The Lineage
From Bodhidharma to Shifu Wu Nanfang
1500 years ago, Bodhidharma arrived at Shaolin Temple and found a problem.
The monks were lost in ritual and study. They pursued enlightenment through texts and ceremonies, caught in intellectual understanding and surface practices. Their minds were cluttered, their bodies weak.
So Bodhidharma taught them to sit facing a wall in true meditation, cutting through mental noise to find genuine stillness. He also introduced systematic physical exercises to strengthen their bodies and unite physical practice with spiritual cultivation.
But his deepest gift was the essence of Zen itself: direct transmission from mind to mind, beyond words and scriptures. Born from the stillness of deep meditation, this wordless understanding passes between master and student in a moment of recognition.
This is what we preserve.
Bodhidharma showed that Zen lives in movement as much as in stillness. That the body itself is the temple. That physical practice, correctly undertaken, becomes meditation.
This planted the seed of Chan Wu — Zen martial arts. Not fighting techniques or performance art, but Zen expressed through the body.
For a thousand years, this understanding developed within Shaolin's walls. Monks discovered that martial practice wasn't separate from spiritual cultivation — it was another door to the same realisation.
The tradition was systematised during the Ming Dynasty under Master Wuyan Zhengdao. He founded Yonghua Hall inside Shaolin Temple in 1592, weaving together three disciplines that, in the Shaolin tradition, were never properly separable: Chan, Wu, and Yi — Zen meditation, martial cultivation, and medicine.
Fourteen generations carried this transmission forward inside the Temple walls. When the Qing Dynasty banned martial arts and the world outside grew hostile, the teaching went underground through Master Zhanmo at remote Shigou Temple.
In 1869, his disciple Wu Gulun became the last monk ever to pass the Shaolin Mountain Gate Test. The temple leaders sent him out to lay life with an unprecedented mission: marry, have children, preserve the teachings until China was ready for their return.
He carried the lineage into one family in the village of Yangshumiao. Five generations later, the current holder is his great-great-grandson, Shifu Wu Nanfang. He is sixty-three. He teaches at a school on Songshan Mountain, fifteen minutes from where Bodhidharma sat.
For the first time in 150 years, the family transmission is opening to students from outside China.
The Full Lineage History
The Gulun lineage is the Wu family branch of Shaolin Kung Fu, traced through fifteen generations of Yonghua Hall transmission inside Shaolin Temple and five generations of family transmission outside it.
The hall was founded at Shaolin in 1592 by Master Wuyan Zhengdao (1547–1623), the 26th-generation Shaolin abbot, as a research house for three disciplines: Chan Buddhism, martial arts, and medicine. In 1869, Wu Gulun (1831–1914) became the last monk to pass the Shaolin Mountain Gate Test, was sent out of the Temple to preserve the system in lay life, and began a family transmission that survives today in his great-great-grandson.
That descendant is Shifu Wu Nanfang, born 24 December 1962. He is the 31st-generation lineage holder counting from the founder of Yonghua Hall and the fifth within the Wu family. The lineage was preserved through the 1928 burning of Shaolin Temple, the Cultural Revolution, and a century of upheaval that destroyed most of what the original Temple held.
Gulun Kung Fu was inscribed as Yanshi City Intangible Cultural Heritage in 2015 and Luoyang City Intangible Cultural Heritage in August 2020.
Yonghua Hall
Master Wuyan Zhengdao founded the Yonghua Hall at Shaolin Temple in 1592, the 20th year of the Ming Wanli reign — the same year he was formally appointed Shaolin abbot by imperial decree. He held the abbacy until 1609.
The hall sat in the Temple's southern courtyard. It operated as a research house for three disciplines that, in the Shaolin tradition, were never properly separable: Chan Buddhism, martial arts, and medicine. The integration is preserved in the doctrinal name still used inside the lineage: Chan-Wu-Yi.
