The Eight Palms (八大掌) — Baguazhang

八大掌 (Bā Dà Zhǎng, "the Eight Great Palms" — also 老八掌, "the Old Eight Palms," or 八母掌, "the Eight Mother Palms") is the **core curriculum of **Baguazhang. Bagua has no long fixed line like the other arts; its "form" is the circle — the practitioner walks a circle and, at each change of direction, performs one of eight ways of turning the body and changing the palm. Those eight changes are the Eight Palms, and they map to the eight trigrams (八卦) the art is named for. The two simplest — the single change (單換掌) and double change (雙換掌) — are the root; the rest elaborate.

The eight trigram-palms (孫祿堂 system)

Sun Lutang (孫祿堂) — who learned Bagua from Cheng Tinghua (程廷華) — organises the eight as a trigram → animal → palm correspondence, each its own short circle-walking sequence:

The two root changes (拳譜)

The single and double palm changes, as set down in Sun Lutang's 八卦拳學 (1916); the recurring 靑龍轉身 → 縮尾 → 返首 → 黑虎出洞 tetrad is the standard "enter the circle" preamble. English are the wiki's own working glosses.

單換掌 — Single Palm Change (兩儀, "the two poles")

雙換掌 — Double Palm Change (四象, "the four images")

See also

Bagua (八卦掌) — the style, the circle, and the lineage

Dong Haichuan (董海川) — the founder

Cheng Tinghua (程廷華) — the Cheng-style founder, Sun Lutang's teacher

Sun Lutang (孫祿堂) — whose 八卦拳學 gives the trigram-animal palms

Sources

[1] 孫祿堂 (Sun Lutang), 八卦拳學 (1916) — the trigram → animal → palm system and the single/double-change sequences reproduced here under fair-use citation, with the wiki's own glosses. Public domain by age (Sun d. 1933). Open bilingual edition: Brennan Translation.

[2] Cross-references: 陳微明 (Chen Weiming), 八卦掌擒拿圖 (1937, Sun-line) and 尹玉章 (Yin Yuzhang), 八卦掌簡編 (1932, Yin Fu line) — both on Brennan — corroborate the palm-change names across lineages. The Cheng-style 老八掌 name-list follows the 八卦掌 article on Chinese Wikipedia (CC BY-SA).

[3] Video: 程派八卦掌 老八掌 demonstrations (Liu Jingru 劉敬儒, Sun Zhijun 孫志君) are indexed on the Bagua on Film page.