The Eighteen Luohan Hands (十八羅漢手)

The Eighteen Luohan Hands (十八羅漢手, Shíbā Luóhàn Shǒu, "Eighteen Arhat Hands") is the most famous origin story in all of Chinese martial arts: the set of exercises the Indian monk Bodhidharma is said to have created at the Shaolin Temple to strengthen his meditating monks — the mythic seed from which Shaolin boxing, and by extension "kung fu" itself, supposedly grew. It is a wonderful story. As history it is almost entirely legend — and the honest account turns out to be the more interesting one.

A first complication: "Eighteen Luohan Hands" is not one thing. The name is attached to several quite different sets across the centuries and across lineages, united only by the number eighteen and the Buddhist branding.

Three things called "Eighteen Luohan"

• The Eighteen Arhats (十八羅漢) are Buddhist figures — a luohan (arhat) being one far advanced on the path but short of Buddhahood. The classic Indian set is sixteen; Chinese tradition added two to make eighteen. Their statues line temple halls, and the martial name borrows their number and the look of their poses.

• The Eighteen Luohan Hands (十八羅漢手) is a named set of eighteen exercises — in most tellings a sequence of standing, breathing, and bracing postures (a kind of qigong) for "strengthening the sinews," and so closely tied to the Yijinjing.

• Luohan Quan (羅漢拳, "Arhat Boxing") is the broader style family said to have grown out of those hands once they were elaborated into fighting.

The thread joining them is thematic, not doctrinal: the exercises borrow the Arhats' name and image. There is no Buddhist scripture of martial arts behind it.

The legend: Bodhidharma's eighteen hands

The fully-formed story has a single, traceable home — the 1915 manual 《少林拳術秘訣》 (Secrets of Shaolin Boxing). It tells how Bodhidharma (達摩), arriving at Shaolin from the south, found his monks "listless in spirit and enfeebled in muscle," taught them that "to see one's true nature, one must first strengthen the body," and showed them a practice of — front and back, left and right — no more than eighteen hands:

合之前成十八法，又名十八羅漢手。此達摩師之開宗手也，在當時不過為強精壯骨之用。 Together these make eighteen methods, also called the Eighteen Luohan Hands. These are Master Bodhidharma's founding hands — though in those days merely a means of strengthening the essence and hardening the bones. — Secrets of Shaolin Boxing, 1915

Centuries later, the story continues, Master Jueyuan (覺遠) enlarged the set into seventy-two hands; then, with two lay boxers — Bai Yufeng (白玉峰) of Taiyuan and Old Li (李叟) of Lanzhou — it grew again into more than a hundred and seventy techniques, reorganized as the Five Forms: Dragon, Tiger, Leopard, Snake, and Crane. This is the celebrated 18 → 72 → 170+ expansion, and the root of the Shaolin "five animals."

Worth noticing is what even this founding text does not say: it calls Bodhidharma's eighteen hands a body-strengthening art, not a fighting style, and credits the actual boxing to Jueyuan and Bai Yufeng. The blanket claim that "Bodhidharma invented Shaolin kung fu" is a later, popular embellishment on top of an already-legendary story.

Legend versus history

Here the wiki keeps its promise to call legend by its name. The Bodhidharma-and-the-eighteen-hands story is not ancient. Its parts are a twentieth-century construction, traced by the historian Tang Hao (唐豪) in the 1930s and confirmed by Meir Shahar and Stanley Henning in our own time:

• The notion of Bodhidharma as a martial founder first appears in a novel — The Travels of Lao Ts'an (老殘遊記), serialized 1904–1907.

• It was reworked as Shaolin School Methods (少林宗法) in a Shanghai newspaper in 1910, then published as Secrets of Shaolin Boxing in 1915 under a pseudonym. The book was a sensation — by 1919 it had run through nearly thirty printings.

• The older anchor of the same myth, the Yijinjing (易筋經), is itself a 1624 text with forged prefaces; the Qing scholar Ling Tingkang (1757–1809) already dismissed its author as "an ignorant village master."

And the documented history of Shaolin's fighting arts runs the other way around:

• In the Tang, thirteen Shaolin monks famously aided the future emperor Li Shimin (a deed recorded on a stele erected in 728) — but that is military service, with no sign of a special boxing art.

• Shaolin's real martial fame through the Ming was for the staff (棍), not the empty hand: the general Yu Dayou visited around the 1560s, and Cheng Zongyou wrote the earliest surviving Shaolin manual — on the staff — around 1610.

