Every so often I see the Shaolin temple and Bodhidharma
mentioned in Taekwondo history. I once held a lecture on taekwondo history where I was approached after it was finished and told that the lecture was good, but I had completly neglected to mention how martial arts were invented in China in the Shaolin temple by Bodhidharma and then spread to the rest of Asia. I could not take that critisism seriously but kept a straight face and told him politely that I did not subscribe to that myth, and quickly departed. I was recently reminded of this tie in with Taekwondo history when I was asked to consult on a taekwondo organisations history on their web page. The first draft contained the Bodhidharma myth in it, and I adviced it to be removed which it was. I therefore thought that a post tackling how the Shaolin/Bodhidharma myth has no place in Taekwondo (and should not even be considered "canon" in Chinese martial arts) could be useful for some. Before starting the actual post however I have to credit the book "Chinese Martial Arts Training Manuals; A Historical Survey" written by Brian Kennedy and Elizabeth Guo which has shaped much of my thinking on this subject and especially page 69-72. The author credits Chinese Martial Arts Historian Tang Hao and Stanley E. Henning. I found and read a few articles by Henning in preperation to this post but in the end I found page 69-72 in the aforementioned book to be a great sumary and I did not find much written by Tang Hao.
Before starting to look where the myth of all martial arts (and therefore Taekwondo) came from Bodhidharma, I thought it prudent to look at the standard myth as presented in Chinese Martial Arts (and sometimes copied directly into Korean Martial Arts)
The standard myth in short form
Sometime in ancient times an Indian monk travelled from India to China to teach Buddhism. The jurney was dangerous and he had to deal with the elements, bandits and wild animals. He therefore got very strong and capable. He first taught the emperor of China before going to the Shaolin Temple. Once there he saw how frail the monks were and they couldn't handle the long meditations because of their frail bodies. Bodhidharma retreated to a cave and meditated, and after a while got back to the temple and started teaching the monks martial arts. This laid the foundation for Shaolin Kung Fu.
The monks provess in Martial Arts became famous and the evil Manchu emperor became conserned that they would pose a military threat against him, so he preemptively attacked the temple, scattering the shaoling monks all over Asia teaching their martial arts to those in need. These students changed their martial arts to their own needs and so we got Karate in Japan, Taekwondo in Korea and Kung Fu in China.
If you have read this or variations on this myth before let me tell you straight away that 90% of it is hogwash (trying to not use strong language), yet people even highly decorated and ranked masters and grandmasters subscribe to this. Like all good lies it does have a cernel of truth in it. There absolutely existed a Shaolin temple, and Bodhidharma is most likely a historical person that might have lived there for a time. The temple was attacked and burned down (more than once), but this is where the history ends and the myth begins.
Origins of the myth
How old do you think this myth is? I thought it was very old, because I have read books going back to the 1920s who mentions this as serious martial arts history, and so I thought it was a well established story going back many generations. The truth is that the whole Shaolin and Bodhidharma myth is much more recent than you might think. The myth comes down to us largely from only two books. It can not be traced back longer than the popular novel "Travels of Lao Can", written between 1904-1907 and according to Henning there is no indication that it was ever part of an earlier oral tradition. The second book is "Secrets of Shaolin Temple Boxing" written in 1915 by an unknown author. Chinese Martial Arts historians who did research on this wrote whole books discrediting the myths as falsehoods already back in the 1930s (Henning uses the works of Tang Hao and Xu Je Dong as sources) but at that time the myths had already become popular and entrenched in the wider comunity.
I am not saying that no martial arts training were going on at the Shaolin temple, there are historical records saying there were, and by the 1500s it seems like they were notorious for their stick or long staff martial arts. But in a historical context the Shaolin Temple was a big landowner, and as a landowner they had to have a form of militia to protect their lands. This is nothing special in itself as this was normal for all great landowners and villages at the time. Their martial arts training therefore probably centered around weapong training, formations and fighting as a group and functioned both as a militia and security guards, but could be called upon by the ruling government to support the Chinese army. So kinda like the army reserves today. In 1561 general Qi Ji Guang included a partner drill with the long staff from the Shaolin temple into his military manual, which made its way into Korean Military Manuals including the Muyedobotongji published in 1790 and I am currently learning the first half of that form as part of my Kyeongdang training. If I pass my next exam I will need to learn the second half for the grading after that. So in a way the Shaolin influence does flow into Kyeongdang at least but the book "Muscle Change Classic" of Bodhidharma which is said to be the foundation of Shaolin Kung Fu has nothing to do with the long staff.
Brief Summary
They myth of Bodhidharma and the Shaolin Temple being the founding place for Kung Fu and or martial arts in general in Asia can only be traced back to around 1904-1907 in a fictional storybook and a martial arts manual published in 1915 which was thouroughly debunked by serious historians way back in the 1920s and 30s. There is no link to Taekwondo in any way, and we can safely edit out Bodhidharma from our Taekwondo history pages.
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