I became aware of Peter Ralston after reading about his books on ‘Effortless Power’, which I subsequently purchased from Amazon.

It is probably the closest to the Kyushindo philosophy that I have come across.

Kyushindo translates roughly as “the way of seeking truth” — kyu (to seek), shin (truth/reality), do (the way/path).

---

Peter Ralston is an American martial artist who started as a competitive martial athlete, became a world champion and moved on to a philosopher of consciousness – always driven by the same restless insistence on discovering what is actually true, rather than what has merely been handed down.

Ralston started judo with some friends – at that time, it was simply another form of play. He didn’t become serious about it until he was almost sixteen. His early philosophy was uncompromising: “My point was never to blindly believe something somebody said, never to adopt someone else’s structure or beliefs. My point was simply to be good.“

By the age of 19, he had black belts in judo, jujitsu and karate. A growing interest in the “internal” martial arts then led him to study T’ai Chi Ch’uan, Hsing I Ch’uan, and Pa Kua Chang, training for more than eight hours a day.

---

Founding of Cheng Hsin

In the early 1970s Ralston was teaching Kung Fu, Hsing I, Pa Kua and T’ai Chi and began branching off into his investigations, discovering the foundations of what he would later call Cheng Hsin.

In 1975 Ralston founded the Cheng Hsin School and in 1977 opened “The Cheng Hsin School of Internal Martial Arts and Center for Ontological Research” in Oakland, California.

---

The 1978 World Championship

Peter saw a poster for the full-contact martial arts world tournament in Taipei in 1978. Ralston travelled to China in February 1978 to compete. He became the first non-Asian ever to win the World Championship full-contact martial arts tournament held in the Republic of China.

The victory was deliberately strategic. Ralston said, “One of the fundamental reasons I fought in a world tournament is that I ask people to do ‘unconventional things’, to actually question and understand themselves… now people listen to me who wouldn’t before, yet I’m saying the same things.”

---

What is Cheng Hsin?

Cheng Hsin is a pursuit of increasing consciousness using internal martial arts, body-being practice and Zen-like contemplation. The name comprises two Chinese characters: Cheng, meaning true, genuine, or real, and Hsin, meaning being, heart, or mind — translated together as the “true nature of being.”

---

The Central Philosophy: Beyond Tradition and Belief

Ralston’s core philosophical drive is honesty about what actually works, rather than adherence to any tradition. Cheng Hsin was never meant to be a martial art or a system — it is a way of approaching discovery. In the martial domain, it is about discovering the principles and dynamics that actually work well, orientated around being effortlessly effective. The pursuit is to understand what’s true beyond every martial art, beyond dogma and belief systems.

---

Effortless Power

In Cheng Hsin internal martial arts and body-being practice, students train to become conscious of and align with certain principles of body design and effective interaction. By studying the design and function of the body and aligning with certain feeling-mental states, practitioners train to align the body to be compressed into the ground and to use the body’s intrinsic strength and the supporting ground for power. All techniques are designed to be executed while remaining completely relaxed.

---

The Martial Practice

Along with many techniques unique to Cheng Hsin, some techniques and forms share similarities with Judo, Aikido, Tai Chi, Western boxing, fencing, and Pa Kua — but these have been recreated and built up from core principles that are unique to Cheng Hsin.

In essence, Cheng Hsin treats the martial arts as a laboratory for discovering universal principles of effective, effortless action – and uses that same spirit of honest inquiry to explore the deeper nature of being, mind, and reality.

Along with martial arts and body-being training, Ralston later put equal emphasis on increasing consciousness through contemplation intensives and ontological workshops.

He currently lives outside of San Antonio, Texas. His major works include Cheng Hsin: The Principles of Effortless Power, Cheng Hsin T’ui Shou: The Art of Effortless Power, Zen Body-Being, and The Book of Not Knowing. He currently teaches Cheng Hsin martial arts and facilitates ontology and contemplation worldwide. You can now find Cheng Hsin schools and affiliated teachers in Australia, Germany, France, Hungary, the Netherlands, South Korea, Sweden, and Wales.

---

Pa Kua is the same as Bagua but was a spelling based on an earlier, different method of Chinese to English translation.