Secrets of Shaolin Boxing (少林拳術秘訣) — 1915

The Secrets of Shaolin Boxing (少林拳術秘訣, Shàolín Quánshù Mìjué), published by the Zhonghua Book Company in 1915, is the single most influential martial-arts book of twentieth-century China — and one of the least reliable. Almost every romantic story the modern world "knows" about Shaolin — that Bodhidharma founded its boxing, that the monk Jueyuan expanded eighteen hand-techniques into a vast system, that a Southern Shaolin Temple was burned by the Qing and Five Elders escaped to seed the southern styles — reaches us through this book or its imitators. It reads like the recovered secret of a thousand-year tradition. It is, in fact, a product of the revolutionary years around 1911, written under a pseudonym, and its history was taken apart by scholarship within a generation. Both things are true at once, and that is exactly what makes it worth a careful page.

An anti-Manchu newspaper serial in disguise

The book did not descend from the temple. Its first eight chapters began as a newspaper serial titled 《少林宗法》 ("The Shaolin School's Methods"), run in the Shanghai paper 天鐸報 (Tianduo Bao) in 1911 — 宣統三年, the last year of the Qing, the year of the revolution that ended it. The author was Lu Weichang (盧煒昌), a Cantonese from Zhongshan; the paper's editor at the time was his fellow Cantonese Chen Tiesheng (陳鐵生). Both men were, in that same period, among the founders of the Jingwu Athletic Association (精武體育會) in Shanghai — the famous reformist martial-arts society. As historians put it bluntly, the serial used fabricated Shaolin history to spread anti-Qing feeling (以偽少林歷史宣傳反清情緒): Shaolin, the Ming-loyalist monastery resisting the Manchu, made a perfect banner for revolutionaries.

After the Qing fell, the material was reworked into a book. In 1915 the Zhonghua Book Company issued it as Secrets of Shaolin Boxing under the studio-name Zunwozhai Zhuren (尊我齋主人, "Master of the Self-Respecting Studio") — a pseudonym whose very defiance carries the old anti-imperial charge. The seditious passages were softened into patriotic ones, and five new chapters were added (chapters nine through thirteen). What remained, in the words of later catalogers, was a text full of "anti-Qing coded language and a great many exaggerated, falsely attributed claims" (甚多反清隱語，很多誇大假托之詞).

What the book contains

For all its mythology, the book is a real and influential boxing treatise, organized in thirteen chapters. It opens not with forms but with internal cultivation — and it is one of the texts that fixed the word 氣功 (qìgōng, "qi-work") in its modern martial sense. The first chapter, Elucidating Qi-Work (氣功闡微), begins:

柔術之派別，習尚甚繁。而要以氣功為始終之則，神功為造詣之精。……氣功之說，有二：一養氣，一練氣。 The branches of the pliant art are exceedingly many; yet all take qi-work (氣功) as their principle from first to last, and "divine power" (神功) as the summit of attainment. … The doctrine of qi-work has two sides: one is to nourish the qi, the other is to train the qi. — opening of Chapter One, 1915 edition

From there it moves through the Five Essentials (五要說), entry methods and "cutting-hand" techniques (技擊入手法, 通行裁手法), body-method (身法示要), a chapter on the history and true transmission of boxing (拳法之史與真傳), and a glossary of combat terms — then closes with the five Republican-era additions: the ultimate path of Chan (禪宗之極軌), the master-methods of the Northern and Southern schools (南北派之師法), the Shaolin precepts (少林之戒約微言), Shaolin's branching in the late Ming (明季少林之變派), and "On Divine Power" (神功說). Note the term it uses for the martial arts throughout — 柔術, "the pliant art," the same two characters the Japanese read as jūjutsu.

The myths it launched

The book's history chapters are where the legends live — and where it must be read with care.

• Bodhidharma (達摩). This is the great vector of the "Bodhidharma founded Shaolin boxing" story. Yet the book is subtler than its reputation: in the chapter on transmission it states outright that the art did not begin with him — "as for Bodhidharma's handful of techniques … he truly cannot be called the founding patriarch of this art" (及達摩師之寥寥數手……實不得謂為此術之開山祖也). It credits him with originating the qi-cultivation regimen, not the fighting — a distinction the popular retellings promptly lost.

