Qigong and Kung-Fu Animal Forms

Over the years (and decades and centuries), a plethora of Animal Forms have been developed by qigong and kung-fu practitioners.

Generally speaking, the Animal Forms incorporate both internal (subtle-body) and external (physical-body) disciplines of Chinese martial arts. The Shaolin (northern) & Wudang (southern) schools of Chinese martial arts each have their own versions of the Five Animal Forms.

One well-known Five Animal Form includes the Tiger, Crane, Leopard, Snake and Dragon.
Why Five?

Five Animal Forms are related to the Taoist Five Element system. Each of the five animals corresponds to one of the five yin-yang organ pairs. Its movements are designed to strengthen and balance that particular organ system.

The Fine Art Of Emulation
As you’ve likely inferred, the Animal Forms are developed via the observation and emulation of non-human animals. The Taoist masters sought to incorporate the power and intelligence of a given animal by replicating its physical movements. But how exactly does this work?

If we cross the border (peacefully) from China into India, a brief consultation with the Indian sage Patanjali may offer a clue. This from chapter three, verse four of the Yoga Sutras (English rendering via Swami Savitripriya):

"These three practices – Concentration, Meditation and Samadhi – when practiced together in sequence, one after the other – are called the practice of Becoming the Object. This threefold practice enables you to enter into the underlying subtle field of matter which composes the object you are observing in order to enter into non-dual oneness with it, because the only way to truly know an object is to become the object."
Another way of putting this is: as we relax the illusion of separation, we re-member our essential Oneness. It’s from this stance that the appearance of emulation, and the experience of truly "walking in another’s shoes (or hoofs or claws or paws)" becomes possible. How is it that my right hand can emulate my left hand? Is it not, essentially, because my right hand and my left hand belong to a single body?

Body Of Tao
If I collapse attention into my right hand, it can seem that right-hand-experience is individual, private. Yet from the point of view of my entire right arm, my right-hand-experience becomes more collective: just one state within the "republic of arm," if you will. From an even more expansive perspective, right-hand-experience is continuous with left-hand-experience -- in the same way that apparently separate water-wells share the continuity of the underground reservoir that is their common source. Designated body parts (hand, arm, etc.) are to the body as a whole, as individual beads are to the thread which renders them a mala: The body as a whole is the "common thread" -- and what makes communication possible, whether or not the "beads" happen to be contiguous. Such continuity (a la underground reservoir or mala-thread)  makes emulation -- or true communication of any sort -- possible, inevitable, and (one hopes) fruitful. Click to learn how Chinese medicine treats Leukopenia.