I was just reading about Shi Deyang, one of the monks who practices strictly traditional forms. It is reassuring to know that there are still Shaolin monks who practice the real thing.
This leads me to wonder, what about Shi Yanming and Shi Goulin, do they practice traditional forms? Or are they primarily contemporary wu shu stylists?
Shi Yang Ming defenitely practices both(but I don’t think he teaches applications)… I think he’s more of a San Shou guy though, and I’d hesitate to call him a real monk.
Shi Guolin defenitely teaches both forms too as you can see from the videos offered on this site 
I don’t know anything about how he teaches though.
Most older generation athletes and a lot of non-pro wushu athletes practice both trad. and modern, and I think a lot of the monks were modern wushu athletes before landing at Shaolin. I think Shi Xing Hao(Texas) was a pretty good pro athlete and a good Shaolin practitioner before going to Shaolin.
BTW, what martial art you practice has little to do with whether or not someone is a good monk or even a monk at all 
Can the monks fight?
Originally posted by Brad
BTW, what martial art you practice has little to do with whether or not someone is a good monk or even a monk at all
I think he was making a joke out of the movie “A few good men.”
I’ve had the pleasure to train with both YanMing and GuoLin. As Brad stated YanMing practices both traditional and contemporary forms. YanMing doesn’t believe in applications, but he teaches it. Just he doesn’t dedicate a class to it. As for Guolin, he definitely knows traditional forms but as for the modern forms, I dunno. I’ve never seen him do any of that stuff.
I’m pretty sure I’ve seen his(Guolin) student performing modern wushu monkey boxing on the Shaolin Ulyses special. Most of the animal forms the monks teach seem to be modern wushu(mantis, eagle, monkey, etc.)
what do you mean by “he doesn’t believe in applications”? how does he train the techs. to be applied?
yeah, pleeze x-plain this “disbelief in apps.” thing
Guolin’s student do know modern forms but, it doesn’t mean that Guolin taught it to them. Guolin brought over a few disciples from China, of the Heng generation, that are teaching at his school. But again, I dunno the extent of Guolin’s knowledge in modern wushu. As for YanMing, if i remember correctly don’t quote me on this, he wants you to be nonrestrictive. In other words, if someone punches you or whatever, he doesn’t want you to think, he punched me with his left hand then I should do this or that, he’d rather want you to just punch or kick you and just end it as soon as possible. I hope that I was able to explain this well enough, maybe some of YanMing’s current students can elaborate more on this.
ok’
i see
I’ve had students from there join my school, and also a school of a friend’s. Bottom line-they don’t teach it, they don’y know it, they don’t do it. But tHey know forms. oh yeah, and they’re real monks. I dunno…David Carradine is startin to look real good, ta me lately…
i was tlaking to this about my sifu today actually. i asked him about the animal forms from shaolin. he said they are mainly wushu-ish. (jsut a brief discussion didnt get into it really.) he said when shaolin was on the ressurection in the 80’s they brought in a bunch of wushu teachers in to teach martial arts, Master Hu being one of them. didnt tlak too much about it. Gene will probably be able to answer this thread a lot more when he sees this on monday. also check out the shaolin monk 2004, Shi Decheng has a good article oin there about real vs fake monk.
Shi Yan Ming a “san shou guy” :rolleyes:
yeah, when he first started out he said he was a san shou champion, said he was the only “REAL” san shou school in NY and talked crap about everyone in the city…
it got around and some rude American sent him a note in of all things CHINESE telling him that if he wasn’t willing to step up and actually, gasp, FIGHT, he had better shut the F up…
(you figure out the above post and who the rude American was)
Shaolin animal crackers
The mix of modern and traditional at Songshan Shaolin is a really confusing issue, especially with animal forms. Right now, I believe the only traditional animal style still extant at Shaolin is Black Tiger. Now that’s a huge statement, so I’m tempering it by saying this is only a personal belief and I cannot yet back it up with facts.
