Hun Yuan Li 混元力

🎨 Interactive demo: This term also has a concept analogy with the sphere you can press from every side — Hun Yuan Li as an artefact. This page is the text to go with it.

The force you do not feel as force

Hun Yuan Li (混元力) is Yiquan's target force: the force of the whole body, elastic and available in every direction at once. 混元 means “original unity”. What is meant is a body in which no part works on its own.

A traditional mnemonic explains the name through a property you can test yourself: “不觉其力也，故谓之浑元” — because you do not feel it as force, it is called hunyuan. Whoever notices effort while practising is still working with single muscles. Joseph P. Lau therefore translates the term as balanced force.

Wang Xiangzhai puts it at the start of everything: “Whole-body force is the foundation of learning martial art. Without this foundation it is impossible truly to master the essence of Yiquan.”

The means is called Zheng Li

How this force arises, Wang states precisely in 1928: “In movement all of the big and small joints always have the two contrary forces — upward and downward, forward and backward, or left and right; only then can one attain the hunyuan strength of the whole body.”

The means, then, is the contending force Zheng Li: pairs of force acting at the same time against each other. Hun Yuan Li is the result when all three axes are in balance at once, up against down, front against back, left against right (六面争力).

Five qualities, one force

In his first book Wang describes Hun Yuan Li through the five elements, read as five qualities the body should have at the same time:

• Metal — bones and muscles hard as iron, skin and flesh soft as cotton. The load-bearing structure does not yield; the surface does.
• Wood — all bones bent and straight at once, like a tree carrying load over a slight curve. Nothing locked straight, nothing buckled.
• Water — movements like a flowing dragon: no fixed track, the force finds its own way (Shun Li Ni Xing).
• Fire — the hands go out like an explosion. This is the only quality of time, the sudden release (Fa Li).
• Earth — the whole body round, heavy and solid, no place empty or left out.

These are not techniques and not a sequence. Every action is meant to carry all five at once. In 1939 Wang draws the conclusion himself: he lists the five forces one by one and ends with “but actually it is just one contradictory force”. The division into five is thus a breakdown for learning, not a cosmology (Wuxing, demystification).

Why nothing shows from outside

The six-sided counter-tension is an internal pair of forces: flexors and extensors work gently against each other. Outwardly this cancels out; the centre of gravity does not move. What arises is not movement but pre-tension, the “taut ball”.

This pre-tension is delivered as force only through the ground reaction (action and reaction): 力从足生, force arises at the foot. The separation explains two observations at once: that a good stance shows nothing from outside, and that in contact something arrives all the same.

Many names for one thing

Yao Chengrong explicitly equates three terms. What Yiquan calls hunyuanli is nothing other than the neili (内力, inner force) of wushu, and it corresponds to the heli (合力, “united force”) of taijiquan. His comment: “Many words for the same thing.” He defines inner force as the interplay of mind, mental image (Yi Nian) and naturalness, not as mere qi.

Closely related is Zheng Ti Li (整体力) from the Yao Zongxun lineage. Both mean the fully integrated force of the body but stress different things: Zheng Ti Li the structural unity without breaks, Hun Yuan Li the availability in every direction.

How it is built

• In Zhan Zhuang it arises in the almost motionless stance. Yao Chengguang: “In real Zhan Zhuang we are looking for the Hunyuan force.” All directions are practised, the diagonals too, “one after another, according to a programme”.
• In Mo Jin and Shili you learn to keep it in movement without the sphere getting a dent.
• In Fa Li it is released. Standing alone produces no explosive force; the release is a stage of its own.

The image (Yi) builds up the pressure; relaxation lets it go. And the image is meant to reach far out rather than cling to the body: the further, says Yao Chengguang, the more natural the body feels.