The Practice
This may be the only place available where you can find the true integration of Zen and kung fu — where you can train in a style of Shaolin that is slow, internal, and deeply rooted in Chan Buddhism.
Internal Shaolin
While other styles evolved toward performance and fighting, this practice remained hidden, preserved within one family for 150 years. What emerges now is kung fu in its original form: a method for expressing Zen through movement, for aligning the human body with the patterns of nature.
As Shifu Wu Nanfang reminds us: “We practise Chan, not Chuan.” Zen, not fighting.
The Effect of Practice on Our Lives
What are we really doing when we make these strange spiralling movements? What happens to our lives through this practice?
Shifu Wu Nanfang
In a world where attention is so often ripped away from our centre, this practice helps us return to source. An internal feeling of fullness and peacefulness from which harmonious activity springs forth naturally.
We’ve lost connection with our bodies. We live in our heads, move in straight lines, hold chronic tension we don’t even notice. We’ve forgotten how nature moves — in spirals, waves, cycles.
Watch water flow. Study how plants grow. Observe how energy moves through the body when truly relaxed. Nothing in nature moves in the rigid, linear patterns of modern life.
Living Meditation
The problem with sitting meditation for many people? Their energetic systems are polluted with tension, stagnation, and other imbalances. Trying to meditate amidst this internal disorder can be torturous.
Instead of meditating first, we harmonise the energetic system through the body, allowing the channels to flow smoothly once more.
Once ready, meditation becomes naturally beautiful.
The Feeling of the Practice
To practise Gulun Kung Fu is to return to your natural state.
Like a tiger roaring in the forest. A monkey leaping across a mountain stream. A bird soaring through vast skies. A horse galloping across boundless plains.
Any forced thought or action creates blockage. When you try too hard, qi stagnates. When you space out, energy scatters. The path lies between — alert but relaxed, focused but natural.
The ancient texts speak of reaching a state where you become “as nimble as a rabbit, heavy as a mountain; as imperceptible as the dragon, silent as a tiger.”
A Closer Look at Internal Shaolin
Internal Shaolin Kung Fu is the slow, meditative branch of the Shaolin tradition. Force is cultivated from inside out — from a quiet mind, through breath and qi gathered in the dantian, expressed through whole-body rotation rather than muscular effort. The visible practice is slow and spiralling. The hidden work is the integration of mind, breath, and form into a single unified movement.
The Gulun branch preserves this internal tradition as it was practised inside Shaolin Temple before its 1928 destruction. The current lineage holder is Shifu Wu Nanfang, the 31st-generation transmitter from the Yonghua Hall foundation. Foundation training begins not with kicks or splits but with Zhan Zhuang — standing meditation — and dantian breathing.
The aim is not combat.
Shaolin Was Always Chan
The original character of Shaolin Kung Fu was Chan Wu — Chan meditation and martial practice as a single discipline. The brick-breaking, the silver-spear-to-throat, the public demonstrations that have come to represent Shaolin in the global imagination — these are later additions. They are not what the senior monks of the Temple were studying for the better part of fifteen centuries.
Shifu is direct on this point.
In the Gulun lineage, Chan and Wu are not separate disciplines that meet at the edges. They are the same practice, approached through movement rather than seated stillness.
Shifu is also clear about what the cultivation is for:
Why the Practice Begins with Stillness
Most internal traditions agree that the foundation is a quiet mind. The Gulun teaching arrives at the same conclusion through a specific physical observation.
Most students arrive at meditation with bodies that cannot easily settle. Decades of accumulated tension in the shoulders, the neck, the lower back. Shallow chest-breathing. Stagnation in the joints and the channels through which qi is supposed to flow. Trying to sit still in this state is often torturous. The mind is not separate from the body, and a body in disorder produces a mind that cannot rest.
The internal practice intervenes through the body. Standing meditation aligns the structure. Dantian breathing returns the breath to its natural seat. Spiralling movement opens the channels through which qi has stopped flowing. Once the body has been brought into order, the mind follows on its own.
