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Ba Duan Jin, and the sets that outlived us

Ba Duan Jin, the eight pieces of brocade, is the oldest thing on this site by several centuries. A version of it appears in a Song dynasty text; it was being practised, in some shape, while the Yang family were still eight hundred years from existing. Eight movements, each repeated six or eight times: hold up the sky, draw the bow, separate heaven and earth, look behind you, sway the head, grasp the toes, punch with angry eyes, bounce on the heels.

This page carries it alongside the other two sets that survived from the same tradition — Wu Qin Xi, the five animal frolics, and Yi Jin Jing, the muscle-tendon change classic. 20 of the classes below teach the brocades, 7 teach the animals, and the rest teach Yi Jin Jing. They are usually taught as alternatives to each other, which is roughly right: doing one of them properly beats sampling all three.

Three sets, and what separates them

Ba Duan Jin is the gentlest and the most systematic. Each of the eight movements takes an obvious direction — one lengthens the spine upward, one rotates it, one bends it sideways, one loads the legs — and the set as a whole reads as a deliberate sweep through every plane a body moves in. That is why it has outlasted the explanations attached to it, and why it is the one to start with.

Wu Qin Xi is the odd one and the most fun. You imitate five animals: tiger, deer, bear, monkey, bird. The movements are bigger, less symmetrical, and openly playful in a way nothing else in this tradition is. It is also the set most likely to get somebody who is bored of slow movement to keep going.

Yi Jin Jing is the hard one. Long isometric holds, wide stances, a lot of tension deliberately applied and released through the arms and back. It is closer to what a strength coach would recognise as work, and it is the only one of the three this page would tell an unsteady beginner to leave alone for now.

Learning one brocade at a time

9 of the classes below are three minutes or shorter, and most of those teach a single movement — the third brocade, the seventh, holding up the heavens on its own. That is not the library padding itself out. It is how these sets are actually taught: one movement, learned until it needs no attention, then the next one added to it.

The practical route is one movement a week. Do the one you are learning six times, then run everything you already know from the beginning, which takes under four minutes even at the end. By week eight you have the set, and — more to the point — you have practised movement one about fifty times rather than eight.

A full run is six to fifteen minutes depending on how many repetitions the teacher takes, which makes this the most reliable standalone practice on the whole site. It fits a ten-minute slot without being cut, it needs no space, and unlike a form it does not decay when you skip a week.

The organ claims, and what is left without them

These sets come with the heaviest claims of anything here. The movements are traditionally named for the organs they are said to regulate — spleen and stomach, kidneys, liver, heart — and several titles below say so. Those titles are reproduced exactly as their authors wrote them, because altering somebody’s title while embedding their work would be worse than quoting it, and that is a stated policy rather than a habit: §8.3.

Reproducing is not endorsing. Nothing on this site supports claims about organ function, immunity, energy or disease reversal, and the app never repeats them in its own voice — §4.7 says it in as many words.

What remains once you set the claims aside is not thin. Eight movements that take the spine through flexion, extension, rotation and side-bending, take the shoulders through their full range, load the legs briefly, and pace it all to a slow breath — done in eight minutes, repeatable daily, learnable by anyone in two months. If that needed a better story than the one it has, it would not have lasted a thousand years.

The 30 classes on this page

The three classical sets, shortest first. Several entries teach a single movement — that is how these are learned, one brocade at a time, not eight at once.

Setting it up

Choose joints as your focus and the qigong phase is weighted up by about a third, which is where these sets live. Choose calm and it happens for a different reason — a repeating set is easier to sink into than choreography.

To learn one properly, ignore the daily session for ten minutes and work down the short classes below in order. Shibashi is the natural sequel, and the qigong page explains where all of this sits in a session.

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