Notes

Source Texts (原典) — the Manuals, in Order

Updated 2026-06-05

On this page

This is the reading guide to the primary sources themselves — the actual manuals and classics this wiki is built on, arranged in the order they were written. For how we source, reproduce, and cite these texts, see the companion methodology page:

Sources & Method — the wiki's citation policy and where the original scans live

This page is the what. Read straight down, the texts tell the real story of the Chinese fighting arts assembling itself — weapons before empty hands, drill before doctrine — and show the famous legends arriving, late, in chapters of their own. Each title below has its own full page with the history, a verified passage in the original, and links to a public-domain scan.

The body-cultivation root

Before the fighting manuals comes the conditioning text that later got wrapped in the founding myth.

The Yijinjing (易筋經, c. 1624) — the 'sinew-changing' daoyin classic, and the forged Bodhidharma prefaces that seeded the Shaolin legend

The age of weapons — Cheng Zongyou, 1621

Shaolin's documented fame began with arms, not fists. The soldier-scholar Cheng Zongyou (程宗猷) was the first to put the temple's weapons into print, in his collected Skills Beyond Farming (耕餘剩技).

Shaolin Staff Method (少林棍法闡宗, 1621) — the earliest surviving Shaolin manual; the staff, not the fist

The Long Saber (單刀法選, 1621) — a Japanese-derived two-handed saber, and the textual root of the modern miaodao

The Spear and the Crossbow (長槍法選 · 蹶張心法, 1621) — the other two weapons of Cheng's quartet: the Yang-family spear and the foot-drawn crossbow

The arrival of the empty hand — Xuanji, 1630s → 1784

Bare-handed Shaolin boxing enters the record only at the close of the Ming, with a real fighting monk — and survives in a Qing redaction.

Hand-Combat Classic (拳經拳法備要) — the monk Xuanji's boxing (1630s), surviving in Cao Huandou's 1784 edition; where Shaolin quan first appears

The training-manual age — the Republican presses

The early twentieth century turned the arts into public textbooks — photographs, plain descriptions, mass print runs — the opposite of the guarded "secret."

Lianbuquan (練步拳圖說, 1931) — Wu Zhiqing's beginner long-fist handbook; the standard introductory form, made deliberately open

The myth-makers and the historians

The same Republican decades produced both the great myth-book and the scholar who took it apart — and the contrast between them is the whole method of this wiki in miniature.

Secrets of Shaolin Boxing (少林拳術秘訣, 1915) — the most influential and least reliable Shaolin book; source of the Bodhidharma and Southern-Shaolin legends

Shaolin–Wudang Study (少林武當考, 1930) — Tang Hao's founding work of critical martial-arts history, which demolished those myths

How to read them

A few habits make these texts repay the effort:

Watch the order. The dates matter more than the stories. A weapons manual in 1621 and a boxing manual that only surfaces in the 1630s tell you, by themselves, that the "ancient Bodhidharma boxing" of legend is the late arrival.
Separate the teaching from the book. Several of these (the Hand-Combat Classic above all) preserve an older teaching inside a later redaction. We try to date each layer, not collapse them.
Legend is labeled as legend. Bodhidharma and the Yijinjing, Zhang Sanfeng and the internal arts, Wang Lang and the mantis — told as the tradition's stories, kept beside the record.
The translations here are ours, released to the public domain; the original-language texts are public domain and linked to a scan on each page.

For the deep taiji classics — the Wang Zongyue Treatise, the Thirteen-Postures songs, Qi Jiguang's Classic of Pugilism, and more, each with full original text and translation — see the sister wiki at taiji.openmindspace.org.