Bagua – 八卦掌

Bagua zhang or palm starts with a circle orbiting the opponent. The moves upon Bagua are designed to allow you to go to the opponent’s back. A binary system as follow would be highly efficient to understand and utilize Bagua Zhang (palm):


1st division: walking left/walking right
2nd division: adhering/not adhering to opponent
3rd division: orbit opponent/opponent orbits you
4th division: apply pressure/not apply pressure
5th division: attack/not attack
6th division: ....
7th division: ....
8th division: ....
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Performers can be doing a walking left, adhering opponent, orbiting opponent, applying pressure to opponent and attacking at the same time (or with any features in 6th....1000th division)and upon his combat, he may shift from his above listed movement to walking left (retain), not adhering (changed), orbiting (retain), not applying pressure, not attack to fool and surprise his opponent. If the above change cannot fool or surprise his opponent, make another change, rapid change in this Bagua binary system is a nightmare to all opponents of Bagua Zhang performer.

Through these infinite divisions, opponent could hardly make a right anticipation of performer’s next move and even he does, performer could shift to another to avoid opponent’s advancement through a right guess. That’s why performer change from walking right to walking left, or walking left to walking right when they perform Bagua Palm themselves. This infinite division could generate highly complicated techniques.

Adhering or not adhering and orbiting or being orbit are very fundamental subjects of Bagua palm. The orbiting of performer caused opponent’s rotation. Upon the receiving of rotational force, opponent is highly vulnerable against performer’s attack as one of the basic idea of Bagua zhang is like a knife orbiting a fruit and through the revolution, it peels off the fruit layer by layer.