Forms & Weapons (套路・兵器) — the routines and the arms

A form (套路, tàolù) is a fixed sequence of movements — the way Chinese martial arts package their techniques for solo practice, transmission, and testing. This section gathers the wiki's form and weapon pages: the foundational drills every northern student meets first, the deep library of empty-hand routines, and the weapons — saber, staff, sword and the great long blades — with a bridge to the Ming-dynasty manuals where those weapons were first written down.

What a form is for

Forms get argued about — are they a training method or a museum piece? The traditional answer is that a taolu is a container: it preserves a style's vocabulary in a fixed order so it can be drilled alone and passed on intact. A typical northern curriculum climbs a predictable arc:

1. Foundational drills — short, repetitive sets that install stance, footwork and a few core powers (the kicking drill, the footwork set).

2. Core empty-hand forms — longer routines that recombine the vocabulary into fighting sequences.

3. Signature / advanced forms — the school's prized, more demanding sets.

4. Weapons — saber, staff, spear, sword, taken up once the empty-hand body is built.

Foundational forms

The cross-style starting points — not the property of any one system, but the shared ground of northern training:

Tan Tui (彈腿 / 潭腿) — the foundational springing-kick drill under most northern schools

Lianbuquan (練步拳) — the footwork-training long-fist set; a standard open beginner form

The Eighteen Luohan Hands (十八羅漢手) — the Shaolin conditioning set at the root of the temple's reputation

The empty-hand library — Northern Mantis

The wiki's deepest form coverage is in Northern Praying Mantis, whose curriculum is documented form-by-form with full move-by-move scripts. Rather than repeat it here, this section points to the two dedicated maps:

Mantis Forms — the script-and-video map of every Mantis form, across all four branches

The White Ape Forms (白猿) — Steals the Peach & Leaves the Cave, with full scripts

All four mantis branches are now documented form-by-form on that map: Seven Star (the full Wong Hon Fan canon — 崩步, 攔截, 連環錦套, 大翻車, 四路奔打 and the rest of the empty-hand sets, plus eleven weapon forms), Eight Step (七手 · 力劈 · 小翻車 · 大翻車 · 摘要 and the 拍按 two-person set), Six-Harmony (the six 趟 — 鐵齒 · 善手奔 · 鏡裡藏花 · 截手圈 · 葉底藏花 · 雙封 — plus 短捶), and Taiji Plum-Blossom (分身八肘, the root Eight-Elbows). Each row links a full move-by-move script.

The internal arts (內家)

The three classical internal arts each have their signature forms scripted here.

Xingyi (形意拳) — form-intent boxing, the five elements and twelve animals:

五行連環拳 Five-Element Linking Fist — the foundational linked form, threading all five element-fists

十二形 Twelve Animals — the animal-form roster, each with its signature postures

八字功 Eight-Character Skills — the eight method-characters + their linking form

Bagua (八卦掌) — the eight-trigram palm, walked on the circle:

八大掌 The Eight Palms — Bagua's core: the trigram-animal palms + the single/double change scripts

Baji (八極拳) — the close-range art of explosive short power:

小八極 Small Baji — the foundational 36-posture form

金剛八式 Eight Vajra Postures — the foundational power-postures, with their verses

The weapons (兵器)

The classical curriculum is built on the eighteen arms (十八般兵器); the documented weapon forms on the wiki come chiefly from the rich Northern Mantis weapons syllabus, grouped here by the arm rather than by branch:

From living forms to the source manuals

These are the practised weapon routines. The wiki also holds the earliest printed weapon manuals themselves — the 1621 Ming texts where the staff, the long saber and the spear first entered the record. The forms above are how the arms live now; the texts below are where they were first written down:

Shaolin Staff Method (少林棍法闡宗, 1621) — the earliest surviving Shaolin weapons manual

The Long Saber (單刀法選, 1621) — the two-handed saber, ancestor of the miaodao

The Spear & the Crossbow (長槍法選・蹶張心法, 1621) — the Yang-family spear and the foot-drawn crossbow

See also

Northern Kung Fu Styles — the arts these forms belong to

Source Texts — the manuals, in the order they were written

The Four Gates (踢打摔拿) — the categories of technique the forms train