Bagua is a martial art that specializes in palm changes, circle walking, and continuous posture changes during movement. Demonstrations of this art displays water-like fluidity with horizontal spirals and vertical flips and turns.

Bagua is a martial art that requires training internal and external aspects. Internally, it trains the awareness and Qi as it main requirement. Externally, it requires training the physical structure, tempo, and function. It combines with Daoyin and Qi gong and is trained through twisting, flipping, walking and turning exercises. Emphasis is placed on obtaining calmness in movement.

At its inception, Bagua was called Muo Men, due to its appearance resembling the pushing of mills stone (Muo is Chinese for stone mill and Men means a “school”). As it matured and became codified, 8 basic palm postures known as the Eight Mother Palms were developed. Each of these “Mother Palms” were developed further based on left-right, up-down, and center directions into 64 palms. Due to its similarity to the Gua changes and combinations as written in the I-Ching, Dong and his successors later named the art Bagua. Currently the popular names are Bagua, Bagua Linking Palms, Bagua Swimming Body Palms, Bagua Swimming Body Linking Palm, etc.

There are many legends surrounding the origin of Bagua, but all deem Dong, Hai Chuan as the art's founder. Dong was born in October of 1797 and passed away on October of 1882. Dong was passionate about martial art and was known in his village for his incredible strength since youth. Some time in (1850—1861), he traveled abroad after an incident. His journey spanned across Eastern Sichuan and many famous mountains in southern JIANGSU, northern ZHEJIANG, and ANHUI county.

The essence of Bagua is to use the Yin-Yang interchanging theory of I-Ching to explain the creation and destruction principles of the five elements, and to use Bagua's complex Gua calculations to explain the evolution of unification, separation, reversing, restructuring, ect, in calculating the changes of the Eight gua (symbols).

In Summary, Bagua is an internal martial art that takes change as its principle and is cultivated through stepping and turning and applied through palm changes. It is developed through finding stillness in movement but in application it uses active movement to overcome passive stillness. Bagua, among Xingyi and Taichi, are considered the three main styles of internal martial art.