Shaolin Staff Method (少林棍法闡宗) — Cheng Zongyou, 1621

The Exposition of the Original Shaolin Staff Method (少林棍法闡宗, Shàolín Gùnfǎ Chǎnzōng), written by Cheng Zongyou and printed in 1621, is the earliest surviving Shaolin martial-arts manual — and one of the most important documents in all of Chinese martial history. Before it, Shaolin's methods had been transmitted only by hand and mouth; Cheng was the first to set them down, in verse, in illustration, and in a remarkable question-and-answer dialogue on theory. And what he recorded was the staff (棍), not empty-hand boxing — which is why this book is the documentary anchor of the honest history of Shaolin: the temple made its name with the pole, and only later with the fist.

The author

Cheng Zongyou (程宗猷; courtesy name Chongdou, 沖斗; c. 1561 – after 1621) came from a literati family of Xiuning in Huizhou, Anhui — the old Xin'an / Xindu region whose name appears on the manual's own title page (「新都程沖斗宗猷著」). In his youth he spent more than ten years studying at the Shaolin Monastery. He arrived too late to learn from the master Hongji, so he trained under the aged Hongzhuan (洪轉) — by then past eighty — along with Zongxiang and Zongdai, and reckoned Guang'an (廣按), Hongzhuan's successor, the most skilled of all. A serious student of weapons, Cheng went on to write a whole suite of manuals, collected as 《耕餘剩技》 ("Skills Beyond Farming"): the staff, a long two-handed saber (單刀法選, from a method of Japanese descent), the spear (長槍法選), and the heavy crossbow (蹶張心法) — later adding a treatise on archery.

The book

Cheng composed the staff manual around 1610, first issued it in 1616, and printed it within the collected Skills Beyond Farming in 1621 — the edition that survives as the original Cheng-family woodblock. It runs to three volumes:

• a first volume of theory and routines — an origin narrative (紀略), a general discussion, the lineage of the "named staffs," and the staff forms themselves (Small and Great Yaksha, the reverse-grip "yin-hand" staff, and others), each as a verse-manual with illustrations, closing with fifty-two posture-verses;

• a second volume of fifty-five posture illustrations;

• a third volume holding the famous forty-item question-and-answer (問答) on staff theory.

(Scholars often cite "53 techniques"; the manual's own enumeration is these fifty-two verses, fifty-five plates, and forty dialogues.)

"The staff is the chief of the arts"

The question-and-answer section is the heart of the book's significance. In it Cheng argues that the staff is the foremost of weapons and that Shaolin's art "combines spear and staff," with the other weapons — and even the empty hand — reducible to staff principles. He remarks, tellingly, that boxing was "not yet popular" in his day. This is the documentary keystone of Meir Shahar's history (The Shaolin Monastery, 2008): through the Ming, Shaolin's fame rested on the pole, not the fist, and empty-hand boxing rose to prominence only later. The popular story that runs the other way — Bodhidharma teaching boxing in the sixth century — is a much later legend, told in full on the Shaolin and Yijinjing pages here.

The legend Cheng records

Cheng's own origin narrative preserves Shaolin's tutelary legend: that during a Red Turban assault on the monastery, the bodhisattva Guanyin manifested as the Kinnara King (緊那羅王) — appearing as a lowly kitchen monk who single-handedly drove off the army with a staff (in some tellings a fire-stoking poker), and was thereafter honored as the temple's protector deity. It is a beautiful story and a real part of Shaolin's religious culture — and it is legend: the armed Kinnara / Vajrapāṇi imagery at Shaolin is, as Shahar shows, a Ming-dynasty development, not an ancient fact. Cheng's narrative also opens by relaying the temple's founding and Bodhidharma's nine years of wall-gazing — the standard temple history of his day:

少林寺以少室得名……後魏孝文太和中，為沙門跋陀開剙。是寺孝昌之三年，達磨東渡，面壁於少室之巖者九年，遺像在壁…… Shaolin Monastery takes its name from Shaoshi peak … In the Taihe era of Emperor Xiaowen of the Later Wei it was founded by the monk Batuo (Buddhabhadra). In the third year of Xiaochang, Bodhidharma came east and faced the wall at the Shaoshi cliff for nine years; his shadow-image remains upon it… — opening of the Narrative (紀略), 1621 woodblock

Reading the original

The 1621 text and its woodblock illustrations are public domain. Two original woodblock scans are freely available on Wikimedia Commons — the National Central Library (Taiwan) copy and a National Library of China copy — preserving Cheng's posture plates in full. (A Qing-era reprint of Skills Beyond Farming on shuge.org is missing the staff volume; the Commons scans are the reliable source for it.)

Training & demonstration video

• 少林棍 — Shaolin staff, full form — a clean single-performer solo routine.

• 陰手棍 — "reverse-grip staff" — the yin-hand staff, a routine named in Cheng's own manual (a modern lineage performance).

• 燒火棍 — the "fire-stoking staff," full form — fittingly named, given the Kinnara legend's kitchen poker.

• 少林棍 — introduction — an instructional intro from a university martial-arts club.

• Shaolin staff spinning — basics — the core handling skills beneath the forms.

• Shaolin warrior monks — performance — staff segments in a (theatrical) monk demonstration.

See also

Shaolin Kung Fu — the temple, the legend, and the staff-before-fist history

The Eighteen Luohan Hands — the empty-hand origin legend this manual quietly contradicts

What is Kung Fu? — legend versus history across the styles

Sources

The account follows the 1621 original woodblock of 《少林棍法闡宗》 (read directly for the structure, the title-page byline, and the Narrative's opening), scanned at Wikimedia Commons (the National Central Library and National Library of China copies); Meir Shahar, The Shaolin Monastery: History, Religion, and the Chinese Martial Arts (University of Hawai'i Press, 2008), for the staff-before-fist thesis and the Ming dating of the Kinnara cult; and Ben Judkins's Chinese Martial Studies analysis. Cheng Zongyou's dates follow the cautious "c. 1561 – after 1621" — his death year is unrecorded, and the "1636" sometimes seen is unsupported.