Wuyan was a Caodong lineage master. The 1624 ordination pagoda inscription names him as the 26th-generation Dharma heir of the orthodox Caodong line. His memorial stele was composed by the late-Ming literatus Dong Qichang (1555–1636).
Patronage came primarily through the Zhou Princely House at Kaifeng, particularly Zhou Duan Wang (Zhu Suzhen, 1563–1635). Eight princes followed Wuyan into monastic life and became his disciples. The first of these, Yuan Hui, became the second-generation Yonghua Hall holder.
The complex was burned by the warlord Li Jiyu in 1641, in the chaos of the Ming–Qing transition. Most of the Yonghua archives were destroyed. The 1624 ordination pagoda survived, as did the White Robe Hall.
Master Zhanmo and the Mountain Gate Test
The Qing court's ban on civilian martial arts came in 1726. By the early 19th century the Yonghua Hall transmission was already a closely-held internal teaching, with its core forms — including Xinyiba — available only to senior monks within the lineage.
In 1828, the Qing official Linqing visited Shaolin and asked for a martial demonstration. The visit accelerated the dispersal of senior practitioners across Shaolin's branch houses in the surrounding mountains. The deepest teachings had to leave the Temple to survive.
The transmission that produced Wu Gulun came through Master Zhanmo, the 14th-generation Yonghua Hall holder, who taught at the remote Shigou Temple in the mountains behind Shaolin. The lineage holds that Zhanmo had practised Xinyiba so intensely that, for a long stretch of years, he slept on a single bench rather than leave his practice.
He did not teach Xinyiba directly.
The story preserved in the family is that Wu Gulun, then a young monk, watched Zhanmo practise in secret for three years, learning the form through observation. One day Zhanmo called him forward and asked him to demonstrate. Wu Gulun performed everything he had taken without permission. Zhanmo had known the whole time. The full transmission was given then.
The principle behind the decision is still cited inside the lineage: a transmission given easily is rarely kept. Wu Gulun had proven his commitment by the effort of taking it unbidden.
The verse the lineage uses to name the form anchors it back to Bodhidharma:
"Bodhidharma came west with not a single word — all is in cultivating Xin Yi through kung fu."
Xin is heart. Yi is mind, intent. Ba is grasp, hold, guard. Xinyiba is the highest skill of the lineage and the one Zhanmo guarded most closely.
In 1869, the surviving abbots of Shaolin chose Wu Gulun to leave the Temple. Before departing, he passed the Mountain Gate Test — the formal examination that proved mastery of Shaolin's complete system.
He was the last monk ever to pass it.
Wu Gulun (1831–1914)
Wu Gulun came from a poor family in Yanshi county, Henan. At the age of five (1836), his family sent him to Shaolin Temple. He did not enter the general novitiate. He was taken directly to Zhanmo at Shigou Temple, where he received the Dharma name Jiqin.
He trained for thirty-three years.
The temple monks called him Bai Hu Xing, White Tiger Star, for his abilities. Stories spread of him crushing stones, of crossing rivers without wetting his shoes. Practitioners who understand internal energy read these as the natural outcome of fully unified mind, qi, and body.
In 1869 he passed the Mountain Gate Test and left. He settled first in Tangzhuang, then moved deeper into the hills to Yangshumiao village, in the Baiyu valley behind Shaolin Mountain. He married, raised a family, and practised medicine in the surrounding countryside.
The family remembers that in 1879 his pregnant wife died after a raid on the home by men seeking the Xinyiba manual. He moved his children deeper into the mountains. The village would be the family's centre for the next five generations.
In Yangshumiao he remade Shaolin's monastic practices into a system that could be cultivated through daily life. Farming became training. Medicine became philosophy. Every action held the potential for cultivation.
When his eldest son Wu Shanlin reached eighteen, Wu Gulun told him: "From tonight, dig a cave with me on the mountain."
