Lineage

Yuan Xiugang 袁修剛

Daoist name Yuan Shimao 袁師懋, 15th generation Wudang Sanfeng Lineage

Yuan Xiugang was born in 1971, the year of the Water Pig 癸亥. Raised in the raging chaos of the Cultural Revolution, his youth was mired in poverty and hunger. He began learning Kong 孔家拳 and Sun Family kungfu 孫家拳 from an itinerant teacher in his home at age 7. In 1981, he attended a showing of the groundbreaking movie The Shaolin Temple 【少林詩】 projected on the wall of a dam in his hometown. As soon as the credits rolled, he sprinted home and, bursting through the door, announced to his family he was quitting school to study martial arts.
Continuing with his training at a local Shaolin school, he was also doing hard labor dredging sand on a boat in his hometown during his teens. Constant exposure to the damp and cold left him with a debilitating and torturous rheumatism which would haunt his bones for years. At 17 he left his family, traveling to Henan to train fulltime. The backbreaking training at Shaolin caused his rheumatism to worsen and unshakeable despair began settling in. Stumbling upon a magazine article on the internal martial arts of Wudang, he began wondering if these practices could cure his affliction. After 3 years of training at Shaolin, he left for Wudang where he became a disciple of Zhong Yunlong 鍾雲龍 in Purple Heaven Palace 紫霄宮.
Yuan Xiugang was eventually handpicked by the president of the Wudang Daoist Association, Wang Guangde 王光德, as one of eight promising young disciples who would enter the temples to become the next stewards of the Daoist tradition in Wudang. After undergoing ordination, Yuan Xiugang’s demanding training soon became even more intense with the addition of daily ceremonial austerities and ecclesiastical duties. Owing to his dedicated work ethic, devotion to study, and superb singing voice, he was eventually chosen by Wang Guangde to lead ceremony as gaogong 高宮, or ‘high officiant’, of Purple Heaven Palace in 1995.
Through dedicated internal alchemy practice, Yuan Xiugang was finally able to cure himself of the rheumatism which afflicted him for so many years. After many years of practice which opened deep insight into the wisdom of the Daoist tradition, he descended the mountain in 2004 to open his own school. In 2009, Yuan Xiugang undertook the unprecedented act of starting a 5-year-long traditional class solely for international students.

My master, Yuan Xiugang doing chin-to-toe in a dragon squat at the Lion Peak 獅子峰 in Wudang.

With thousands of students around the world and several qualified disciples, Yuan Xiugang has truly spearheaded Wudang’s greater emergence into global consciousness.

Zhong Yunlong 鍾雲龍

Daoist name Zhong Qingwei 鐘清微, 14th generation Wudang Sanfeng Lineage

Zhong Yunlong was born in 1964, the year of the Wood Dragon 甲辰. Raised in abject poverty during the Cultural Revolution and inculcated in the violence of street brawls from an early age, he began training in kungfu at a young age. At age 13, he traveled unaccompanied to Jiangxi province to learn from a Yang Family 楊家拳 master named Tan Yunye談雲葉. Training with him for several years, Tan Yunye encouraged his young disciple to travel in search of greater teaching than his own. Zhong Yunlong traveled to Shaolin for a brief stay and eventually made his way to Wudang in 1982. 
When Zhong Yunlong first arrived in Wudang, China had just begun surveying the smoking debris left in the wake of the Cultural Revolution. Most of the temples were in ruin and disrepair after being raided, looted, and desecrated. The Daoist community was also substantially diminished as the Revolution scattered them into exile, labor camps, and worse. But, joining the aged and dwindled population of renunciants, Zhong Yunlong felt right at home. He soon let his hair grow long and began wearing the dark blue robes of a renunciant. 
Many of the old Daoists he met trained in kungfu in their younger years but had stopped during the Cultural Revolution. It was unanimously agreed the best were two old friends who could not be more dissimilar in their archetypal expressions of Daoist character – Guo Gaoyi 郭高一 (1900-1996), the unpredictable Zhuangzian joker and Zhu Chengde 朱诚德 (1990-1990), the reticent and elusive mystic. Two old Daoists who would later be revered as the ‘eccentrics of Wudang’ 武當異人. Zhong Yunlong endeavored to learn from them both.
After three years of devoted training under them, in 1985 Zhong Yunlong was handed a solemn task by Wang Guangde 王光德 and the Wudang Daoist Association: In the Daoist tradition of ‘cloud wandering’ 雲遊, he descended the mountain to travel in search of the scattered and hidden Daoist diaspora and encourage their return. Most refused and, in his wanderings, Zhong Yunlong became a reliquary gathering and transporting the various threads of their teachings. He studied under many Daoist masters, most notably learning the Wudang Northern Longfist system from Kuang Changxiu 匡常修 in Laoshan and Longmen Dragon Baguazhang 龍門龍形八卦掌 from Liu Chengxi 劉誠喜 in the Zhongnan Mountains.
At the end of his 3 years of travel, Zhong Yunlong returned to Wudang to take up the mantle of his teachers. He soon began cultivating a new generation of the Wudang Sanfeng Lineage to help reinvigorate and properly inherit the rich and abundant traditions of Wudang. After scouring the countryside to collect the scattered and windblown shards of a shattered tradition, the next generation would need to work tirelessly to reconstruct a wholly new mosaic – one which could securely embody the essence and ancient wisdom of the teachings while still being able to fluently interact with the modern world.

Zhong Yunlong hanging out in Purple Heaven Palace in 1989

Guo Gaoyi with Zhong Yunlong, 1988

Wang Guangde

Zhu Chengde

Kuang Changxiu

Liu Chengxi