The principles of Hsing-I Chuan were originally recorded by a famous Chinese general named Yueh Fei who lived during the Sung Dynasty (960-1127). Yueh Fei had learned Hsing-I Chuan from an unknown master at Wu-Tang Mountain. He taught it to his soldiers and wrote the original book of Hsing-I Chuan in order to spread the knowledge of its values. Yueh Fei was entrapped by the Prime Minister Chin Kue and later executed by the authorities. His students scattered because whoever knew and practiced this martial art was to be apprehended and executed.

Although it was handed as an inheritance from one generation to the next, there is no record of the practice of Hsing-I Chuan from this period in the Sung Dynasty through the Yuan and Ming Dynasties. At the end of the Ming Dynasty and the beginning of the Ching Dynasty, a martial arts master named Chi-Lung Feng went to the Szechuan and Shensi provinces to look for further training in martial arts. He met a Taoist monk at Chuan and gave him the book of Yueh Fei. Chi Lung-Feng put all his efforts into analyzing and applying the techniques of Hsing-I and later taught the art to his two students, Ts'ao Chi Wu of Shansi province and Ma Hsueh Li of Honan province.

The aim of Hsing-I Chuan as translated from the Taoism and Buddhism, is to exercise for health, to nourish energy and to promote strength.

• Hsing means forms, literally, "the form of thousands of things that shows outwardly."

• I means mind, literally, the heart strength and thought; the mind stays inward.

Hsing-I therefore means the heart and the mind are within, and the form of thousands of things shows outwardly. The inner and the outer are co-related. Generally speaking, it means that there is One Chi (energy) which keeps flowing.