Cheng Zongyou (程宗猷, 1561 – after 1636) — who put the Shaolin staff in print

Cheng Zongyou (程宗猷 / Chéng Zōngyóu, 1561 – after 1636), courtesy name 沖斗 (Chongdou), was the Ming gentleman-martialist who spent more than a decade at the Shaolin Temple and then did what no monk had: he wrote the temple's staff method down and printed it. At a time when Shaolin was famous for its staff, not its boxing, Cheng's illustrated treatises are the single most important documentary record of late-Ming Shaolin weapons — and the reason that method survives in a fixed, studyable form at all.

Life

Born into a well-off family of 休寧, 徽州 (Xiuning, Huizhou prefecture, in modern Anhui) — a region that produced an unusual number of literate martial enthusiasts — Cheng travelled to the Shaolin Temple as a young man and studied its staff method reportedly for more than ten years, under the temple's recognized staff masters of the day (the monk 洪轉 Hongzhuan among the names his prefaces honor). He went on to study the spear and other weapons with non-Shaolin masters, becoming a rounded weapons specialist rather than a pure temple disciple.

In later life he assembled his learning into an illustrated compendium, 《耕餘剩技》("Techniques Surplus to Farming"), printed around 1621.

What he gave the martial arts — the compendium

Geng Yu Sheng Ji gathers four illustrated weapons treatises that together form a Ming arsenal in print:

• 少林棍法闡宗 (Shaolin Staff Method Exposition) — the foundational text of Shaolin staff, with stance-by-stance illustrations and a question-and-answer exposition of principle. The source for late-Ming Shaolin staff.

• 單刀法選 (Selected Single-Saber Methods) — a long, two-handed saber method showing clear Japanese influence (the wokou blade that Qi Jiguang's soldiers had faced), adapted to Chinese use.

• 長槍法選 (Selected Spear Methods) — the spear, the "king of weapons."

• 蹶張心法 — a method for the foot-drawn crossbow.

The codex holds the National Library of China woodblock scans of 少林棍法闡宗, the saber 少林刀法闡宗 / 單刀法選, in Sources/taiji-manuals/ and Sources/northern-kungfu-manuals/.

Place in the record

Cheng Zongyou sits beside Qi Jiguang and Mao Yuanyi (whose vast 武備志 Wubei Zhi of 1621 reproduced much of this material) as one of the three great late-Ming documentarians who fixed the oral martial arts in printed, illustrated form just before the dynasty fell. Where Qi recorded boxing, Cheng recorded the Shaolin staff and the long saber — and between them they preserve the Ming weapons world.

See also

Shaolin Staff Method (少林棍法闡宗) — Cheng's foundational staff treatise, in detail

The Long Saber (單刀法選) — Cheng's Japanese-influenced two-handed saber

Qi Jiguang (戚繼光) — the contemporary who documented Ming boxing

Shaolin Kung Fu — the temple whose staff Cheng recorded

A Short History of Chinese Martial Arts — the Ming military roots

Sources

[1] Cheng Zongyou, Wikipedia (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cheng_Zongyou) and the Chinese Wikipedia counterpart — biography, the Shaolin study, the Geng Yu Sheng Ji compendium.

[2] 程宗猷 《少林棍法闡宗》 and 《單刀法選》 — National Library of China woodblock scans, public domain (compiled c. 1610s, printed 1621). Held in the codex.

[3] 茅元儀 《武備志》 (Mao Yuanyi, Treatise on Military Preparedness, 1621) — the great Ming military encyclopedia that reproduced much of Cheng's weapons material; the corroborating contemporary source.