Happy Martial Arts

Reading "martial arts" as "scholarship" is the most intriguing thing about Happy Martial Arts. It grows out of a famous allusion in Jin Yong's The Legend of the Condor Heroes, in which Huang Shang compiles the Daoist canon and thereby comprehends the Nine Yin Manual: if the Nine Yin emerged from Daoist scriptures and the Eighteen Dragon-Subduing Palms from the Book of Changes, why shouldn't Buddhist sutras and the classics of the philosophers also be martial manuals? Thus the scriptures of Buddhism, Daoism, Confucianism, Legalism, and Mohism become double texts here—"outwardly on statecraft, inwardly on martial arts"—and the heirs of the Hundred Schools turn into transmitters of scriptures; academy heads and masters of classical learning are simultaneously martial grandmasters. The protagonist, Qin Chao, knows no classical scholarship but understands science and the principles of taijiquan, and uses a science student's approach to "reverse-engineer" the ancients' techniques. It reads with both the pleasure of puzzle-solving and the exhilaration of a youth inventing moves. The overall tone is light and does not rely on heartbreak to drive the plot, making it suitable for wuxia readers seeking a change of flavor as a long-term read. One caveat: this is a web-serialized work of enormous size and countless chapters, and what circulates on the market is mostly digitally compiled editions with no official publication information.