Ask a kung fu club where its art began and the answer is often one word: . The records tell a longer story than any single temple, and it is worth separating what they show from what the legends say.
Two words
, Mandarin gōngfu, first meant any skill gained through long, hard effort, such as making tea, and only later came to mean fighting arts. 2 simply means martial arts and is the Chinese word for the whole field. In English it now usually means the modern sport, but the IWUF uses it for every form of Chinese martial art and calls the traditional styles "traditional wushu (commonly referred to as kungfu)". 3,40 From 1928 the official name was , national art. 1,3
Before Shaolin
The records start later. Wrestling and unarmed fighting appear in early Chinese texts, and manuals on hand fighting are listed in the histories of the Han dynasty, before 8 AD. The physician Hua Tuo is said to have created an exercise called the five animals play around 208 AD. 1 The IWUF's own history traces wushu back to Bronze Age survival skills and early wrestling. 40
A monastery for Batuo
In 495 the Shaolin Monastery was built on Mount Song in Henan for an Indian monk called Batuo. 1,4 The IWUF tells its history from this point, and says that later monks combined Chan Buddhism with fighting skills. 40
The first hard evidence of fighting monks is carved in stone. A stele of 728 records Shaolin monks fighting in about 610 and in 621. 1,4 From the 16th and 17th centuries, at least 40 sources show that the monks practised martial arts, above all the , the staff, and the earliest surviving Shaolin manual, on staff fighting, dates from about 1610 to 1621. 1,4
The general's manual
The Ming general Qi Jiguang described Shaolin staff techniques and set out 32 verses of empty hand techniques in his 16th century military manual, the , which later influenced martial arts across East Asia. 1,18 Hold on to his name: chapter four meets it again, in the village that gave the world tai chi. 13
Later rulers honoured the temple. The Kangxi Emperor's "Shaolin Temple" inscription is dated 1704. 4 A Qing dynasty wall painting at the monastery shows monks training in pairs. 1
The Bodhidharma story
Historians, among them Tang Hao, Matsuda Ryuchi, Meir Shahar and Stanley Henning, reject it. The link between Bodhidharma and fighting first appears in the , a qigong text written in 1624 and falsely credited to him, and it became widespread only through a novel serialised from 1904 to 1907. 2,4
Film added a chapter of its own. Jet Li's first film, The Shaolin Temple of 1982, was the first shot at the monastery, and it is credited with turning the temple into a major tourist destination. 16 Many family styles still trace themselves to Shaolin monks or nuns. 1,5 The most famous of those stories come from the south, and they begin with a fire.