But I can illustrate some examples. My own Shaolin monk teacher, Shi Decheng (see the
cover story article mentioned above, teaches a Songshan five animal form, but I don’t think that it is traditional. I beleive that it is a modern re-creation, something that was developed to fit an need, so to speak. It is composed like a traditional Songshan form, but I’m still suspicious. Juxtapose that with his mantis form - now most Shaolin masters teach Yu Hai’s mantis form - this is clearly modern. Yu Hai played the big monk in Jet Li’s Shaolin Temple series, and I think it was Shaolin little kids where they did the mantis form. It stayed in Dengfeng after Yu Hai left and is still wildly popular. In fact, the movies had a big impact on the area, bringing a lot of Beijing and Shandong masters like Yu Hai and Hu Jiangqiang out to Shaolin for a spell. But Decheng also knows a very traditional mantis form, and 8 step (babu tanglang), which I think is from his Kaifeng lineage, something he learned outside of his Shaolin training. If you were to learn mantis from him, you’d probably get this traditional mantis form, while the others would give you the modern Yu Hai form. I should note that while Yu Hai is often considered to be a big wushu master, he is firmly rooted in traditional styles. Just look at his age - wushu wasn’t invented when he began training.
Another example is Shi Yanming’s duck form. He knows several traidtional duck forms, which were qutie rare at Shaolin until quite recently. As I mentioned in my Shaolin Trips Episode 2 piece, duck style has become popular as a demonstration form recently, mostly for comic relief. That duck is generally a modern duck, very showy for the show. You also see frog, which typical seems derivative of what appears in Jet Li’s Shaolin Temple. So I’d judge both of these as modern, yet Yanming personally has a traditional duck. He left Shaolin before duck even became popular.
What my confounds this theory is the sheer amount of animal imitative boxing. In Goulin’s demo tapes (here’s vol 1) you see a lot of wushu like animals, stuff like scorpion, which is a really unique and crazy form. Most of the animals are really flamboyant, not in line with traditional Shaolin. Now I should mention that I’ve never seen Guolin do non-traditional, but that doesn’t mean that he never did any. He has other monks and Shaolin masters teach modern stuff at his temple. In fact, three of his monks are introduced in the Shaolin Special 2004. That’s why you see wushu coming out from some of his students.
Originally posted by bung bo
what do you mean by “he doesn’t believe in applications”? how does he train the techs. to be applied?
YanMing does not believe forms teach fighting. He says they are for health and conditioning.
that would be economic health (his) and conditioning vs. the suffering of being forced to learn stuff like “Shaolin Temple Chen Taiji” :rolleyes:
I’m beginning to wonder if styles like Choy Li Fut, Hung Gar, Bak Siu Lum etc… are closer to original Shao Lin than what is currently practiced at the temple itself.
YanMing does not believe forms teach fighting. He says they are for health and conditioning.
Forms don’t teach you how to fight, he’s right in that respect. They SHOULD have techniques that can be used in a fight though. I don’t know about the forms he teaches, but the forms I’m learning have techniques that I use in San Shou all the time, but that’s mainly because most of the techniques are hooks, uppercuts etc…
Don’t miss the obvious
Imagine if you were in a community with 80 schools, the largest of which is 13,000 students, all within an hour walk of each other, many right next door to each other. It’s so big that the schools have to coordinate their days off so the rival schools don’t cross paths and street fight. With that many schools and that many students, all in constant competition, do you think a school can survive without fighting skills? Sure there’s a lot of wushu, but don’t be fooled into believing that’s all there is. There’s a massive traditional core at Shaolin, but many foreigners never penetrate it.
Re: Don’t miss the obvious
Imagine if you were in a community with 80 housing projects, the largest of which is 13,000 occupants, all within a 15 minute walk of each other, many right next door to each other. Do you think an average person can survive without fighting skills?
Sorry Gene, nothing personal, but just because they brawl in the street doesn’t mean they have high level Kung Fu. I’ve heard all the same stories, but by far and by large, I don’t see much major skill, when they parade out the shaolin san shou fighters, I find their skill level much lower than the national team, etc