Wu Shanlin assumed the cave was for living space — the family was growing. Each night his father said only: "Follow my movements. Finish in three years. No rush."
Three years later, the cave was complete. Wu Shanlin had also received the full Xinyiba transmission, never named as such. The form had been hidden inside the labour of digging.
He had learned, in Shifu's phrase, to keep a busy body and a calm mind.
Wu Gulun died in 1914, age 83.
Second Generation: Wu Shanlin (1875–1970) — Preserving the Lineage After the 1928 Fire
Wu Shanlin inherited both the techniques and the depth of understanding from his father Wu Gulun. From childhood he farmed, studied medicine, and practised alongside his father. He became the first to teach Gulun Kung Fu openly outside the family. His reputation spread as a healer; locals called him Master of Massage.
Then came 1928.
The warlord Shi Yousan burned Shaolin Temple to the ground. The Mahavira Hall, the Heavenly Kings Hall, the Scripture Library and eighteen other halls were lost. The Scripture Library held the Temple's collected martial arts manuals, including the core Yonghua Hall texts. Most of the written record of internal Shaolin turned to ash.
"For Shaolin Temple in 1928, this was a great calamity. For the loss to Shaolin culture, it was truly too severe."
— Shifu Wu Nanfang, recalling his great-grandfather
In 1931, the surviving abbots of Shaolin Temple — Zheng Xu and Zeng Jun — invited Wu Shanlin, a layman, to return to the Temple and retrain the monks. The lay family branch had become the living memory of what the Temple had lost.
"In this situation, Shaolin Temple's Masters Zeng Jun and Zheng Xu invited my great-grandfather to Shaolin Temple to teach martial arts for many years. Truly, the scale of Shaolin martial arts received proper transmission, proper nurturing and development at Shaolin Temple."
— Shifu Wu Nanfang
Wu Shanlin trained over forty warrior monks at the Temple, including future masters Shi Degen and Xing Zhang. Many later teachers who claimed Shaolin lineage traced their training back to him.
At the age of 88, when he demonstrated Xinyiba for officials of the National Sports Commission, they recorded their assessment as "his skills are consummate." The Temple invitation is preserved in the Dengfeng City Chronicles. Wu Shanlin's biography appears in the Yanshi County Gazetteer, Volume 26, page 625.
Before dying at 95, he passed everything to his descendants with one instruction: wait until the world is ready to understand that Chan Wu isn't about fighting — it's about transformation.
Third Generation: Wu Tianyou and Wu Youde — Wu Shanlin's Sons
Wu Shanlin had two sons who carried the lineage forward in very different ways. The elder, Wu Tianyou, became the public teacher and warrior. The younger, Wu Youde, became the hidden teacher who guarded the internal transmission and prepared the next generation.
Wu Tianyou (1898–1950) — The Warrior
Wu Tianyou trained from childhood in the full system. By his twenties he was teaching neighbours and local students. In 1937 he established his own school at Zhongyue Temple, teaching monks, Daoists, and laypeople alike.
When Japan invaded, Wu Tianyou didn't retreat into contemplation. He founded resistance training camps and led a broadsword unit through enemy blockades. During one operation near Zhitan he was shot close to the heart. He survived. The wound never fully healed.
Wu Youde (1908–1980) — The Hidden Teacher
While his brother fought wars, Wu Youde maintained the internal transmission. Wu Shanlin's second son possessed a different temperament from his brother — quieter, more introspective, but equally dedicated.
He taught select students and security forces, but his primary focus was preparing the next generation. When his great-nephew Wu Nanfang showed exceptional promise, Wu Youde took personal responsibility for the boy's early training, laying the foundation that Wu Musheng would later build upon.
One night in 1975, two robbers ambushed the seventy-year-old master. In seconds, both lay unconscious. Wu Youde had barely moved.
This is Xinyiba — where intention, energy, and action merge spontaneously.
