Shaolin Temple: History, Monks and Kung Fu

By Tim Yu, Founder & Editor · Published 2 November 2026

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The Shaolin Temple (Shaolin si 少林寺) is a Chan, or Zen, Buddhist monastery on the slopes of Mount Song (Songshan 嵩山) near Dengfeng in Henan province, China. It was founded in the late fifth century for a foreign monk named Batuo, and its resident monks are ordained Buddhist monastics. Its fame rests on martial arts: a Tang stele records its monks fighting at the end of the Sui and in 621, and by the sixteenth century they were famous for the staff. Much of the rest is legend.

What and where is the Shaolin Temple?

Meir Shahar, whose articles and 2008 book The Shaolin Monastery are the main scholarship on its history, places it “on the slopes of the sacred Mount Song, some thirty-five miles southeast of Luoyang” (Asia Major, 2000, p. 15). The monastery’s own account puts it at the western foot of Mount Song, 13 kilometres northwest of Dengfeng, and explains the name as “temple in the thick forests of Shaoshi Mountain.” In 2010 UNESCO inscribed the “historic monuments of Dengfeng,” eight clusters of buildings and sites at the foot of Mount Song, on the World Heritage List (UN News); PBS, citing Xinhua, named the Shaolin Temple among them.

It is a working monastery of the Chan tradition, the Chinese school from which Japanese Zen, Korean Sŏn and Vietnamese Thiền descend (see the branches of Buddhism), with an abbot and a resident community.

How was the Shaolin Temple founded?

The earliest record is in the Wei shu (Book of Wei), the official history of the Northern Wei. Its treatise on Buddhism and Daoism says that Batuo (跋陀), a monk “of the Western Regions,” was deeply revered by the emperor, and that “by decree Shaolin Monastery was built on the north side of Mount Shaoshi for him to live in,” with clothing and food supplied by the state (our rendering, as with all Chinese on this page).

The entry gives no year of its own; it sits between events of 496 and 497, and the text calls the emperor Gaozu. In his 2000 article Shahar writes only that Shaolin was “established during the late-fifth century” (p. 15). The monastery’s own account is more exact: it says Emperor Xiaowen of the Northern Wei had the temple built in 495 “to accommodate the Indian master Batuo (Buddhabhadra),” who became its first abbot. Daoxuan’s seventh-century Further Biographies of Eminent Monks (Xu gaoseng zhuan 續高僧傳) calls the same teacher Fotuo (佛陀), “the Indian monk of Shaolin Monastery on Mount Song,” and adds that the monastery built for him by imperial order “is today’s Shaolin.” Elsewhere in the same collection he is Batuo.

Bodhidharma and Huike at Shaolin

Centuries before 1513, Shahar notes, the monastery was renowned “due in part to the hagiographic literature of the Chan school” (2000, p. 15). Legend had it that Bodhidharma meditated for nine years in a cave above the monastery, and by 1513 visitors such as the scholar Du Mu were being shown what was supposedly his figure, “cast as a shadow on the cave’s wall” (p. 15). By the early eighth century, according to Shahar’s 2001 article, a tradition already placed his transmission of the teaching to Huike on Mount Song. Daoxuan’s seventh-century biographies of the two men do not name Shaolin: Huike meets Bodhidharma as he wandered and taught around Song and Luo.

The monks who fought for Li Shimin (621)

The first firm evidence of fighting monks is a stele still standing at the monastery. Seven texts written between 621 and 728 were engraved on it in 728. Pei Cui’s history on the stele says the monks resisted bandits who burned the monastery’s stupas in the last years of the Sui Daye era (605–616) (Shahar 2000, p. 19). The texts also record that in spring 621 Shaolin monks fought for Li Shimin (600–649), the future Tang emperor Taizong, against his rival Wang Shichong. On 23 May 621 they took Wang’s position at the monastery’s Cypress Valley Estate (Baigu zhuang) and captured his nephew, Wang Renze.

Pei Cui’s history names the monks Zhicao, Huiyang and Tanzong, “and the others.” Tanzong was given the title general-in-chief; the others, an official letter of 632 says, declined office because they “only wanted to pursue the religious life” (Shahar’s revision of Penelope Herbert’s translation, p. 28). Li Shimin’s letter of thanks, dated 26 May 621, ends:

The letter, Shahar argues, served “a dual purpose, simultaneously praising, and restraining, the Shaolin monks” (p. 25).

Shaolin martial arts in history: staff, monk soldiers and the fist

After some seven centuries of silence, Shahar’s 2001 article finds, at least forty sixteenth- and seventeenth-century sources show that martial practice had become part of monastic life at Shaolin. Their speciality, the weapon that made the monastery famous, was the staff (gun 棍), though the same sources mention the spear and bare-hand fighting.

Monks also went to war for the Ming. In 1553, during the worst of the pirate raids, military officials in Jiangnan mobilised Shaolin and other monastic troops, and monks fought at least four battles between 1553 and 1555. The largest unit, 120 monks, routed a pirate band at Wengjiagang on 21 July 1553; not all of them came from Shaolin, but their leader, Tianyuan, had trained there. Shahar adds the caveat: monastic participation was limited, and the chronicler Zheng Ruoceng probably exaggerated it.

Bare-hand fighting came later. Shahar’s 2008 book, Katz summarises, traces hand combat and kicking to “at least the sixteenth century,” and the publisher says it dates Taiji Quan, Xingyi Quan and Shaolin Quan to the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, made for religious and therapeutic ends as well as fighting.

