--- title: The Eighteen Luohan Hands (十八羅漢手) --- The **Eighteen Luohan Hands** (十八羅漢手, *Shíbā Luóhàn Shǒu*, "Eighteen Arhat Hands") is the most famous origin story in all of Chinese martial arts: the set of exercises the Indian monk **Bodhidharma** is said to have created at the **Shaolin Temple** to strengthen his meditating monks — the mythic seed from which Shaolin boxing, and by extension "kung fu" itself, supposedly grew. It is a wonderful story. As *history* it is **almost entirely legend** — and the honest account turns out to be the more interesting one. A first complication: "Eighteen Luohan Hands" is not one thing. The name is attached to **several quite different sets** across the centuries and across lineages, united only by the number eighteen and the Buddhist branding. ## Three things called "Eighteen Luohan" - **The Eighteen Arhats (十八羅漢)** are *Buddhist* figures — a *luohan* (arhat) being one far advanced on the path but short of Buddhahood. The classic Indian set is **sixteen**; Chinese tradition added two to make eighteen. Their statues line temple halls, and the martial name borrows their number and the look of their poses. - **The Eighteen Luohan Hands (十八羅漢手)** is a named set of **eighteen exercises** — in most tellings a sequence of standing, breathing, and bracing postures (a kind of *qigong*) for "strengthening the sinews," and so closely tied to the **Yijinjing**. - **Luohan Quan (羅漢拳, "Arhat Boxing")** is the broader **style family** said to have grown out of those hands once they were elaborated into fighting. The thread joining them is **thematic, not doctrinal**: the exercises borrow the Arhats' name and image. There is no Buddhist scripture of martial arts behind it. ## The legend: Bodhidharma's eighteen hands The fully-formed story has a single, traceable home — the 1915 manual **《少林拳術秘訣》 (*****Secrets of Shaolin Boxing*****)**. It tells how **Bodhidharma** (達摩), arriving at Shaolin from the south, found his monks "listless in spirit and enfeebled in muscle," taught them that *"to see one's true nature, one must first strengthen the body,"* and showed them a practice of — front and back, left and right — no more than eighteen hands: > 合之前成十八法，又名十八羅漢手。此達摩師之開宗手也，在當時不過為強精壯骨之用。 > *Together these make eighteen methods, also called the Eighteen Luohan Hands. These are Master Bodhidharma's founding hands — though in those days merely a means of strengthening the essence and hardening the bones.* — *Secrets of Shaolin Boxing*, 1915 Centuries later, the story continues, **Master Jueyuan** (覺遠) enlarged the set into **seventy-two hands**; then, with two lay boxers — **Bai Yufeng** (白玉峰) of Taiyuan and **Old Li** (李叟) of Lanzhou — it grew again into **more than a hundred and seventy** techniques, reorganized as the **Five Forms: Dragon, Tiger, Leopard, Snake, and Crane.** This is the celebrated **18 → 72 → 170+** expansion, and the root of the Shaolin "five animals." Worth noticing is what even this founding text does *not* say: it calls Bodhidharma's eighteen hands a **body-strengthening art**, not a fighting style, and credits the actual *boxing* to Jueyuan and Bai Yufeng. The blanket claim that "Bodhidharma invented Shaolin kung fu" is a later, popular embellishment on top of an already-legendary story. ## Legend versus history Here the wiki keeps its promise to call legend by its name. The Bodhidharma-and-the-eighteen-hands story is **not ancient**. Its parts are a **twentieth-century construction**, traced by the historian **Tang Hao** (唐豪) in the 1930s and confirmed by **Meir Shahar** and **Stanley Henning** in our own time: - The notion of Bodhidharma as a *martial* founder first appears in a **novel** — *The Travels of Lao Ts'an* (老殘遊記), serialized **1904–1907**. - It was reworked as *Shaolin School Methods* (少林宗法) in a Shanghai newspaper in **1910**, then published as ***Secrets of Shaolin Boxing*** in **1915** under a pseudonym. The book was a sensation — by **1919** it had run through nearly thirty printings. - The older anchor of the same myth, the **Yijinjing** (易筋經), is itself a **1624** text with **forged** prefaces; the Qing scholar Ling Tingkang (1757–1809) already dismissed its author as "an ignorant village master." And the **documented** history of Shaolin's fighting arts runs the other way around: - In the **Tang**, thirteen Shaolin monks famously aided the future emperor Li Shimin (a deed recorded on a stele erected in 728) — but that is **military service**, with no sign of a special boxing art. - Shaolin's real martial fame through the **Ming** was for the **staff** (棍), not the empty hand: the general Yu Dayou visited around the 1560s, and Cheng Zongyou wrote the earliest surviving Shaolin manual — on the *staff* — around 1610. - **Empty-hand boxing came late**, only at the close of the Ming (roughly the 1620s–1640s, around the military monk Xuanji), and became Shaolin's signature only in the **mid-Qing**. So the legend **inverts** the record: it projects an empty-hand origin back to the sixth century, when the evidence shows boxing arriving more than a thousand years later — *after* the staff and *by analogy* to it. No source from the sixth through fifteenth centuries records an "Eighteen Luohan Hands" at all. None of this makes the Eighteen Luohan Hands worthless — only *legendary*. The myth is a real and powerful part of kung-fu culture; it simply isn't documented history. We tell it as a story the tradition tells about itself, and keep the record straight alongside. ## Many sets, one name Because the name is famous, many different forms have claimed it. There is **no single canonical "Eighteen Luohan Hands."