Week 3: A Brief History of Kung Fu
Hello Everyone!
This last week has been chaotic. On Sunday, my computer broke and is no longer functional, which was frustrating enough. But to make matters worse, I had scheduled data collection for ankle mobility with three of my four participants for Monday. Not having a computer made things significantly more challenging. Thankfully a friend chipped in to help and all of the data on biological ankle mobility I need has been collected and is ready to go through.
Like I said last week, I want to talk a little more about the origins of kung fu, specifically, the branch of kung fu I practice, Southern Shaolin Kung Fu.
The origins of Shaolin Kung Fu date back to the end of the 5th century B.C.E when an Indian Buddhist monk, Ba Tuo (Chinese name) traveled to China to teach Buddism. Eventually, word of Ba Tuo reached the Emporer, who encouraged Ba Tuo to continue to spread his teachings and provided him with a piece of land on the side of Sōngshān (嵩山) Mountain. Ba Tuo built a monastery on this land which became known as “Small Forest” or Shàolín (少林). This became the first iteration of the Shàolín Temple.
Forty years later, another Buddhist holy man named Bodhidharma left India to spread the word of Ch’an (Zen in Japanese) Buddhism. In China, he found the now well-known Shàolín Temple, which was famous for translating Buddhist texts. Bodhidharma sought entrance to the temple but was denied, as many visitors had already caused harm to the temple. To prove his dedication to Buddhism, it is said that Bodhidharma meditated in a nearby cave for nine years. Eventually, he did gain entrance to the temple.
Upon entering Shàolín Temple, Bodhidharma, or Damo (his Chinese name), found that the monks were physically weak and unable to perform the necessary meditations expected from practicing monks. As a solution, Damo created a selection of exercises based on yoga and Indian Martial Arts to strengthen the monks physically. This led to the creation of gōngfu (功夫) meaning skill achieved through dedication and hard work. Originally, gōngfu was for simply keeping oneself in physical shape, but due to frequent attacks on the Shàolín Temple, it developed into a form of self-defense. Allowing the monks to ward off attackers. Later, gōngfu became romanized into western languages as kung fu keeping a majority of its martial aspects in popular culture, but losing some of the more spiritual aspects such as personal health and growth. Partially this is due to wushu or martial arts movies, which became very popular in the United States and thus spread to more of western culture.
As this project develops, I want to increase awareness of the health aspects of kung fu, not just the fighting ones. This project’s aim to increase accessibility to martial arts is not so that more people can fight, but so that more people can gain the mental and physical benefits of martial arts. To embody the original goal of gōngfu, hard work and dedication leading to skill and personal growth.
That is all I have for today, next week I’m going to look into possibly gaining access to a motion lab to gain supplemental data for the project and begin sifting through what I have already collected.
-Aiden