Youth Student’s Corner
by Chantal Moylan
Fu For You Spring 2025
Every class we start off with our three bows, the first one being to show our respect to our ancestors. But have you ever wondered who these ancestors really were? And how did Kung Fu begin in the first place? To really understand our Kung Fu ancestors, we need to look back in time and at the history of the masters who started it all!
About 1,500 years ago, there was a special place in China called the Shaolin Temple, where Buddhist monks lived and trained. According to legend, a really smart monk named Bodhidharma came from India to visit them. He taught the monks special exercises to make them strong and disciplined. Over time, these exercises turned into the martial art now called Shaolin Kung Fu.
As the monks continued to practice their Kung Fu, they watched animals in nature and noticed how they moved. They saw that each animal had its own special way of fighting and defending itself. The monks used these ideas to create the Shaolin Five Animal Kung Fu style, with each animal teaching a different way to fight and move.
After Bodhidharma left, the Shaolin monks kept adapting their skills. They used the animals’ movements to make their own. They learned to be strong like a tiger, fast like a leopard, flexible like a snake, balanced like a crane, and wise like a dragon.
As time passed, more and more monks started to become very skilled warriors. They didn’t use their kung fu to hurt people, but to protect their temple and help others. The Shaolin monks became famous all over China for their talents in martial arts!
Hundreds of years later, two great martial artists named Jue Yuan and Bai Yufeng, decided they wanted to make Shaolin Kung Fu even better. They traveled all around China, learning from all sorts of different masters. They brought back new moves and ideas to the Shaolin Temple, helping kung fu to become even stronger! Jue Yuan and Bai Yufeng also studied how the human body moves and how animals fight. They organized Shaolin Kung Fu into different styles, which helped students learn faster and become better fighters.
Later, when some bad people came to China, a lot of the Shaolin monks had to leave their temple to hide. They traveled to Southern China and continued to teach kung fu in secret. One of the most famous warriors from this time was Hung Hei-Gun, a powerful fighter who helped keep Shaolin Five Animals Kung Fu style going! Hung Hei-Gun made Shaolin Kung Fu popular in the south, and his lessons later helped create new kung fu styles like Hung Gar and Wing Chun.
Because of these great teachers—Bodhidharma, the Shaolin monks, Jue Yuan, Bai Yufeng, Hung Hei-Gun and many others, Shaolin Kung Fu is still around today! Now, people all over the world practice and share Kung Fu, keeping the tradition alive!