6 ideas
Qiyun shengdong asks whether a painting carries the vital breath (qi) that makes the subject seem alive and makes the viewer resonate with it. It names something that cannot be measured directly and shows only as animation. A technically correct painting without it is judged dead.
The canons are ordered so that faithful depiction of forms comes third, after spirit resonance and brush structure. Resemblance is necessary but insufficient: a painter who copies appearances exactly but misses the living energy and the strength of line has mastered a lower skill.
Gufa yongbi holds that the brushstroke itself must have 'bone', a firm internal structure that gives a form its strength and articulation. Line is treated as the skeleton of the image rather than as an outline filled in later. This makes calligraphic brush control a core measure of a painter's quality.
Painting is broken into six separable competencies: spirit resonance, bone-method brushwork, fidelity to forms, color suited to the kind of thing, compositional placement, and transmission through copying models. Xie He observes that most excel in only one aspect and that almost none unite all six, which lets him rank earlier painters into tiered classes.
The sixth law, chuanyi muxie, makes transmission through copying earlier works a formal part of painting rather than a lesser act of imitation. Skill and tradition pass between generations when painters reproduce models. The standard for originality therefore sits inside a lineage instead of against it.
The laws are stated in a few four-character phrases without definitions. Even their punctuation and grammar are disputed, for example whether 'spirit resonance' and 'life-motion' are one idea or two. That compression turned the text into a fixed reference point each later era read its own aesthetics into, so painters kept arguing with it for fifteen centuries.