What is Abimoxi?

Chinese Medicine developed with early records reporting Chinese living in trees in order to avoid wild animals.  Chinese medicine at this time was a matter of basic survival.  Moxibustion, single herbs and bian stone acupressure formed its most primitive branches.  From waking up on frozen ground to surviving dessert conditions the Chinese learned how to use principles from nature to survive.  Over time basic combinations of herbs were used to counter each other’s side effects and surgical techniques improved.  Herbs that promote clotting were mixed with those that improve circulation as a way to stop pain and promote healing of injuries.  Gradually they were mixed with herbs which improve bone density and provide anesthesia to form rudimentary formulas for emergency care.  At this stage Chinese civilization was only on par with medieval Europe.  They had the crossbow and many other aspects of culture that would not reach Europe for millennia.  Much of this can be credited to the pictographic nature of Chinese writing.  Even as language changed and dynasties fell the language of the ancients was perfectly legible and allowed for cultural exchange throughout East Asia in spite of spoken linguistic diversity.

Around 600BC Abimoxi branched as a guarded medical tradition surrounding Xia or Chinese Knights who often worked as bodyguards.  Without hospitals, emergency medicine was a necessity in their line of work.  They also found that increased medical knowledge made it easier to kill their targets.  As a result the two began to develop together each one lending deeper insights into the other.  Chinese torture methods became instrumental in extracting military and medical information.  Mountain temples served as Universities within ancient Chinese society and were largely left aside from politics.  As a result they became gathering places for Xia during political shifts in Chinese history.  It was through this dynamic that many of the best martial art and medical systems found their way to Taoist temples.  

At the time of the Han dynasty Emperor Wei Qing expelled the Turks from their native China and they were forced to fight with the Persians and later the Greeks where they took control of Anatolia and introduced Chinese medical techniques into Greco Medicine.  The double snake symbol used by the Greeks and Egyptians draws its roots from medical traditions in China using the double dragons wrapped around a pole.  This symbol is also seen in the oldest medical traditions of India.  Each intersection of the wrapped snakes represents a chakra or one of the 9 Chinese heaters.  During the Sui dynasty the influx of Buddhism brought increased medical and martial influences from India.  Da Mo, also known in the West as Bodidharma was a part of the physician knight tradition that still exists in India.  He brought the Indian martial and medical arts to the Shaolin temple.  The influence created an arms race within the Xia of China.  As a result of this the medicine was often the most closely guarded aspect of their warrior tradition.  Poisons, antidotes, and surgical techniques were passed down and influenced by new theories arriving from Greco-Arabic medicine and from European sources from the time of the Mongolian Yuan dynasty onwards.  Herbs with origins in Africa such as frankincense and myrrh became indispensable.  Hui Arabs brought Gerco Arabic medicine back to China with the new additions made by Greek and Arab doctors.  Today this medicine is still practiced within China as a minority medicine.  

At the end of the Ming Dynasty China faced Manchurian invaders.  Under the new threat Xia from the 17 most advanced systems of the time gathered at Shaolin.  The son of the rebel leader was Wang Lang. Faced with certain death, they poured their knowledge into Wang Lang who amalgamated these systems into mantis boxing.  Afterwards their was a cultural revolution in the Qing dynasty which served to purge kill the Xia continued to act as guerrilla fighters in order to preserve their culture..  Mantis was preserved at a daoist monastery at Lao Mountain and later, taught privately as the dynasty stabilized an was eventually taught and then in martial art colleges.  Martial arts at this time were trade schools, rather than exercise clubs.  As the dynasty became more stable and the Manchurians became Chinese many systems of martial arts medicine became divided focusing more on injuries sustained from martial arts.  This bone setting branch of medicine is called “Die Da” or Dit Da” medicine and is particularly prevalent in regions of China famous for their martial artists such as Guangdong, Hong Kong and Shandong.  These were also some of the first areas to suffer under Western occupation the first Chinese in modern times to travel to western countries.  Following on the railroad workers and miners, Chinese doctors were able to fix so called incurable disease and set bones using trigger points and were often the only doctors in the region.  The Chinese techniques passed onto allopathic doctors who would rename Dit da techniques “Chiropractics” in the US and “Osteopathy” in France.

Those that practiced abimoxi were the most famous doctors.  Up until the early 1900s Xia like Wong Fei Hong and Feng Huan Yi were renowned both for their Robin Hood like characteristics and for their medical skills.  The top martial artists served as military instructors and it was their renown which lead to the near destruction of this tradition.  After the communists took control of China in 1949, MaoZedong, being a student of Chinese history attempted to purge the Xia tradition by destroying the temples and abolishing religion.  Very few were able to escape before being executed.  Mantis master Wei Xiao Tang was barely able to escape to Taiwan.  Today it is rare to find the complete transmission of the physician knight traditions.  There are perhaps two branches in India and only a few from the Chinese branches left on Earth.  Many that survive today do so precisely because they avoided reputation.  As a result of such secrecy, many traditions have been watered down or the medical traditions have been lost.  Historically these traditions open once every millennium.  

While we are not the only tradition of Abimoxi, we are the first in modern times to open this body of knowledge publicly so that they can continue to benefit people into the future.  The xia tradition is very much alive.  Our instructors teach military and police throughout the world, many serve in the armed forces, while others practice the medicine of the system.  In 1999, One of our instructors Peter Ray MD coined the name Abimoxi combining the Greek abios meaning the absence of life and moxi as a shortened version of moxibustion, which is the earliest form of Chinese medicine using warmth.  Since that time Grandmaster Shyun and Michael Cimino have published numerous books on the subject and have been teaching through the Abimoxi Institute of Health and ACMAF schools where students study both nurturing and martial arts in order to benefit themselves and society.