Fourteen Centuries of Fighting Monks

Shaolin kung fu is the fighting tradition of the Shaolin Monastery on Mount Song in Henan province, a Chan Buddhist monastic community whose monks have practised martial arts for some fourteen centuries by the historical record, making it one of the best documented cases anywhere of a monastic religious community cultivating armed and unarmed combat skill as a sustained part of its own institutional life rather than as an incidental or peripheral activity.

Historical justifications given within the tradition for monks training in combat include the documented episode of Shaolin monks aiding the founding Tang emperor Li Shimin in the early seventh century, an event referenced in a surviving Tang stele inscription and treated within Shaolin tradition as founding evidence for the monastery's martial legitimacy, alongside the more general practical need, well attested across Chinese monastic history broadly, for physically capable monks able to defend monastery property and travelling pilgrims against banditry in a frequently unstable countryside. Shaolin's martial training is presented within the tradition as inseparable from its Chan Buddhist religious purpose rather than as combat skill practised alongside but separate from monastic life, with physical discipline framed as a vehicle for cultivating the same qualities of focus, discipline and self mastery Chan meditation practice itself pursues.