Photo 1
Of all 72 styles of Shaolin
Kung Fu, Qinggong is certainly one of the
most intriguing. It is also the one that is
most frequently practiced. Highly
accomplished Qingong masters can be found
among each generation of Shaolin monks.
Photo 1 was
taken on the date of 19 October 2004, in
which a student from Shaolin Martial Arts
School in Quanzhou City, Fujian Province,
meditates with his body being sustained in
the air by a rope around his neck hanging
from the ceiling.
It is a high art to turn an
ordinary human body into a weightless object.
A maestro of Qinggong is supposedly capable
of scaling walls, gliding on water, flying
over rooftops, or taking huge leaps through
the air, much like what has been depicted in
the movie "Crouching Tiger, Hidden
Dragon".
Qinggong as a form of martial
arts is not just confined to the Shaolin
style. A case in point is that the Qingong
masters in Lee An’s film are all from
Daoist sect. And then, the man mounting the
wall to reach the rooftop in Photo 2
is neither a Buddhist monk nor a Daoist, but
a corner-store owner in Ningxia Hui Muslin
Autonomous Region.
Photo 2
His name is Ge Qiang, the
author of a book titled Scaling Walls and
Flying over Rooftops, published in 2003
by the PLA Publishing House. One of
the military experts suggested in his review
that the techniques illustrated in Mr. Ge’s
book could be employed to train China’s
police officers and firemen alike.
Though extraordinary with
spiderman-quality, Wall Scaling is perceived
as being a relatively simple expression of
Qinggong. On 4 June this year, a 14 year-old
girl called Long Fengzhi performed a more
demanding Qinggong stunt in Nanjing by
dancing on the sharp knife-edges bare footed.
Photo 3
Photo 4
Photo 5
(Sources of the
photos .tom.com; China Today)
