth grade we find Yan Xisheng, a man of Hengshan xian in Hubei... and so on as long as to the eighth generation when we find Ma Yuncheng that  received the tradition from Chen Mengchang of the seventh generation. Ma  Yuncheng came from Hebei, in the North,  Quyang district and  passed down the tradition to Song Weiyi  宋 唯 一 (alias Dehou). Song Weiyi started at first to teach  Zhang Xiangwu and then Li Fangchen  (more known as Li Jinglin李 景 林) and  Jiang Xinshan ; these men were  to create or to systematize the techniques of  wudang sword as we know  today.
Li Jinglin, after having studied as a young the Confucianism (Ruism) and being therefore  a literate, studied then the martial arts from his father . After this, he started to travel and   learned the art of the sword from the expert of  wudang sword Chen Shijun. Subsequently he learned the Taijiquan and the Shuaijiao  in which became excellent; he undertake therefore the military career becoming  general and he created a body of one hundred martial artists with  the heading of the  Baguazhang master Fu Zhensong 傅 振 嵩 and with assistants Na Chaoqing , Wang Puyu , Chen Puzhong and Song Jinlan . These men practiced  the whole day; in the evening Li Jinglin would them gathered and brought them to practice the shuaijiao techniques, the striking techniques,   qinna  (capturing skills) and swordmanship. In 1928 the Nanjing Central institute of Guoshu was founded (= National Art = Kungfu)  and Zhang Zhijiang 張 之 江  was named president. He sent to Beijing the  appointee, Luo Bin to choose the most famous teachers of Martial Arts.  To improve the sword techniques were called the  Baguazhang teacher Jia Fengming 賈 風 鳴 that had  been in precedence the first teacher of Fu Zhensong and also the Bagua teacher  of Tianjin, Jiang Laosan . Fu Zhensong, together with his collaborators,  designated  Zhang Dejun 張 德 君 and Guo Qifeng 郭 歧風 to effect  sword duels to be able to study them and to systematize their techniques. The two teachers, using bamboo swords,  performed their sword techniques  and on this base the two-man sets were built  (duijian) in wich were embodied the 13 principals techniques of  wudang sword. The duijians so constituted  were five (the first one is that of which the photos are seen here above).
Li Jinglin had been named vice-president of the Central institute of Guoshu of Nanjing but he often traveled, for es. to Tianjin and he often resided to Hangzhou. In all these moves he publicized the techniques of wudang sword  and therefore the students of this art were numerous more and more. Some famous students of his were Huang Yuanxiu and Zhu Guiting . At the 1936 Berlin Olympiads the wudang sword-techniques  were shown that got so one some resonance also in the foreign countries.
 Guo Qifeng, called "the sword-immortal one "  , at the end of the years '40 traveled in a lot of places of China becoming famous and teaching to numerous groups in Shenyang, Beiping, Shandong, Yangzhou , Changsha, Wuhan and Guangzhou . Only in Changsha and Wuhan,  he for example, taught  famous martial artists as Li Ciyi , Cao Zhongsheng , Liu Chunchen, Liang Xudong and others. Guo Qifeng in late age published 13 Chapters on the sword.
Other propagators in following ages  were Li Tianji 李 天 驥 , Pei Xirong 裴 錫 榮  from Shanghai and Fu Yonghui 傅 永 輝 , Fu Zhensong son.
The  wudang sword is certainly the most famous sword of the Chinese martial history. Besides it must be said that also the  taiji sword derives from it. The book 'Dao, sword, baton and sanshou Taiji', written by Chen Gong in 1943, states that the  technical taiji/13 sword has ,note , the same 13 techniques of the  wudang sword. After all the founder of the style Yang of Taiji, Yang Lushan, was famous for the use of the spear  and the nickname given on him was 'Invincible Yang' but he is never quoted for the sword. It was only, probably, with Yang Chenfu that  had many technical exchanges with Fu Zhensong and others of the  wudang tradition, that the formation of a sequence of taiji sword took place. After all it  seems that the sword was not even present in the original  Chen style. According to the book Chenshi Taiji jian, published in 1986 by one of the most famous propagandists of the  Chen school, Gan Guixian , the  taiji sword of the  Chen school would have been created very lately, from students of Chen Fake, the famous Chen school teacher that for first  went  to Beijing to teach the family style . These students were: Lei Muni, Tian Xiuchen, Zhao Jiuzhou, Song Linge and Chen Zhaokui . It was shown in public for the first time to a national demonstration in 1982! Around the 60% of the techniques of this form  are similar, also in the names, to those of the sword of the  Yang school. In his article 'Tai Chi  Weapons Embody Advanced Swordmanship' ([magazine] T'ai Chi vol. 14, n. 3, June 1990, pp.14-15) Docfay Wong affirms that today the most greater part of the people slowly practise the form of  taiji sword, plainly, just as the form of Taijiquan, but to the beginnings of the '900 the advanced apprentices otherwise practised it, as a true martial art. They set in  two different types of power (jin) in the anterior part of the blade, a dynamic jin and a static one. The dynamic jin represents the yang energy  and is the result of a rapid and abrupt action of the waist and of the wrist that it makes to wave only the last lines of the blade. Some examples of this jin are the wudang techniques BENG, DIAN and JI. The static jin is yin and uses only the movement of the waist to check the point. As the  wudang sword, also the techniques of  taiji sword mainly point to the wrist of the adversary and they have agile movements of waist and wrist.
The art of today's sword, as it is seen in the actual Wushu competitions ,  has lost a lot unfortunately of its martial characteristics mainly reducing itself to stunts and martial dance with a certain executive beauty; but also this beauty as the whole modern Wushu, does the effect of a dessert too sweet : sickly.
To return to the real potentialities of the sword it means therefore to return to the recovery of its more sublime tradition: the wudang sword. This is also a way to respect, safeguarding with it the perseverant job and sometimes dark work of thousand of daoist hermits , military or also simple apprentices that untiringly, in the centuries,  worked with passion around these techniques. To go out of our cultural provincialism, to make our kungfu to be not only a physic practice  but also a cultural acquisition, means to start to think in terms of respect to characters as Song Weiyi, Guo Qifeng and Fu Zhensong but particularly to the "General" Li Jinglin.
 

THE 13 TECHNIQUES OF WUDANG SWORDMANSHIP.

Wudang sword encloses dan-jian (spada  solo), duijian (two-man) e san-jian (swordmanship free fighting). Its main 13 techniques are: CHOU 抽  "to lash", DAI 帶 "to carry", TI 提 "to lift", GE 格 "to parry", JI 擊 " to hit ", CI 刺 (leggi: *tsz) "to drill", DIAN 點 "to point", BENG 崩 "to collapse" (the wrist, snaping and lifting the sword-point), JIAO 攪 "to make circles", XI 洗 "to wash", YA 壓  "press down", JIE 截 "to intercept/to cut", PI 劈 "to break down",  13 techniques with their combinations and changes.  Wudang sword stresses the use of the hips tipical of Taiji, the Baguazhang stepping and owns the  "three basins" (sanban ) and applications of Heaven, Man, Earth. The body of the 13 techniques consists of  combinations and the stances are beautiful, clear and alive following the stanmces of the adversary and using a combination of empty and full, i.e. dodging and attacking.

A typical technique  from the forms of  Wudang sword of Fuzhensong:
Fanshen pi-jian, overturning to the back with the cutting-down sword .

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