Structure, striking with the palm, and the applications the eighteen movements are built from.
Home / Practice / Eighteen Lohan Palm
十八羅漢掌 ·
Eighteen
Lohan Palm.
A complete system of cultivation in its own right — not a martial art with health work bolted on, and not a supplementary set. Eighteen movements, each one a door rather than a step.
The system
Coming soon
A complete system of cultivation
Lohan 羅漢 — luohan or luóhàn in pinyin, from the Sanskrit arhat, one who has attained — names the accomplished disciples whose postures the system takes its shape from. It is a Buddhist tradition with long-standing Daoist connections, and it is complete in the sense that matters: it contains everything needed to take a person from conditioning the body to settling the mind, without borrowing from anywhere else. It is not the martial component of some larger syllabus, and the health work is not an accessory to the fighting.
What survives is a system that trains the body to fight, to open, to nourish, and to sit — and treats those as four faces of the same work rather than four subjects. A student who only ever practised Lohan would not be missing a stage.
The eighteen palms provide the framework, but the real work lies in discovering what they contain. A movement may begin as mobility or conditioning, then reveal whole-body connection, martial use, breath coordination and subtler forms of awareness. Internal skill and internal power 內功 develop along the way rather than being trained separately.
Martial method
Dǎoyǐn 導引
Guiding and stretching: opening the joints and the channels through movement.
Yǎngshēng 養生
Nourishing life — the maintenance work that keeps the rest of it sustainable.
Seated practice
Stillness training, which the moving work is preparation for as much as the reverse.
Why it belongs here
Alongside the Daoist work, not folded into it
Three reasons. It is a cultivation method and a support system for exactly the work we do elsewhere — seated meditation, qìgōng and nèidān. It shares body skills and refined forces 勁 with the Daoist internal arts, so the two feed each other rather than compete. And its inclusive character — Buddhist in origin, Tibetan in influence, Daoist in company — matches the disposition we take from Mǐn Yīdé 閔一得: read widely, and don't police the borders.
It is taught as itself, with its own vocabulary and its own sequence, and never blended into a generic qigong syllabus.
Grandmaster Chen's own writing
Chen's account of the internal work, Secrets of Longevity Revealed, sets out the health and cultivation side of the system. Ian has completed a full bilingual translation of it, and that translation underpins how the curriculum is taught here. See study and texts.
Who it suits
No martial arts background is assumed. The system is demanding in the sense that it asks for regular attention, but the entry point is low and the material is taught in an order that builds. People come to it from all three directions — wanting a martial art, wanting the health work, or wanting the sitting.
How to start
A regular Lohan class is being set up in Edinburgh. It will be a longer session, which is what a complete system needs: time for conditioning, the palms, application and sitting in one go rather than parcelled out. Beginners are welcome at any of them. Sifu Neil Ripski also visits the UK from time to time to teach the system directly; dates go on the classes page once confirmed.