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Shaolin Xin Yi Ba training in China (Dec'08 - Feb'09) |
 Song Shan as seen from the Wugulun school
As I sit on the tatami floor of my little room in the Shinjuku suburb of Tokyo, the mountains of the Dengfeng region of China seem like another world, very far away. But the experiences I had there are still fresh in my mind.
For the past 2 months I studied the basics of Shaolin Xin Yi Ba at the Wugulun school situated at the foot of the majestic Song mountain, just a few bus stops away from the Shaolin Temple. The training was very basic, perhaps the most basic that I have ever encountered. I am naturally in a hurry to learn and to make progress, so I found this basic training very frustrating at times, but looking back at the results and the changes in myself I must admit that the training was extremely useful and rewarding. I did not learn many things, but the things I did learn were of high quality. Over a two month period I trained an average of six hours a day and the training consisted out of three things: standing meditation (Zhuang Gong), stepping practise (Bu Fa) and Form training (Taolu). I learned two very short and basic forms that strongly resembled taiji forms, but with more focus on the dantian (body centre) leading all motions and a kind of compression and expansion of the dantien. Xin Yi Ba is most certainly an internal martial art, and this disproves the popular misconception that the shaolin martial arts are all external.
 Master Wu Nanfang
The living conditions were far from luxurious, especially because of the cold winter. The dormitory that I shared with some fellow students was a concrete structure with no insulation at all. It was like sleeping in a fridge. There was no shower as all the water pipes had frozen up, so I would wash in an outside cubicle with half a bucket of water before going to bed.
The teacher at the school was Wu Nanfang, great grandson of Wu Gulun, the last true shaolin monk to fight his way out of the temple in order to return to secular life. Wu Gulun was also one of the very few people to continue the authentic shaolin Chan Wu Yi culture after the temple was burned and gongfu was outlawed in 1923.
Master Wu Nanfang’s training methods are very traditional and he has no interest to join the easy-to-please mainstream McShaolin culture. For this reason his school is very small, basic and modest. I will continue to train the basics that I have learned, with gratitude.
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