This is why Gulun Kung Fu treats Zhan Zhuang as walking meditation rather than as warm-up.
The point is preserved in the lineage’s account of Wang Xiangzhai, the 20th-century founder of Yiquan, who came to Shaolin to find what was missing from his own training.
Standing is not preparation for the practice. Standing is the practice. Everything that follows is the same teaching extended into movement.
Why the Movement Spirals
Watch how a river runs. Watch how a vine climbs. Watch how water moves around a stone.
Nothing in nature moves in straight lines.
Modern bodies do. Sitting at desks, walking on flat pavement, repeating linear gym movements — the human structure has lost its native rotational pattern. Tension accumulates because the body is being asked to function in a way it was not built to function. What internal Shaolin restores is the body’s relationship to its own natural geometry.
Every Gulun movement is a rotation. A turn of the hip transmits through the spine, through the shoulder, through the hand. The whole body participates in any single action. There is no isolated muscle. There is no point of contact at which force is generated separately from the rest of the body.
The unified force this produces has a name in the lineage: 混元一氣 hunyuan yiqi — unified primordial qi.
Once the body moves this way, force from a small movement at the dantian arrives at the hand without conscious effort. The mechanics of internal power begin from rotation, breath, and unified structure rather than from muscular contraction.
Softness Gives Birth to Hardness
The phrase Shifu repeats most often when correcting practice is the lineage’s mechanical foundation:
The hardness here is not muscular tension. It is the integrity of fully aligned structure under load. A Gulun practitioner working through forms looks soft to the eye — flowing and continuous and never stiff — but the structure underneath the softness is unified. When force is required, it appears without preparation.
Force generated this way differs from external force in a way Shifu describes plainly.
The contrast extends into application.
Rotation does not meet force. It dissolves it. The same principle, Shifu adds, governs more than combat.
Slow Practice, Fast Use
The visible movement of Gulun Kung Fu is slow. The reason is not aesthetic. Slow practice is how internal capacity is built.
Foundation training in the system progresses through a structured sequence: standing meditation, dantian breathing, the five foundational stances, Ba Duan Jin, and the linked stance form Pan Gen. After several years of consistent foundation work, students move into the longer forms and into the internal-coiling sequences. The progression is unhurried by design.
Shortcuts produce only the shape of the practice without its content. The body learns the choreography. The integration never arrives.
XinYiBa: The Highest Form
XinYiBa — literally heart-intention grasp — represents the highest level of Shaolin Kung Fu. The embodiment of Zen itself.
It is the form the senior monks practised inside the Temple before its 1928 burning. The footprints worn into the floor of Shaolin’s Thousand Buddha Hall, still visible today, were made by generations of monks practising XinYiBa in the same place over more than two hundred years.
XinYiBa is not a sequence of techniques to memorise. It is what emerges when xin (heart-intention), yi (mind), qi (breath-energy), and xing (outer form) move as one unified expression.
The “ba” in XinYiBa means “grasp.” What the practitioner is learning to grasp, in the end, is themselves.
At its highest level, Shifu describes XinYiBa using a classical Chan phrase:
Illuminating the mind and seeing one’s original nature is the destination of seated Chan practice itself. XinYiBa is movement that arrives at the same place.
The form is not for everyone.
Form to Formlessness
The mature stage of internal practice does not look like more refined external practice. It looks like ordinary action.
The structure has been built so completely that it is no longer visible. The rotation, the breath, the integration, the unified force — all of it happens automatically. The form has dissolved into the person.
The lineage describes the journey through four stages.
This is what the ancient Shaolin tradition called Chan-Wu unity. It is the same teaching the Yonghua Hall preserved through fifteen generations, that Wu Gulun carried out of the Temple in 1869, that the Wu family kept alive through the 1928 burning and the Cultural Revolution, and that Shifu Wu Nanfang now teaches at the school on Songshan Mountain.
Through the harmony of mind, body, and qi, practitioners grasp the essence of life itself. The body becomes the vehicle for understanding. Each movement peels away what isn’t truly you.