Sources & Method (Extended)

Wulin aims to be a rigorously sourced, fair-use knowledge base for Chinese martial arts — not received opinion or forum lore. Three kinds of material carry the weight: public-domain primary texts (the old training manuals 拳譜 and classics, in the original language), reputable scholarship, and our own summaries and translations. This page states what we draw on and how we cite it, so any claim here can be traced to a source you can check yourself.

This page extends the original Sources & Method page with the specific reservoirs the wiki is actually drawing on.

The method in brief

• Primary sources first — and public-domain where possible, so we can reproduce them in full.

• Scholarship to interpret and corroborate — cited, never pasted.

• Living-tradition and in-copyright material — we link at the source; we do not re-host.

• Honesty about legend versus history — the Wang Lang origin of mantis, the Bodhidharma origin of 易筋經, the Zhang Sanfeng origin of taiji: all labeled as legend.

Where the originals live

The open reservoirs for the original-language manuals:

• National Library of China scans on Wikimedia Commons — Republican-era 拳譜 under stable NLC416-\* filenames, downloadable by catalog ID via the Commons API. The single deepest reservoir for downloadable PD-China martial-arts scans (256 titles enumerated; we hold a representative working set).

• 臺灣華文電子書庫 (Taiwan eBook) — taiwanebook.ncl.edu.tw — free 1911–1949 PDF downloads.

• Harvard-Yenching Chinese Rare Books — curiosity.lib.harvard.edu/chinese-rare-books — Ming–Qing rare books at full resolution via IIIF, particularly the Daoist 內丹 and Chinese-medical roots.

• Chinese Wikisource — zh.wikisource.org — the cleanest base text for the classics (太極拳經 and the songs/discourses).

• ctext.org — ctext.org — searchable transcriptions of the pre-modern canon (military, Daoist, medical).

• archive.org for the large Daoist canon sets and Ming military classics.

• CUHK Library — the 黃漢勛 Praying Mantis Collection for the mantis literature (browser-only viewer).

• Paul Brennan's translations — brennantranslation.wordpress.com — bilingual editions embedding the original Chinese facsimile; indispensable for finding and reading the originals. Brennan's English is in copyright; we cite it.

Companion taiji wiki

The internal art of Taiji is documented in depth on its own sister wiki — much of the classical literature that Wulin's wider scope summarizes is reproduced and translated in full there:

• taiji.openmindspace.org — the Wang Zongyue Treatise, the Thirteen Postures songs and discourses, Yang Chengfu's Ten Essentials, Chang Naizhou's Cultivating the Central Qi, Qi Jiguang's Classic of Pugilism, the Five-Character and Four-Character Secrets, and more — each with original Chinese, fresh English translation, commentary, and provenance.

Where Wulin needs to refer to one of these texts in detail, it links there rather than duplicating the work.

Citation policy

• Public-domain originals may be quoted in full in the original language.

• In-copyright works (modern translations, scholarship, living-lineage publications) are paraphrased and attributed; we use at most one short quotation (under 15 words) per source, always credited.

• Our translations are original work by this wiki, released to the public domain (CC0 dedication). Anyone may use them.

• Legend versus history is flagged on every relevant page.

• Living people: for contemporary teachers and lineage holders we link rather than embed, and we avoid unsourced or contentious claims.

Vault provenance

Behind this wiki sits a private knowledge vault (AbydosTempleCodex) that maintains the master archive of PD scans, transcriptions, and bilingual masters. Pages here are drafted from those masters and stay in sync. The vault's harvest manifests are pulled from public reservoirs — citations and download recipes are recorded so any contributor can verify or extend the corpus.