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“If you want to find the immortals Li Bei ancient poet |
Song Shan is located in Henan Province.
Many traditions record this as the central peak of Taoism. It is a very old Taoist sight and there is still a Taoist community there today. Buddhism, imported from India, later used Song Shan as a place for Indian monks to translate Buddhist tracts from Sanskrit into Chinese. This would not have been possible without the Taoist’s help as the Indians were forced to use Taoist terms for translations of specific spiritual states because they didn’t exist in Chinese except in this special use form that the Taoists created. While the Buddhist monastery at the foot of the mountain became very famous in modern times, it was destroyed several times while the Taoists continued to live up on the mountain.
Shaolin Temple located at the foot of Song Shan
The earliest reference to martial arts at Shaolin is a 728 AD stone tablet at the temple that alludes to a series of events which took place between 605 and 618 AD when the monks repulsed a group of marauders and the actions of thirteen monks in 621AD who helped to capture the “bandit” Wang Shichong, who had been a threat to the newly established Tang Dynasty.
Martial arts were brought into the monastery from outside and practiced as a diversion by a small percentage of monks. They brought the known styles of each period into the temple but there is no record of a unique Shaolin empty hand style in ancient times. Shaolin became famous for staff training in the 1500’s. The height of Shaolin boxing was in the later half of the sixteenth century and the connection between Shaolin and the Chinese military seems to date from this time. The Ming general Yu Dayou [1503-1580] trained a couple of young monks in staff fighting so that they could raise the level of the rest. To this point in its history only a style of staff fighting had been named after the monastery. (Click here to see a video)
There was a hard type of Chi Kung practiced there into modern times. Many famous gung fu styles were preserved and perfected there through the 1700’s. Then began a series of demolitions and persecutions of the monks. The temple was destroyed by the “Christian general” Feng in 1926 for the third time and when Western visitors passed by in the mid thirties there was only a pile of rubble and the walls with the murals on them.
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