[QUOTE=Tainan Mantis;1278329]I have serious doubts about the existence of such a book. If you have a link to an original Chinese source I would like to see it.[/QUOTE]
sure. it’s fortunately been recently published. you can get it from here in 8 volumes: jd.com: Shaolin Quan pu (isbn for vol.1: 9787500937944).
to see other volumes, search in the website.
In the pursuit of what was recorded by who and when I have spent more than a few years tracking down and tracing every source of pre-Qing martial arts books.
If there is such a book as Shaolin Quanpu () I would expect to find it in serious historical works such as Lin Boyuan’s Zhong Guo Gu Dai Wu Shu () or in Zhong Guo Gu Dian Wu Xue Mi J (), to name just a few.
In English there is Meir Shahar’s work The Shaolin Monastery
In Brian Kennedy’s book Chinese Martial Arts Training Manuals: A Historical Survey He quotes a list of the twelve most important historical martial art books of ancient China and it is not listed there either.
this is quite natural. very few scholars know about original Shaolin temple manuals. before abbot Miaoxing, all these manuals were kept super secret. just before the fire of 1928, Miaoxing gave some copies of a few manuals to some of his disciples and those got published. this one was very important but burnt in the fire. a long time later it was found out that a monk Yongxiang () had copied all or at least most parts of this quan pu. those copied parts were later given to several disciples to be kept, and about 1980, on his request, the copies were returned to him, to be given to his most trusted disciple, Shi Deqian, the compiler of the Shaolin encyclopedia. this text was first written in the 960s, under supervision of monk FuJu, but was updated generation to generation. in addition, i’m not sure that this published version is exactly the copied that Deqian got from Yongxiang, they may have been tampered with in some ways. not sure. i don’t know where the original copies are now.
Shaolin Quanpu shows up on Baike which is a website with, I think, very little oversight in the facts of the information.
That article starts off like this
[INDENT]Shaolin Quan Pu is a book authored by Shaolin’s Abbot Fu Ju from the Song
dynasty. He summarizes the essence of martial art styles from before the
Song Dynasty. [/INDENT]
That sounds too good to be true.
[INDENT]It has been handed down to a passionate enthusiast of martial arts named
Zhao Zuoxiang in Chi Feng City of Inner Mongolia. It is Fu Ju’s compilation
of Eighteen Families of fist and weapons…[/INDENT]
this manual for sure. should have been copied several times during its history. but the only one i know about is Deqian’s manuals. Zhao Zhuoxiang! so there’s another copy.
I had originally hoped you had referred to a record of Han Tong in the Official Record of the Zhou, prior to the Song.
it depends on what you want to find out about. Han Tong’s personal life or his martial art. his life, if had ever been recorded, should be related to Zhou or early Song dynasty records, this is however, irrelevant to martial arts and i personally haven’t seen anything other than some short quotes. but about his martial arts, the right place is Shaolin temple and its texts. they don’t write about his life, but they inherited his martial art via the early Song dynasty generals who were in the same Zhou dynasty army as him and they gave his martial style to Shaolin temple, which is still kept and taught in the temple. however, Shaolin temple texts are not real historical document in that these texts have been updated from generation to generation. however, in his special case, about Han Tong’s martial art, there enough reason to say the Shaolin quan pu is accurate, because a manual of the 1700s tells the same story, with the difference that Shaolin quan pu calls Han tong’s style ‘Tong Bi quan,’ while this 1700s manual calls it ‘Tong Bei quan.’ no other difference. both tell the same.