What is legend, and what the sources show

Shaolin as a Chan monastery

Shaolin was a place of meditation from its first generation. Daoxuan writes that people from all over who sought to still the mind came when they heard of Fotuo, so that “the community always numbered several hundred” (our rendering). The monastery’s own account says Bodhidharma “initiated the Chinese Chan tradition at Shaolin Temple,” which is how later tradition tells it. In 1990 the Christian Science Monitor reported from Dengfeng that 80 monks lived at the monastery and that, over the previous twelve years, it had “tentatively revived Chan meditation and Shaolin boxing.” For what Chan monastic life involves in general, see the life of a Buddhist monk and a day in a monastery.

Fighting monks and the precept against killing

Shaolin’s monks are bound by the monastic code, the Vinaya (in China, the Dharmaguptaka Vinaya), in which taking a human life is among the gravest offences, and by the first precept. Shahar is plain: “Clearly, during the early seventh century, some monks violated the Buddhist prohibition on the taking of life” (2000, p. 32). The canon’s monk-historians, he argues, were “loath to discuss monastic involvement in warfare,” because it “contradicted their religion’s prohibition against violence” (p. 16).

Later tradition offered an answer. Shahar reads the Jinnaluo legend as an apology for monastic violence: if a Buddhist deity could fight to defend a monastery, so could monks. Late-Ming hymns to the deity grounded his violence in compassion. Katz notes that Shahar traces how Vajrapāṇi became the staff-wielding Kimnara (Jinnaluo 緊那羅), and finds a real need for monks to protect themselves and monastic property. In 2001 Shahar found no seventeenth-century Shaolin text linking martial arts to Buddhist enlightenment; his 2008 book, Katz reports, shows that in Chinese religious culture physical strength was often seen as part of the quest for spiritual perfection. The wider question belongs to Buddhism and violence.

Who are the Shaolin monks today?

“Shaolin monk” covers four kinds of people in Shahar’s account, which follows Gene Ching (as Katz summarises it): Buddhist-ordained clerics who live in the monastery; Shaolin-ordained martial monks who leave to set up schools; professional martial artists who are not ordained but wear robes to perform, sometimes called “performance monks”; and lay disciples (sujia dizi 俗家弟子) who trained there but are not clerics. So a robed performer on tour may not be a monk at all. On ordination itself, see how to become a monk.

Ordained Shaolin monks, like Chinese monastics generally, take the surname Shi (釋), from Shijia 釋迦 (Śākya), as the abbots’ names Shi Yongxin and Shi Yinle show. Huijiao’s Biographies of Eminent Monks traces the custom to Dao’an. On the surname and on generation characters, see Dharma names.

The twentieth century: the 1928 fire and after

On 15 March 1928 the warlord Shi Yousan (1891–1940), having defeated General Fan Zhongxiu, whom Shaolin’s monks had joined, set fire to the monastery. The fire destroyed some of its ancient halls and partly damaged the Tang stele (Shahar 2000, p. 22 n. 20). It also consumed the whole Jinnaluo Hall; the shrine was rebuilt in 1984 and the deity’s cult revived (Shahar 2001).

The Mao years were harder still, by the Christian Science Monitor’s 1990 account (which dates the fire to 1927). Political persecution, it reported, had cut the community to fewer than ten monks by the late 1950s, and the remaining monks abandoned their martial-arts skills and fled when Red Guards stormed the monastery at the start of the Cultural Revolution (1966–76). Shaolin’s kung fu, AP notes, has been “referenced in many movies and TV dramas,” including the 1982 film The Shaolin Temple starring Jet Li. For the wider modern story, see Buddhism in China.

The abbot: investigation and conviction (2025–2026)

Shi Yongxin had served as Shaolin’s 30th abbot since 1999 and, China Daily noted, had “faced controversy over its commercialization”; AP recalls that Xinhua reported in 2015 that he was known as a “CEO monk.” On 27 July 2025 the temple management office announced a joint investigation by several departments. Xinhua reported that he was suspected of criminal offences, “embezzling and misappropriating project funds and temple assets,” and accused of serious violations of Buddhist precepts, “maintaining long-term inappropriate relationships with multiple women and having at least one illegitimate child.” At the end of July 2025 the Buddhist Association of China revoked his ordination certificate, calling his actions “extremely bad,” and the temple named Shi Yinle, abbot of the White Horse Temple, as its new abbot.

He was tried on 25 May 2026 and pleaded guilty. On 29 May the Intermediate People’s Court of Xinxiang City sentenced him (his birth name is Liu Yingcheng) to 24 years in prison for crimes including embezzlement, misappropriation of funds, accepting bribes and offering bribes, Xinhua reported. The court found he had illegally appropriated more than 131 million yuan of temple and foundation assets between 2003 and 2025; he said he would not appeal. AP, citing CCTV, added a fine of 3.5 million yuan. As of 2 November 2026 that ruling is the latest development we have found reported.

Visiting the Shaolin Temple

Shaolin is part of a UNESCO World Heritage listing near Dengfeng, and also a working monastery, so the ordinary courtesies of a temple visit apply; see Buddhist temple etiquette and Buddhist temples. In its Stupa Forest (Talin), Shahar wrote in 2000, a ten-storey stupa funded by Empress Wu in the Tang still stands.