Fourth Generation: Wu Musheng (1930–2013)
Wu Musheng — Wu Tianyou's second son — began training under his father and his great-uncle Wu Youde from the age of five. By twenty he had mastered the complete system.
He served as a platoon leader in the Korean War, where his abilities earned him military honours and an offer of a senior position from the North Korean government. He returned to China instead, settling in the family compound at Yangshumiao.
For the next sixty years he refined and preserved the teachings. He never married, dedicating every moment to maintaining the purity of the transmission.
In his later years, Wu Musheng recognised that Wu Nanfang possessed the qualities necessary to carry the lineage forward. He took the boy as his primary disciple, training him with the same intensity his own father had shown — ensuring every detail of the tradition passed intact to the fifth generation.
Fifth Generation: Wu Nanfang and the Cultural Revolution Underground
Shifu Wu Nanfang began training around 1972, at the age of ten, under his grand-uncle Wu Youde. Days were for school. Evenings were for the family's practice.
Those evenings overlapped with the Cultural Revolution.
From 1966 to 1976 the Chinese state pursued an official policy of dismantling Buddhist and martial traditions. Practising Shaolin Kung Fu was dangerous. The Wu family practised anyway — at night, in the mountains behind the Temple, after the village had gone to sleep.
"Especially when I was young, during the ten years of the Cultural Revolution, the policy was to eliminate Buddhism. No Buddhist cultural things were permitted to exist. So in that turbulent era, my family was behind Shaolin Temple, deep in the mountains. In that environment, my grandfather and the others, they all used the nighttime. After everyone had gone to sleep, they would still be there constantly practising."
— Shifu Wu Nanfang
As a boy, Wu Nanfang slept beside his great-grandfather, absorbing presence as much as stories. The elders took him to Shaolin Temple's Baiyi Hall, where murals depicted ancestor Wu Gulun. Standing before these images, something awakened — not ambition, but recognition.
He studied under grandfather Wu Youde, uncle Wu Musheng, cousin Qiao Heibao. For over twenty years, he trained with Master Xingxing in both martial and Zen practices.
At seventeen, against his family's wishes and his teachers' concerns, he committed to lifelong practice. In 1995 he took Buddhist refuge at Shaolin Temple under Abbot Shi Suxi, who gave him the Buddhist name Defang.
He then spent the better part of a decade travelling across Songshan Mountain, tracing the students his great-grandfather and grandfather had taught, collecting the scattered fragments of Gulun Kung Fu that had drifted across the region in the upheavals of the twentieth century.
"I used ten years to collect many of these things. The purpose was to be more complete. To properly preserve, promote and continue these Shaolin-transmitted cultural martial arts manuals."
— Shifu Wu Nanfang
He frames the inheritance as something carried, not owned.
"This is the wisdom cultivated by how many generations of Shaolin senior monks. Formed generation by generation, not by one person. So it comes not easily."
— Shifu Wu Nanfang
Shifu Wu Nanfang – Testament from Ben Lucas
I have had the privilege of training one-on-one with Shifu Wu Nanfang since September 2024. Every day we practise, drink tea, and I observe a human being unlike any I've encountered.
In those ten months of daily contact, I have never once seen him irritated, nervous, or worried. He exists in constant inner harmony, with sunlight seeming to shine from within. At 63, he looks exactly as he did in videos from 15 years ago.
He embodies perfect yin-yang balance—extraordinarily powerful yet utterly peaceful. He can speak loudly and forcefully without a trace of aggression. His kindness makes everyone around him feel uplifted.
He lives simply and humbly, completely untouched by commercial pressures.
Everyone who meets him recognises immediately that he has touched something real. He is deeply spiritual without any pretentiousness. Nothing he teaches comes from books—everything emerges from his own direct experience. He teaches in his own words, his own understanding.
For him, the secular and spiritual are not separate. Kung fu exists everywhere in daily life. You never see rushing or imbalance in him. A true master.
