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title: Source Texts (原典) — the Manuals, in Order
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This is the **reading guide to the primary sources themselves** — the actual manuals and classics this wiki is built on, arranged in the order they were written. For *how* we source, reproduce, and cite these texts, see the companion methodology page:

<PageRef space="notes" slug="sources-and-method" text="Sources &amp; Method — the wiki's citation policy and where the original scans live" />

This page is the *what*. Read straight down, the texts tell the real story of the Chinese fighting arts assembling itself — **weapons before empty hands, drill before doctrine** — and show the famous legends arriving, late, in chapters of their own. Each title below has its own full page with the history, a verified passage in the original, and links to a public-domain scan.

## The body-cultivation root

Before the fighting manuals comes the conditioning text that later got wrapped in the founding myth.

<PageRef space="notes" slug="yijinjing" text="The Yijinjing (易筋經, c. 1624) — the 'sinew-changing' daoyin classic, and the forged Bodhidharma prefaces that seeded the Shaolin legend" />

## The age of weapons — Cheng Zongyou, 1621

Shaolin's documented fame began with **arms, not fists**. The soldier-scholar **Cheng Zongyou** (程宗猷) was the first to put the temple's weapons into print, in his collected *Skills Beyond Farming* (耕餘剩技).

<PageRef space="notes" slug="shaolin-staff-method" text="Shaolin Staff Method (少林棍法闡宗, 1621) — the earliest surviving Shaolin manual; the staff, not the fist" />

<PageRef space="notes" slug="long-saber-method" text="The Long Saber (單刀法選, 1621) — a Japanese-derived two-handed saber, and the textual root of the modern miaodao" />

<PageRef space="notes" slug="spear-and-crossbow" text="The Spear and the Crossbow (長槍法選 · 蹶張心法, 1621) — the other two weapons of Cheng's quartet: the Yang-family spear and the foot-drawn crossbow" />

## The arrival of the empty hand — Xuanji, 1630s → 1784

Bare-handed Shaolin boxing enters the record only at the close of the Ming, with a real fighting monk — and survives in a Qing redaction.

<PageRef space="notes" slug="hand-combat-classic" text="Hand-Combat Classic (拳經拳法備要) — the monk Xuanji's boxing (1630s), surviving in Cao Huandou's 1784 edition; where Shaolin quan first appears" />

## The training-manual age — the Republican presses

The early twentieth century turned the arts into **public textbooks** — photographs, plain descriptions, mass print runs — the opposite of the guarded "secret."

<PageRef space="notes" slug="lianbuquan" text="Lianbuquan (練步拳圖說, 1931) — Wu Zhiqing's beginner long-fist handbook; the standard introductory form, made deliberately open" />

## The myth-makers and the historians

The same Republican decades produced both the **great myth-book** and the scholar who took it apart — and the contrast between them is the whole method of this wiki in miniature.

<PageRef space="notes" slug="secrets-of-shaolin-boxing" text="Secrets of Shaolin Boxing (少林拳術秘訣, 1915) — the most influential and least reliable Shaolin book; source of the Bodhidharma and Southern-Shaolin legends" />

<PageRef space="notes" slug="shaolin-wudang-study" text="Shaolin–Wudang Study (少林武當考, 1930) — Tang Hao's founding work of critical martial-arts history, which demolished those myths" />

## How to read them

A few habits make these texts repay the effort:

- **Watch the order.** The dates matter more than the stories. A weapons manual in 1621 and a boxing manual that only surfaces in the 1630s tell you, by themselves, that the "ancient Bodhidharma boxing" of legend is the late arrival.
- **Separate the teaching from the book.** Several of these (the Hand-Combat Classic above all) preserve an older teaching inside a later redaction. We try to date each layer, not collapse them.
- **Legend is labeled as legend.** Bodhidharma and the Yijinjing, Zhang Sanfeng and the internal arts, Wang Lang and the mantis — told as the tradition's stories, kept beside the record.
- **The translations here are ours**, released to the public domain; the original-language texts are public domain and linked to a scan on each page.

For the deep **taiji** classics — the Wang Zongyue *Treatise*, the Thirteen-Postures songs, Qi Jiguang's *Classic of Pugilism*, and more, each with full original text and translation — see the sister wiki at [taiji.openmindspace.org](https://taiji.openmindspace.org).

## See also

<PageRef space="notes" slug="shaolin-kung-fu" text="Shaolin Kung Fu — the narrative history these texts document" />

<PageRef space="notes" slug="eighteen-luohan-hands" text="The Eighteen Luohan Hands — the legend the texts quietly contradict" />

<PageRef space="notes" slug="mantis-canon-english-translations" text="Mantis Canon — open English translations of the Praying Mantis literature" />

<PageRef space="notes" slug="northern-styles" text="Northern Kung Fu Styles — the living arts these manuals underlie" />

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