Part 1 Southern Shaolin
The dog and the stingray tasted real good and it was great to climb Wudang Mountain again in the company of three fellow Scots (Ronnie & Elspeth Robinson, and Ian Cameron) and two refined French ladies (Anya Meot and Pascale Deguen), but maybe the highpoint was your correspondent and said colleagues on the back of our motorcycles roaring up the drive of the Southern Shaolin Monastery rucksacks on the backs and holding on in fear and trepidation.
They said in some books it doesn’t exist, for example in his interesting book on Bubishi The Bible of Karate, Patrick McCarthy states that the temple’s exact location has not been discovered and that at the beginning of the Qing dynasty in the mid-17th century the secrets of vital points were indirectly passed on to the temple by the great scholar Huang Zong-xi and his son Bai-jia both of whom trained in Nei Jia Chuan under Wang Zheng-nan.
It’s there all right. Following the details given in one of my Chinese martial arts encyclopedias, we found it, situated on top of the small Dong Yue (Eastern Sacred) Hill just outside the city of Quanzhou, in Fujian province. Unlike the better known and older Northern Shaolin Temple at the foot of Songshan, which even when I visited in 1984 was already extremely commercialized, the Southern Shaolin Temple is a quiet place. Too many people write about Shaolin and Wudang, and how external arts are derived from Shaolin, while internal arts are from Wudang, but too few have actually been to either. So let me tell you what we found.
We got off the bikes and started to examine the main temple building, when a powerful looking young monk approached. I asked him if he practiced martial arts. He said he did and asked me if we would like to meet the monks. He took us to a nearby building which proved to be a training hall with various typical Southern Shaolin weapons. He told one of his colleagues to demonstrate a Guan Dao (halberd) form which was done with impressive skill.
At this point, the abbot arrived. He introduced himself as Shi Chang Ding. He told us that this was the temple we had seen was the only one in a proper state of repair and he showed us a map of the original temple layout saying that they were slowly renovating and rebuilding, but were dependent on donations. Abbot Shi added that there were around 17 monks at the temple receiving instruction in both traditional Southern Shaolin martial arts as well as Chan (Zen) Buddhism. He told us how the students came from all over China, but said that he did not insist that they were Buddhist before he started to teach them. He said that foreigners were welcome to come and train at the Temple and in fact a few had done so. He himself had been to Paris to give demonstrations.
Students followed a gruelling schedule of martial arts training, Chan meditation, cultural activities (calligraphy, study of Chinese philosophy and history etc., and doing chores) They trained most days for 6-8 hours.
We then went out into the courtyard where one of his pupils performed a Tiger Fork (kind of Chinese trident) set with grace and skill. I asked if we could see an empty hand form as we wanted to see the special characteristics of Southern Shaolin boxing. It was interesting to see how practical the movements seemed compared with much Northern Shaolin. He said that Southern Shaolin boxing included a number of styles such as Crane, Tiger, Nanchuan, Lohan and others, but that in general, in Southern Boxing there was a greater reliance on hands and arms and low kicks and there tended to be less in the way of jumps and high kicks. Indeed most karate practitioners would have found many of the movements in this form to be familiar, though perhaps more fluid.
We were impressed with the sincerity of the abbot and his monks. They are considerable martial artists yet also humble and devoted to their art and religion.
The Northern Shaolin Temple was made famous by the Indian monk, Da Mo (Bodhidharma) when he arrived from India probably some time in the mid-5th century AD. Construction of the Southern Shaolin Temple in Fujian is said to have started from 874-8 AD, during the Tang dynasty. It seems that there may have been other Shaolin temples including one in Guangdong and another in Hebei, but I’ve as yet been unable to find more material on these.
Most Chinese martial arts historians believe it was the Southern Shaolin Temple which was burned to the ground sometime during the reign of the great Qing dynasty Emperor Kang Xi (1662-1723) supposedly because rebel supporters of the Ming dynasty (which the Manchus had overthrown to establish their “foreign” Qing dynasty) were operating from the temple. However, some say this burning occurred during the reign of the Yong Zheng Emperor and it is interesting to note that he issued a general prohibition against boxing in 1728.
This burning led to the story of the “Five Elders”, five monks who escaped from the burning temple. Though some say these five braves came from the Northern Shaolin Temple at Songshan or the one in Hebei. This is also not the derivation of the famous system of Five Ancestors, which is, however, from Fujian and so must have been influenced by Southern Shaolin. One of the elders was called Wu Mei and is said to have taught martial arts to a girl called Yong Chun (Eternal Spring) which name is better known in its Cantonese form of Wing Chun. Strangely on the way to the Shaolin Temple in Fujian there is a town of this name also which is supposed to be famous for White Crane Boxing.
So as with most things in Chinese martial arts history, the more you investigate, the more you are left with unanswered and perhaps unanswerable questions. In Part 2 of this article we’ll take a look at Wudang Mountain.
For those interested in training in genuine Chinese martial arts with these warrior monks, I recommend you go to Quanzhou, get on board a motorcycle and go see the abbot. They won’t waste your time and you won’t waste your money.