He Xinyin was originally named Liang Ruyuan, a native of Yongfeng in Jiangxi. He was born in 1517 and died in prison in 1579. Contemporaries called him a great swordsman, yet The Records of Ming Confucian Scholarship and the official biographies contain not one line about him practising martial arts or handling weapons.
The title had nothing to do with fists and feet. To understand it, one has to see who coined it first.
The label Wang Shizhen created
The phrase traces back to a chapter in the Later Collection of Historical Materials from Yanzhou by Wang Shizhen: The Great Swordsmen of the Jiajing and Longqing Eras. Feng Menglong reused the description at the opening of the Insight section of his Compendium of Wisdom:
He Xinyin was a great swordsman of the Jiajing and Longqing years, and used lecturing as his name.
The words of Wang Shizhen himself are more revealing:
In the Jiajing and Longqing era lecturing spread across the realm, and at its worst it turned into a tool for swashbuckling under the name of teaching, and swashbuckling in turn became cover for greed and arrogance. The method itself could not move people, so the disappointed and the unsatisfied gathered around it, drummed it up, dispersed and regrouped in a flash, until one almost feared another Yellow Turban or Five Pecks of Rice rising.
Borrowing lecturing as a tool for swashbuckling: using the lecture hall to do the work of a knight-errant. Wang Shizhen was an official and stood with the court. He watched He Xinyin gather disciples and travel, the followers coming and going in bursts, and reached for the Yellow Turbans and the Five Pecks of Rice sect as a comparison. The phrase great swordsman of the rivers and lakes was therefore not praise at first. It was a warning, even a slight. What it described was the power to summon and organise people, not skill with weapons.
What he actually did
Yet the name outlived the pen that made it. The conduct of He Xinyin did resemble that of the old knight-errants.
He placed first in the provincial examination, with a career laid out in front of him, and gave up the imperial examinations on his own initiative. Back home he founded the Juhe Hall, sometimes written Cuihe Hall, as a social experiment: the clan held property in common; marriages, funerals, schooling and taxes were handled together; he gave away his own estate; and he shielded villagers from the extortion of local officials. Harming himself to help others.
When Yan Song monopolised power, the court could not move him for years. He Xinyin laid a plan in the capital: he used the Daoist priests and the spirit-writing that the Jiajing emperor trusted to plant suspicion, and joined it to the impeachment by Zou Yinglong, and Yan Song fell. A commoner scheming against the chief minister of the day: the nerve alone was enough.
Then came his death. Zhang Juzheng was in power, closing and destroying academies and suppressing private lecturing. He Xinyin opposed him openly and was put on the wanted list. After his arrest he was brought before the provincial governor Wang Zhiyuan and sat without kneeling: How dare you kill me, how could you kill me; the one who kills me is Zhang. He was beaten more than a hundred strokes by strong guards and only laughed drily. In prison, when his disciples came in tears with wine and food, he only smiled. Then he died.
Li Zhi wrote On He Xinyin, saying that the tens of thousands of people of Wuchang, high and low, all knew the injustice done to him. Li Zhi and Huang Zongxi admired him for exactly that: a backbone that would not turn back in the face of death.
Bare hands against dragons and snakes
The claim that He Xinyin knew martial arts comes mostly from a line in the Ming Confucian Scholarship, Taizhou School, part one, by Huang Zongxi:
After the Taizhou school, many of its people could fight dragons and snakes with bare hands. Passed down to the line of Yan Shannong and He Xinyin, they were no longer something orthodox teaching could rein in. These men turned heaven and earth over; no ancients before them, no successors after. The Buddhists shout and strike, running wild when the moment comes, but once they set down the staff they are like fools. These men carried everything on their bare bodies and never set it down.
Dragons and snakes meant entrenched power, ritual orthodoxy, worldly authority. Fighting them bare-handed meant overturning the established order with nothing in hand, refusing to be bound by orthodox teaching. It is a metaphor from intellectual history, and it describes spirit.
Late Ming unofficial notes also circulated stories of fighting a python bare-handed, but that is rumour layered on rumour and cannot be used as evidence.
Looking back at the title
When Wang Shizhen coined the label the tone was critical. In the hands of Li Zhi and Huang Zongxi it became praise for integrity. The label stayed the same; the meaning had changed.
At no layer of meaning, however, did anyone record what martial art he practised.
