Shaolin Kung Fu (少林功夫) — Temple, Legend, and History

The Shaolin Temple (少林寺, Shàolín Sì) on Mount Song (嵩山) in Henan is the most famous name in the Chinese martial arts — a working Chan (Zen) Buddhist monastery, founded in 495 CE, whose fighting monks became the legendary fountainhead of "kung fu." The legend and the history are very different things, and both are worth knowing. The romantic story — that the Indian patriarch Bodhidharma created Shaolin boxing in the sixth century — is, as history, a late fabrication. The real story, pieced together from steles, manuals, and Ming-dynasty records, is of a martial tradition that grew over centuries, made its name first with the staff, and only later with the empty hand.

The legend, briefly

In the popular telling, Bodhidharma (達摩) came to Shaolin around 527 CE, found the monks weakened by meditation, and gave them the Eighteen Luohan Hands and the Yijinjing — the seed of Shaolin boxing. It is a wonderful and central story in kung-fu culture. It is also not history: it was assembled in the late-Qing and Republican decades and demolished by modern scholarship. The two texts at its heart are covered in full on their own pages:

The Eighteen Luohan Hands (十八羅漢手) — the legend and the debunking

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

What actually happened

The documented history of Shaolin's martial arts runs the other way from the legend:

• Tang dynasty (618–907) — soldiers, not boxers. The one firmly documented early episode is martial service: thirteen Shaolin monks helped the future emperor Li Shimin against a rival in 621, a deed thanked in a royal letter and later carved on a temple stele erected in 728. This is battlefield assistance — no sign yet of a special Shaolin boxing art.

• Ming dynasty — the age of the staff. Through the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, Shaolin's martial fame was for the staff (棍), not the empty hand. The great general Yu Dayou visited around the 1560s and found the monks' staff method decayed; the monk Cheng Zongyou then wrote the earliest surviving Shaolin manual — the Exposition of the Original Shaolin Staff Method (少林棍法闡宗, composed c. 1610, printed 1621) — with companion works on the saber and the crossbow. Shaolin monks fought, with weapons, against the wokou pirates raiding the coast.

• Empty-hand boxing — a late arrival. Bare-hand quan (拳) became a serious Shaolin pursuit only at the close of the Ming (roughly the 1620s–1640s), developed — in Meir Shahar's reading — by analogy to the staff the monks had already perfected. The key early evidence is a manuscript tradition tied to the military monk Xuanji (玄機), superintendent of Shaolin's fighting monks in the 1630s, surviving as the Hand-Combat Classic (拳經拳法備要). Empty-hand boxing became Shaolin's signature only in the mid-Qing.

• Republican fame. The temple's modern, worldwide reputation was made by a flood of popular books in the early twentieth century — above all the 1915 Secrets of Shaolin Boxing (少林拳術秘訣) — which also spread the Bodhidharma myth.

So the legend inverts the record: it projects an empty-hand, Bodhidharma origin back to the sixth century, when the evidence shows weapons first and boxing arriving more than a thousand years later.

The Shaolin manual tradition

Much of what we know rests on a real and rich body of public-domain manuals — the primary sources this wiki is built on:

• Cheng Zongyou (程宗猷), early seventeenth century — the Shaolin Staff Method Explained (少林棍法闡宗) and his companion saber (少林刀法闡宗) and crossbow (少林弩法闡宗) expositions: the earliest and most important Shaolin weapons manuals.

• The Republican-era boxing manuals — Zhu Hongshou's Shaolin Fist Illustrated (少林拳法圖說), Jin Yiming's Shaolin Boxing Explained (少林拳圖解), Wu Zhiqing's Shaolin Lianbuquan (少林正宗練步拳, 1936), and the Luohan-boxing manuals (such as Zhu Xiatian's 少林護山子門羅漢拳圖影).

• And the scholarship that corrected the record — Tang Hao's Study of Shaolin and Wudang (少林武當考, 1930) and his Bibliography of Chinese Martial Arts (中國武藝圖籍考, 1940), foundations of honest martial-arts history.

"Southern Shaolin"

Many southern styles — Hung Ga, Choy Lay Fut, and others — trace themselves to a Southern Shaolin Temple (南少林) in Fujian, supposedly burned by the Qing. As with the northern temple's Bodhidharma story, the southern temple is largely legendary: no single site is firmly documented, and the burning is a tale repeated across many lineages. The styles are real; the temple that anchors their origin myths is not.

See also

The Eighteen Luohan Hands (十八羅漢手)

The Yijinjing (易筋經)

Northern Kung Fu Styles — including Northern Shaolin

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

Sources

The historical account follows Meir Shahar, The Shaolin Monastery: History, Religion, and the Chinese Martial Arts (University of Hawai'i Press, 2008) — the standard modern scholarly history — and the pioneering research of Tang Hao (唐豪), who in the 1930s traced and debunked the Bodhidharma origin myth. The primary manuals named above are public-domain Ming and Republican texts (National Library of China and Wikimedia scans). The Tang-dynasty episode rests on the Li Shimin stele (728) at the temple; the staff-before-fist chronology on Cheng Zongyou's c. 1610–1621 manuals and the Xuanji hand-combat manuscript of the 1630s.