Internal and External Styles
Chinese martial arts may be divided into neijia (內家, internal family) or wàijiā (外家, external family) styles.
Many styles combine both internal and external techniques; Chow Gar is a good example of this.
There is an ongoing debate within the martial arts community at both the popular and scholarly level over the distinction between "internal" and "external" arts. Consequently, the list of styles considered internal or external may vary greatly from source to source. There are only three Chinese styles that are universally recognized as internal, and they are sometimes referred to as the "Orthodox internal styles." These three styles are Xingyiquan, Baguazhang, and T'ai chi ch'uan (Taijiquan), the three arts counted as internal and set apart by Sun Lutang, who greatly popularized the terms "neijia" and "wàijiā" as a method of classifying martial arts.
Read more about this topic: List Of Chinese Martial Arts
Famous quotes containing the words internal, external and/or styles:
“Even if fathers are more benignly helpful, and even if they spend time with us teaching us what they know, rarely do they tell us what they feel. They stand apart emotionally: strong perhaps, maybe caring in a nonverbal, implicit way; but their internal world remains mysterious, unseen, “What are they really like?” we ask ourselves. “What do they feel about us, about the world, about themselves?””
—Augustus Y. Napier (20th century)
“The law is only one of several imperfect and more or less external ways of defending what is better in life against what is worse. By itself, the law can never create anything better.... Establishing respect for the law does not automatically ensure a better life for that, after all, is a job for people and not for laws and institutions.”
—Václav Havel (b. 1936)
“The gothic is singular in this; one seems easily at home in the renaissance; one is not too strange in the Byzantine; as for the Roman, it is ourselves; and we could walk blindfolded through every chink and cranny of the Greek mind; all these styles seem modern when we come close to them; but the gothic gets away.”
—Henry Brooks Adams (1838–1918)