• Empty-hand boxing came late, only at the close of the Ming (roughly the 1620s–1640s, around the military monk Xuanji), and became Shaolin's signature only in the mid-Qing.

So the legend inverts the record: it projects an empty-hand origin back to the sixth century, when the evidence shows boxing arriving more than a thousand years later — after the staff and by analogy to it. No source from the sixth through fifteenth centuries records an "Eighteen Luohan Hands" at all.

Many sets, one name

Because the name is famous, many different forms have claimed it. There is no single canonical "Eighteen Luohan Hands." Among the distinct sets that bear the name:

• A health/qigong set of eighteen postures (the sense in which it is "also called yijin," sinew-changing) — taught in many modern lineages as breathing-and-stretching exercise.

• A Southern boxing form, the 十八羅漢手 / 佛家拳 ("Buddha-family fist"), carried from Fujian into Guangdong in the Qing and expanded 18 → 36 → 72 → 108 hands among the Foshan boxers — woven into Hung Ga (洪拳) as its Sap Baat Lohan, and linked to Plum-Blossom Praying Mantis through the eighteenth-century master Li Bingxiao.

• Northern Luohan boxing — agile, kicking, long-range — as against the Southern versions' rooted stances and dense hand strikes.

• The "Fut" (佛, Buddha) stream that feeds hybrids like Choy Lay Fut (蔡李佛, founded in the 1830s) and Jow Ga.

The expansion-counts even disagree across these lineages — 18 → 72 → 170+, or 18 → 36 → 72 → 108, or 18 → 36 → 173 → 324 — competing family genealogies, none independently documented. What they share is the number and the name, not a common choreography. (The "Southern Shaolin Temple" through which several of these sets claim transmission is itself historically unattested, and gets the same legend-versus-fact caution.)

Place in kung-fu history

For all that the history is legend, the idea of the Eighteen Luohan Hands has been enormously productive. It is the narrative fountainhead by which the sprawling, regionally diverse world of Chinese boxing claims a single, ancient, Buddhist, Bodhidharma-blessed root — a story that answered deep needs for identity and legitimacy in the troubled late-Qing and nationalist Republican decades when it was finally written down. As a symbol, the eighteen hands sit at the head of the family tree of Shaolin boxing; as history, that tree's real roots are the Ming staff and the late-Ming fist.

Training & demonstration video

The Shaolin "small Luohan" fighting form (小羅漢十八手)

• Luohan Shíbā Shǒu — "Buddha's 18 Hands," with applications — taught by Shi De Yang (释德扬), a well-known Songshan Shaolin monk; the strongest lineage provenance in this group.

• Small Luohan 18 hands — combat applications — the companion applications video.

As a health / qigong set

• Luohan 18 Hands — step-by-step tutorial — the eighteen-hand health version, taught movement by movement.

• 傳統 羅漢十八手 — full form — a traditional 羅漢十八手 demonstration.

The Hung Ga (洪拳) "Sap Baat Lohan"

• Sap Baat Lohan Kyun (十八羅漢拳) — part 1 of 4 — the Southern Hung-Ga form (continue to parts 2–4 on the channel).

Mainland (Bilibili)

• 少林 罗汉十八手 — detailed tutorial — a Shaolin 罗汉十八手 walkthrough.

See also

The Yijinjing (易筋經) — the 'Sinew-Changing Classic,' the other half of the Bodhidharma legend

Northern Kung Fu Styles — including Northern Shaolin

What is Kung Fu? — legend versus history across the styles

Sources

The legend's locus classicus is 《少林拳術秘訣》 (Secrets of Shaolin Boxing), published by the Zhonghua Book Company in 1915 under the pseudonym 尊我齋主人 ("Master of the Self-Respect Studio"). The book is public domain (its copyright term has long lapsed), and its full Chinese text is freely readable at Chinese Wikisource (zh.wikisource.org/wiki/少林拳術秘訣); a National Library of China scan of the 1932 reprint is on Wikimedia Commons. The quoted passage is from the seventh chapter, History and True Transmission of Boxing (拳法之史與真傳).

The historical correction rests on Tang Hao (唐豪), the founder of modern Chinese martial-arts history; Meir Shahar, The Shaolin Monastery: History, Religion, and the Chinese Martial Arts (University of Hawai'i Press, 2008); and Stanley Henning, "Ignorance, Legend and Taijiquan" and related essays — who together establish the 1904 → 1915 textual chain, the staff-before-fist chronology, and the late-Ming arrival of Shaolin empty-hand boxing.