The Lineage Today
Shifu Wu Nanfang teaches at the school on Songshan Mountain, fifteen minutes from Shaolin Temple. He has practised for fifty years. He has trained over a thousand students from the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany, Russia, Korea, and Japan since 1988. The first Western one-on-one student arrived in September 2024. The first retreats outside China are scheduled for August 2026 in Germany.
The lineage now carries formal cultural-heritage recognition. Shaolin Kung Fu was inscribed as China's National-level Intangible Cultural Heritage in 2006. Gulun Quanfa, the Wu family's distinct system within that tradition, was inscribed as Yanshi City-level Intangible Cultural Heritage in 2015 and Luoyang City-level Intangible Cultural Heritage in August 2020.
Practitioners who train with Shifu daily over months tend to describe a single observation in different words. He exhibits no irritation, no anxiety, no apparent pursuit of recognition or money. The yin-yang balance the lineage describes — extraordinary power coupled with quietness — appears in the person and not only in the practice.
He frames his task as a debt rather than an ambition.
"I must take up this responsibility. To take the true Shaolin tradition, the folk branch of culture that my great-great-grandfather brought out. I want to preserve it well, transmit it well, pass it on."
— Shifu Wu Nanfang
Asked why he is willing to teach Westerners — something no previous holder of this lineage has done — his answer points back to where it all began:
"Bodhidharma was a foreigner who transmitted Zen to the Chinese. Zen is beyond language. Why shouldn't I teach foreigners?"
— Shifu Wu Nanfang
He frames the teaching itself as something that does not belong to him, his family, or even China:
"Such excellent Chinese culture should not belong to any one school or family. It should belong to the whole Chinese nation. The teaching should be returned to the country, to society, to all humanity."
— Shifu Wu Nanfang
For the first time in 150 years, the family transmission is opening to students from outside China. The window is finite. Shifu is sixty-three.
Frequently Asked Questions
Who founded the Gulun lineage?
Wu Gulun (1831–1914) founded the lay branch in 1869, when he became the last monk to pass the Shaolin Mountain Gate Test and was sent out of Shaolin Temple to preserve the Yonghua Hall transmission. He settled in Yangshumiao village behind Shaolin Mountain, married, raised a family, and turned monastic Shaolin practice into a system that could be cultivated through daily life.
What was the Yonghua Hall?
The Yonghua Hall was a research house founded inside Shaolin Temple in 1592 by Master Wuyan Zhengdao, the 26th-generation Shaolin abbot. It transmitted three disciplines as one body of knowledge: Chan Buddhism, martial arts, and medicine. Wuyan was a Caodong-school master patronised by the Zhou Princely House at Kaifeng. The complex was burned in 1641; the 1624 ordination pagoda survived.
How did the lineage survive the Cultural Revolution?
The Wu family lived in Yangshumiao village, deep in the mountains behind Shaolin Temple. From 1966 to 1976, with Buddhist and martial practice officially suppressed, Wu Youde and Wu Musheng practised at night, after the village had gone to sleep. Wu Nanfang began training under Wu Youde around 1972 and inherited the full system from Wu Musheng over the following decades.
Who is Shifu Wu Nanfang?
Shifu Wu Nanfang was born on 24 December 1962 in Yangshumiao village. He is the 31st-generation Yonghua Hall lineage holder and the fifth generation in the Wu family branch. He has practised for fifty years. He took Buddhist refuge at Shaolin Temple in 1995 under Abbot Shi Suxi, who gave him the Dharma name Shi Defang. He teaches at the school on Songshan Mountain.
Is Gulun Kung Fu recognised as cultural heritage?
Yes. Shaolin Kung Fu was inscribed as China's National-level Intangible Cultural Heritage in 2006. Gulun Quanfa, the Wu family's distinct system within that tradition, was inscribed as Yanshi City Intangible Cultural Heritage in 2015 and as Luoyang City Intangible Cultural Heritage in August 2020.