Simon Cox

Simon Cox is a teacher of Wudang martial arts and a scholar of religion. After a degree in classics from the University of Houston, he moved to China at twenty-one and spent six years at Wudang Mountain under Master Yuan Xiugang, one of twelve foreign students in an intensive five-year programme in the Sanfeng lineage that combined morning qigong, a full day of kung fu and evening meditation or chanting. He went on to a PhD in religion at Rice University with Jeffrey Kripal and Anne Klein, later published by Oxford University Press as The Subtle Body: A Genealogy, a history of the idea of a body of subtle energy in Western thought.

Since 2022 he and his wife Brandi have run Okanagan Valley Wudang in Penticton, British Columbia, treating kung fu, tai chi and qigong together as one path of cultivation, with morning tai chi and qigong classes alongside longer evening sessions. He holds a research fellowship with Esalen's Center for Theory and Research, working with co-founder Michael Murphy on a book about the institute's history, and a visiting scholar at Harvard Divinity School. At Esalen he also teaches Daoist sleep and dream practices drawn from his Wudang training.