• Jueyuan and the growing system. The book tells how a later monk, Jueyuan (覺遠上人), expanded Bodhidharma's eighteen hands into seventy-two, and then, with the lay masters Bai Yufeng (白玉峰) and Li Sou (李叟), into the full Shaolin curriculum of some one hundred seventy-three techniques and the five-animal forms. It is a vivid origin story — and, as we will see, an unverifiable one. (This is the source of the "eighteen Luohan hands grew into the whole art" narrative covered on its own page.)

• The Southern Shaolin saga. The late chapters carry the southern legend that fed the Cantonese styles and the Hongmen (洪門) secret societies: a Southern Shaolin Temple burned by the Qing, the Five Elders (五祖) who escaped, and folk heroes like Zhishan (至善禪師) and Hong Xiguan (洪熙官). These are the founding myths of Hung Ga and the Triads — and, through them, of an entire genre of Hong Kong cinema. They are beloved, and they are legend.

The reckoning: Tang Hao's investigation

The book's spell was broken by China's first true martial-arts historian, Tang Hao (唐豪), who in 1941 published a dedicated study — 《少林拳術秘訣考證》 ("A Textual Investigation of Secrets of Shaolin Boxing") — testing its claims about "Shaolin" and the Hongmen against the record. Tang went to the Shaolin Monastery itself and searched its steles and lineage registers for the masters the book names. He found nothing: figures such as Jueyuan (覺遠上人), Hongyun (洪蘊禪師), and Qiuyue (秋月禪師) left no trace in tombstone inscriptions or transmission records — they were, in his judgment, names falsely borrowed under Shaolin's prestige (假托少林之名).

Later scholarship confirmed and widened the verdict. Stanley Henning, drawing on Tang Hao and Xu Zhedong (徐哲東), treats the 1915 book as the central modern source of Shaolin mythology; Meir Shahar's history reaches the same conclusion from the temple's own archive. As Henning and others note, the entire "Bodhidharma founded Shaolin kung fu" idea cannot be traced back any earlier than the 1904–1907 novel The Travels of Lao Can (老殘遊記) and this very book — see the companion pages on the two texts that carried it:

The Yijinjing (易筋經) — the forged 'Bodhidharma' manual that seeded the legend

The Eighteen Luohan Hands (十八羅漢手) — the 'eighteen hands grew into the art' story originates here

Reading the original

The 1915 text is public domain. The full Chinese text is freely readable at Chinese Wikisource, and the original woodblock-era printing is scanned at the National Library of China (via Wikimedia Commons) and in the National Central Library (Taiwan) ebook collection.

• Full text: zh.wikisource.org — 少林拳術秘訣

• Scanned original (National Library of China): Wikimedia Commons — 少林拳術秘訣.pdf

• National Central Library (Taiwan) reader: taiwanebook.ncl.edu.tw — 少林拳術秘訣

See also

Shaolin Kung Fu — the temple, the legend, and the staff-before-fist history

Shaolin Staff Method (少林棍法闡宗) — what a real early-seventeenth-century Shaolin manual looks like

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

Sources

The publication history follows the Chinese Wikipedia article on 《少林拳術秘訣》 and standard catalog records: the 1915 中華書局 edition under the pseudonym 尊我齋主人, expanded from 盧煒昌's 1911 serial 《少林宗法》 in the 天鐸報 (edited by 陳鐵生; both early 精武體育會 figures). The verbatim opening of Chapter One was read from the Chinese Wikisource full text and cross-checked. The historical critique follows Tang Hao (唐豪), 《少林拳術秘訣考證》 (1941), and his broader Shaolin–Wudang Study (少林武當考, 1930); Stanley Henning's articles on martial-arts historiography (citing Tang Hao and 徐哲東); and Meir Shahar, The Shaolin Monastery: History, Religion, and the Chinese Martial Arts (University of Hawai'i Press, 2008). On the Bodhidharma legend's late origin, see also the Yijinjing and Eighteen Luohan Hands pages and their sources.