---
title: Secrets of Shaolin Boxing (少林拳術秘訣) — 1915
---

The **Secrets of Shaolin Boxing** (少林拳術秘訣, *Shàolín Quánshù Mìjué*), published by the **Zhonghua Book Company** in **1915**, is the single most *influential* martial-arts book of twentieth-century China — and one of the least *reliable*. Almost every romantic story the modern world "knows" about Shaolin — that **Bodhidharma** founded its boxing, that the monk **Jueyuan** expanded eighteen hand-techniques into a vast system, that a **Southern Shaolin Temple** was burned by the Qing and **Five Elders** escaped to seed the southern styles — reaches us through this book or its imitators. It reads like the recovered secret of a thousand-year tradition. It is, in fact, a product of the **revolutionary years around 1911**, written under a pseudonym, and its history was taken apart by scholarship within a generation. Both things are true at once, and that is exactly what makes it worth a careful page.

## An anti-Manchu newspaper serial in disguise

The book did not descend from the temple. Its first eight chapters began as a newspaper serial titled **《少林宗法》 ("The Shaolin School's Methods")**, run in the Shanghai paper **天鐸報 (*****Tianduo Bao*****)** in **1911** — 宣統三年, the last year of the Qing, the year of the revolution that ended it. The author was **Lu Weichang** (盧煒昌), a Cantonese from Zhongshan; the paper's editor at the time was his fellow Cantonese **Chen Tiesheng** (陳鐵生). Both men were, in that same period, among the founders of the **Jingwu Athletic Association** (精武體育會) in Shanghai — the famous reformist martial-arts society. As historians put it bluntly, the serial used **fabricated Shaolin history to spread anti-Qing feeling** (以偽少林歷史宣傳反清情緒): Shaolin, the Ming-loyalist monastery resisting the Manchu, made a perfect banner for revolutionaries.

After the Qing fell, the material was reworked into a book. In **1915** the Zhonghua Book Company issued it as *Secrets of Shaolin Boxing* under the studio-name **Zunwozhai Zhuren** (尊我齋主人, "Master of the Self-Respecting Studio") — a pseudonym whose very defiance carries the old anti-imperial charge. The seditious passages were softened into patriotic ones, and **five new chapters were added** (chapters nine through thirteen). What remained, in the words of later catalogers, was a text full of **"anti-Qing coded language and a great many exaggerated, falsely attributed claims"** (甚多反清隱語，很多誇大假托之詞).

<Callout type="warning">
  **Read it as a 1915 cultural document, not a temple record.** *Secrets of Shaolin Boxing* is the fountainhead of modern Shaolin legend. Its stories are the ones the films and novels run on — and most of them were assembled in the late-Qing and early-Republican press, not transmitted from the monastery. We tell the legends here as legends, and keep the record beside them.
</Callout>

## What the book contains

For all its mythology, the book is a real and influential **boxing treatise**, organized in thirteen chapters. It opens not with forms but with **internal cultivation** — and it is one of the texts that fixed the word **氣功 (qìgōng, "qi-work")** in its modern martial sense. The first chapter, *Elucidating Qi-Work* (氣功闡微), begins:

> 柔術之派別，習尚甚繁。而要以氣功為始終之則，神功為造詣之精。……氣功之說，有二：一養氣，一練氣。
> *The branches of the pliant art are exceedingly many; yet all take ****qi-work**** (氣功) as their principle from first to last, and ****"divine power"**** (神功) as the summit of attainment. … The doctrine of qi-work has two sides: one is to ****nourish**** the qi, the other is to ****train**** the qi.* — opening of Chapter One, 1915 edition

From there it moves through the **Five Essentials** (五要說), entry methods and "cutting-hand" techniques (技擊入手法, 通行裁手法), body-method (身法示要), a chapter on **the history and true transmission of boxing** (拳法之史與真傳), and a glossary of combat terms — then closes with the five Republican-era additions: the **ultimate path of Chan** (禪宗之極軌), the **master-methods of the Northern and Southern schools** (南北派之師法), the **Shaolin precepts** (少林之戒約微言), **Shaolin's branching in the late Ming** (明季少林之變派), and **"On Divine Power"** (神功說). Note the term it uses for the martial arts throughout — **柔術**, "the pliant art," the same two characters the Japanese read as *jūjutsu*.

## The myths it launched

The book's *history* chapters are where the legends live — and where it must be read with care.

