Sifu Fong Ha had been practicing Chinese internal arts since his childhood in Hong Kong, and had studied with many renowned teachers. He began his studies of Yang-style Taijiquan in 1953 with Dong Yingjie, a former student of Yang Chengfu.

In 1957, Fong came to the U.S. to attend college and then graduate school, but he continued his practice in the martial arts, and returned regularly to Hong Kong to study with various masters there, and when the political climate allowed, to mainland China as well. It was during one of his trips back to Hong Kong that he met Han Xingyuan, who first led him into the realm of Yiquan.

One of the first Yiquan teachers in the West, Fong Ha was well known for his power, graciousness, and cosmopolitan charm. With humor and insight, he encouraged students to be true to themselves, to recognize their inner strengths, to develop at their own pace, and to actualize their potentials.

While teaching Taiji, Yiquan, and other martial arts, Fong also taught math at Lowell High School in San Francisco for twenty years, until his retirement. He travelled widely throughout the U.S. and abroad to give workshops, and also directed the Integral Chuan Institute in Berkeley, California, until his death in 2019. In addition to Yiquan and the Nature of Energy, he also produced the video, Stillness in Movement: The Practice of T’ai Chi Chuan with Master Fong Ha (Vision Arts Video, 1996).

More amazing was Han’s basic practice, an odd sort of standing meditation called zhanzhuang (zhan: stand, zhuang: pillar or foundation), which, I soon learned, is the heart and soul of Yiquan practice, and the main theme of this book. This isn’t to say that Han didn’t also diligently practice other, more obviously martial techniques, but these were few and deceptively simple, and all were practiced within the context of, and informed by zhanzhuang and by a certain attitude, which one might think of as the “Yiquan way.”

What do I mean by the “Yiquan way”? Han was a descendant of a family deeply rooted in the internal martial arts tradition. He was already a master of Baguazhang and Xingyiquan by the time he met Wang Xiangzhai and became his student. And then like his teacher, Han Sifu proceeded to strip his practice to the bare essentials. At first glance, Han’s system seemed much too simple, so simple in fact it seemed absurd that Han could have developed his extraordinary powers this way.

But this was the essence of the Yiquan way. Through these deceptively simple practices, we integrate the mind with the body, we develop qi, we learn to focus our intention more precisely, and we strip our reflexive responses of all the excess baggage of learned techniques, preconceived notions, or unconscious habits of carriage, behavior, and self-armoring picked up over a lifetime of hard knocks.

Yiquan doesn’t emphasize tradition; the focus is on how to get results. How you feel is the important thing, not the perfect imitation of techniques learned from this or that master. Yiquan teaches the principle of returning to your own nature, of becoming your own master.

Through this practice, then, we allow our natural responses to whatever life sends our way to surface; in this, the ideas underlying Yiquan are very similar to those of Daoism and Zen. Yiquan helps us find the physical correlate to what in Daoism is called the Dao or “way,” that is the natural, appropriate response or course of action that is in harmony with all around us.

The practice, and the physical and spiritual insights it offers, provides a firm center in a changeable world in which we are constantly bombarded with received ideas and ways of acting and being. Thus through the martial art of Yiquan, we can physically confirm and reinforce the essence of a life philosophy and spiritual path. Both Wang and Han understood this; they viewed Yiquan as a way of transforming the self, and hoped it would transform society as well.