The History of the Shaolin Temple: 1,500 Years, Honestly Told

The Shaolin Temple has been founded once, burned more than once, emptied to a handful of elderly monks, and rebuilt into the most recognised monastery on earth. Along the way it acquired a legend so large that the history underneath is often lost. This is the documented version: what the records actually say, where the famous stories come from, and which of them survive scrutiny. Every major claim below is traced to a named source.

495 CE: a temple built for an Indian monk

The Shaolin Temple was built in 495 CE by order of Emperor Xiaowen of the Northern Wei, on the western foot of Songshan, roughly 13 kilometres northwest of what is now Dengfeng in Henan Province. It was not built for martial arts. It was built to house a single Indian meditation master, Batuo (also called Buddhabhadra), who had arrived in China around 464 CE and spent three decades teaching before the emperor granted him a monastery of his own.

The name itself is geography rather than philosophy: 少林 (Shàolín) means "young forest" or "forest on Shaoshi," after the Shaoshi peak of Songshan on whose slopes it stands. Batuo served as its first abbot and devoted himself to translating Buddhist scriptures. For its first century, Shaolin was what its founder intended: a serious centre of translation and meditation, one of many in a period of intense Buddhist patronage.

If you want the geography rather than the chronology, our Songshan Shaolin Temple visitor and training guide covers the mountain, the temple complex and the schools around it today.

Bodhidharma and the birth of Chan

The figure most people associate with Shaolin arrived later. Bodhidharma, known in Chinese as Damo (达摩), is traditionally said to have reached Shaolin in the early sixth century, and to have spent nine years in meditation in a cave on the Wuru peak above the monastery. From that retreat comes the tradition of Chan Buddhism, the school that would travel to Japan as Zen.

Bodhidharma sits on the boundary between history and hagiography. That a foreign monk of that name taught in China is broadly accepted; the vivid details, crossing the Yangtze on a single reed, staring at a wall until his legs withered, cutting away his own eyelids to defeat sleep, belong to devotional literature written centuries afterwards. The same caution applies to the claim, repeated everywhere, that he invented Shaolin Kung Fu. The exercises attributed to him, the Yijinjing and Xisuijing, first appear in texts dated to the seventeenth century, more than a thousand years after he is supposed to have lived.

What is not in doubt is the influence of the meditative tradition itself. The union of Chan and martial practice, 禅武合一 (chán wǔ hé yī), remains the organising idea of Shaolin training, and we explore that living side of it in our guide to Shaolin meditation, Chan and Qi Gong.

621: the thirteen monks, and what the stele really says

This is the story every film retells, and it is the one place where legend and documentation genuinely meet. In 621 CE, during the wars that established the Tang dynasty, a group of Shaolin monks took the side of Li Shimin, Prince of Qin and the future Emperor Taizong, against the warlord Wang Shichong. They helped capture a strategic fort, and shortly afterwards Li Shimin's decisive victory at the Battle of Hulao delivered Luoyang and effectively the empire.

The evidence is unusually good. A stone stele erected at Shaolin in 728 CE, barely a century after the events, records the monastery's service to the Tang court and preserves correspondence relating to it. The stele still stands at the temple. You can walk up and read it.

But here is the detail almost every retelling omits, and it matters. As the historian Meir Shahar emphasises in his study of the monastery, the 728 stele attests that monks fought. It says nothing about martial training at Shaolin, and nothing about any fighting technique in which the monks specialised. The monks of 621 appear in the record as men who took up arms in a civil war, not as the product of a martial system. The system came later.

The Ming dynasty: when Shaolin monks truly went to war

Shaolin's reputation as a martial institution is real, but it belongs to the Ming dynasty rather than the Tang. From the sixteenth century, a declining Ming military increasingly conscripted irregular troops, monks among them, and Shaolin fighting monks were deployed against the pirate raids then devastating China's southeastern coast. Their performance in those campaigns was recorded and admired, and the period coincides with a fashion for military encyclopedias in which their methods could be written down and circulated.

That combination, real battlefield service plus a print culture ready to celebrate it, is what turned a monastery into a martial legend. Shahar's argument is that the Shaolin martial tradition as we recognise it was consolidated in this era, not handed down intact from Bodhidharma. Far from diminishing the tradition, this makes it more impressive: a documented, evolving body of practice refined by people who were using it.

The sayings preserved from these centuries carry the training method inside them, which is why we collected and sourced twenty of them in 20 Shaolin Sayings: The Complete Edition.

Decline, and the fire of 1928

The Qing dynasty was less hospitable to armed monasteries, and Shaolin's fortunes declined across the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The catastrophe, though, came in the twentieth.

In 1928, during China's warlord period, troops under the warlord Shi Yousan set fire to the monastery. The fire is reported to have burned for more than forty days and to have destroyed roughly 90 percent of the buildings, including a great part of the temple library. Manuscripts that had accumulated over more than a millennium, including training and medical texts, were lost outright, and many relics were looted. It is the single greatest reason that so much of Shaolin's early martial record is reconstructed rather than read: the primary documents burned.

What followed was half a century of near extinction. By the late 1970s the birthplace of Kung Fu was reduced to a small number of elderly monks living among burnt foundations.

A film, and an unlikely resurrection

The temple was saved by an improbable agent: a movie. In 1982, a teenage national wushu champion named Li Lianjie, known worldwide as Jet Li, starred in The Shaolin Temple, a film loosely based on the very story of the monks who aided Li Shimin. It was an enormous hit across China and beyond.

The effect was immediate and permanent. Visitors arrived in numbers the site had never seen, young people travelled to Dengfeng wanting to train, and the martial arts schools that now surround the temple grew up in the decades that followed. The modern Shaolin economy, the tourism, the international students, the schools we work with today, traces directly to that film.

2010: World Heritage status

In 2010, at its 34th session, UNESCO inscribed the temple on the World Heritage list, not on its own but as part of a larger property: Historic Monuments of Dengfeng in "The Centre of Heaven and Earth". The listing covers eight clusters of buildings and sites spread across roughly 40 square kilometres around Songshan, including Songyang Academy, Zhongyue Temple, the Dengfeng Observatory, the Zhougong Sundial Platform and the Han dynasty Que gates.

The framing is worth noticing. UNESCO recognised the area for its long tradition of mountain worship and its role as a perceived centre of heaven and earth, of which Shaolin is one expression among many. The temple is the globally famous component, but it sits inside a much older sacred landscape.

What you can still see today

• The temple compound
  Rebuilt and restored across the modern era, with halls, courtyards and the celebrated frescoes depicting monks at practice.
• The Pagoda Forest
  A cemetery of stone stupas raised over generations of eminent monks, and one of the largest collections of its kind in China.
• The stele forest
  Inscribed stones spanning more than a thousand years, including the 728 CE stele recording the Tang campaign.
• The Damo Cave
  Up on the Wuru peak above the monastery, the traditional site of Bodhidharma's nine years of meditation.

Every one of these is on the itinerary of our 12-day China retreat, which builds in a full day at the temple with warrior monk demonstrations.

Myth and record, honestly assessed

Shaolin does not need embellishment, so here are the five claims you will meet most often, weighed against the record.

Frequently asked questions

Sources and further reading

Walk it yourself

History reads differently once you have stood in the courtyard. Whether you want a guided fortnight or a longer stay at one of the academies around Dengfeng, the mountain is the same starting point it has been for fifteen centuries.

Questions about the history or the training? Get in touch and we will answer honestly.