- **Bodhidharma (達摩).** This is the great vector of the "Bodhidharma founded Shaolin boxing" story. Yet the book is subtler than its reputation: in the chapter on transmission it states outright that **the art did not begin with him** — *"as for Bodhidharma's handful of techniques … he truly cannot be called the founding patriarch of this art"* (及達摩師之寥寥數手……實不得謂為此術之開山祖也). It credits him with originating the *qi-cultivation regimen*, not the fighting — a distinction the popular retellings promptly lost.
- **Jueyuan and the growing system.** The book tells how a later monk, **Jueyuan** (覺遠上人), expanded Bodhidharma's **eighteen hands** into seventy-two, and then, with the lay masters **Bai Yufeng** (白玉峰) and **Li Sou** (李叟), into the full Shaolin curriculum of some one hundred seventy-three techniques and the five-animal forms. It is a vivid origin story — and, as we will see, an unverifiable one. (This is the source of the "eighteen Luohan hands grew into the whole art" narrative covered on its own page.)
- **The Southern Shaolin saga.** The late chapters carry the southern legend that fed the Cantonese styles and the **Hongmen** (洪門) secret societies: a **Southern Shaolin Temple** burned by the Qing, the **Five Elders** (五祖) who escaped, and folk heroes like **Zhishan** (至善禪師) and **Hong Xiguan** (洪熙官). These are the founding myths of Hung Ga and the Triads — and, through them, of an entire genre of **Hong Kong cinema**. They are beloved, and they are legend.

## The reckoning: Tang Hao's investigation

The book's spell was broken by China's first true martial-arts historian, **Tang Hao** (唐豪), who in **1941** published a dedicated study — **《少林拳術秘訣考證》 ("A Textual Investigation of *****Secrets of Shaolin Boxing*****")** — testing its claims about "Shaolin" and the Hongmen against the record. Tang went to the Shaolin Monastery itself and searched its **steles and lineage registers** for the masters the book names. He found **nothing**: figures such as **Jueyuan** (覺遠上人), **Hongyun** (洪蘊禪師), and **Qiuyue** (秋月禪師) left no trace in tombstone inscriptions or transmission records — they were, in his judgment, **names falsely borrowed under Shaolin's prestige** (假托少林之名).

Later scholarship confirmed and widened the verdict. **Stanley Henning**, drawing on Tang Hao and **Xu Zhedong** (徐哲東), treats the 1915 book as the central modern source of Shaolin mythology; **Meir Shahar**'s history reaches the same conclusion from the temple's own archive. As Henning and others note, the entire "Bodhidharma founded Shaolin kung fu" idea **cannot be traced back any earlier** than the 1904–1907 novel *The Travels of Lao Can* (老殘遊記) and this very book — see the companion pages on the two texts that carried it:

<PageRef space="notes" slug="yijinjing" text="The Yijinjing (易筋經) — the forged 'Bodhidharma' manual that seeded the legend" />

<PageRef space="notes" slug="eighteen-luohan-hands" text="The Eighteen Luohan Hands (十八羅漢手) — the 'eighteen hands grew into the art' story originates here" />

## Reading the original

The 1915 text is **public domain**. The full Chinese text is freely readable at **Chinese Wikisource**, and the original woodblock-era printing is scanned at the **National Library of China** (via Wikimedia Commons) and in the **National Central Library** (Taiwan) ebook collection.

- Full text: [zh.wikisource.org — 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)
- Scanned original (National Library of China): [Wikimedia Commons — 少林拳術秘訣.pdf](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:NLC416-01jh001033-10582_%E5%B0%91%E6%9E%97%E6%8B%B3%E8%A1%93%E7%A7%98%E8%A8%A3.pdf)
- National Central Library (Taiwan) reader: [taiwanebook.ncl.edu.tw — 少林拳術秘訣](https://taiwanebook.ncl.edu.tw/zh-tw/book/NCL-9910015492/reader)

## See also

<PageRef space="notes" slug="shaolin-kung-fu" text="Shaolin Kung Fu — the temple, the legend, and the staff-before-fist history" />

<PageRef space="notes" slug="shaolin-staff-method" text="Shaolin Staff Method (少林棍法闡宗) — what a real early-seventeenth-century Shaolin manual looks like" />

<PageRef space="notes" slug="what-is-kung-fu" text="What is Kung Fu? — legend versus history across the styles" />

## Sources

The publication history follows the Chinese Wikipedia article on **《少林拳術秘訣》** and standard catalog records: the 1915 **中華書局** edition under the pseudonym **尊我齋主人**, expanded from **盧煒昌's** 1911 serial **《少林宗法》** in the **天鐸報** (edited by **陳鐵生**; both early **精武體育會** figures). The verbatim opening of Chapter One was read from the **Chinese Wikisource** full text and cross-checked. The historical critique follows **Tang Hao** (唐豪), **《少林拳術秘訣考證》** (1941), and his broader *Shaolin–Wudang Study* (少林武當考, 1930); **Stanley Henning**'s articles on martial-arts historiography (citing Tang Hao and **徐哲東**); and **Meir Shahar**, *The Shaolin Monastery: History, Religion, and the Chinese Martial Arts* (University of Hawai'i Press, 2008). On the Bodhidharma legend's late origin, see also the *Yijinjing* and *Eighteen Luohan Hands* pages and their sources.