** Among the distinct sets that bear the name: - A **health/qigong set** of eighteen postures (the sense in which it is "also called *yijin*," sinew-changing) — taught in many modern lineages as breathing-and-stretching exercise. - A **Southern boxing form**, the **十八羅漢手 / 佛家拳** ("Buddha-family fist"), carried from Fujian into Guangdong in the Qing and expanded **18 → 36 → 72 → 108** hands among the Foshan boxers — woven into **Hung Ga (洪拳)** as its *Sap Baat Lohan*, and linked to Plum-Blossom Praying Mantis through the eighteenth-century master Li Bingxiao. - **Northern Luohan** boxing — agile, kicking, long-range — as against the Southern versions' rooted stances and dense hand strikes. - The **"Fut" (佛, Buddha) stream** that feeds hybrids like **Choy Lay Fut** (蔡李佛, founded in the 1830s) and **Jow Ga**. The expansion-counts even disagree across these lineages — **18 → 72 → 170+**, or **18 → 36 → 72 → 108**, or **18 → 36 → 173 → 324** — competing family genealogies, none independently documented. What they share is the **number and the name**, not a common choreography. (The "Southern Shaolin Temple" through which several of these sets claim transmission is itself historically unattested, and gets the same legend-versus-fact caution.) ## Place in kung-fu history For all that the history is legend, the *idea* of the Eighteen Luohan Hands has been enormously productive. It is the narrative **fountainhead** by which the sprawling, regionally diverse world of Chinese boxing claims a single, ancient, Buddhist, Bodhidharma-blessed root — a story that answered deep needs for identity and legitimacy in the troubled late-Qing and nationalist Republican decades when it was finally written down. As a *symbol*, the eighteen hands sit at the head of the family tree of Shaolin boxing; as *history*, that tree's real roots are the Ming staff and the late-Ming fist. ## Training & demonstration video Curated links to public demonstrations — provided for reference, not re-hosted. Because "Eighteen Luohan" names several distinct things, the clips are grouped by what they actually show. "Authentic / 正宗" labels are the uploaders' own, not a certification. **The Shaolin "small Luohan" fighting form (小羅漢十八手)** - [Luohan Shíbā Shǒu — "Buddha's 18 Hands," with applications](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r2YQcNxIeNo) — taught by Shi De Yang (释德扬), a well-known Songshan Shaolin monk; the strongest lineage provenance in this group. - [Small Luohan 18 hands — combat applications](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xuom2OAQtJk) — the companion applications video. **As a health / qigong set** - [Luohan 18 Hands — step-by-step tutorial](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7zLAvDHwvUY) — the eighteen-hand health version, taught movement by movement. - [傳統 羅漢十八手 — full form](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LRAQvxpCx3M) — a traditional 羅漢十八手 demonstration. **The Hung Ga (洪拳) "Sap Baat Lohan"** - [Sap Baat Lohan Kyun (十八羅漢拳) — part 1 of 4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vm1zANvrrNo) — the Southern Hung-Ga form (continue to parts 2–4 on the channel). **Mainland (Bilibili)** - [少林 罗汉十八手 — detailed tutorial](https://www.bilibili.com/video/BV1SU4y1V7vA/) — a Shaolin 罗汉十八手 walkthrough. ## See also ## Sources The legend's locus classicus is **《少林拳術秘訣》 (*****Secrets of Shaolin Boxing*****)**, published by the Zhonghua Book Company in **1915** under the pseudonym 尊我齋主人 ("Master of the Self-Respect Studio"). The book is **public domain** (its copyright term has long lapsed), and its full Chinese text is freely readable at **Chinese Wikisource** ([zh.wikisource.org/wiki/少林拳術秘訣](https://zh.wikisource.org/zh-hant/%E5%B0%91%E6%9E%97%E6%8B%B3%E8%A1%93%E7%A7%98%E8%A8%A3)); a National Library of China scan of the 1932 reprint is on Wikimedia Commons. The quoted passage is from the seventh chapter, *History and True Transmission of Boxing* (拳法之史與真傳). The historical correction rests on **Tang Hao** (唐豪), the founder of modern Chinese martial-arts history; **Meir Shahar**, *The Shaolin Monastery: History, Religion, and the Chinese Martial Arts* (University of Hawai'i Press, 2008); and **Stanley Henning**, "Ignorance, Legend and Taijiquan" and related essays — who together establish the 1904 → 1915 textual chain, the staff-before-fist chronology, and the late-Ming arrival of Shaolin empty-hand boxing.