The Practice
Internal Shaolin
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.
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?
"The purpose is to help your mind become calm, allowing Qi to naturally enter the Dan Tian."
— 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.
"Your kung fu is like a tree, roots in the ground... like tree roots deeply planted in the soil, but your body sways with the wind very naturally."
— Shifu Wu Nanfang
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.
"The root of kung fu is a type of spiritual cultivation."
— Shifu Wu Nanfang
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.
"Shaolin itself is Chan kung fu. There is no brick-breaking, stone-smashing, silver spear piercing the throat and so on. These are all external additions."
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.
"Life itself is a form of Zen. Practising kung fu is also a form of Zen."
— Shifu Wu Nanfang
Shifu is also clear about what the cultivation is for:
"This kung fu is not something you can just cultivate. It is a kind of tempering. Cultivating what? Cultivating the person. Cultivating a quiet heart. Through the formation of a quiet heart, the four limbs, the hundred bones, the internal organs all receive their proper adjustment."
— Shifu Wu Nanfang
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.
"For monks, the task is to accomplish walking meditation. Including our Gulun school. When someone first arrives, they must begin walking meditation. Walking meditation is standing stake."
— Shifu Wu Nanfang
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.
"Wang Xiangzhai stayed with the master Henglin for about half a year. He understood the principle. Because Shaolin Temple monks every day went to the hall, paid respects to Buddha. Paying respects to Buddha requires walking meditation. Standing practice is standing without moving. Then through walking, that's called walking meditation. Then later he created Yiquan."
— Shifu Wu Nanfang
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.
"Inside is qi. Outside is form. The combination of form and qi. This is how it is born."
— Shifu Wu Nanfang
The unified force this produces has a name in the lineage: 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:
"Softness taken to its extreme gives birth to hardness. This is how it comes out."
— Shifu Wu Nanfang
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.
"External practitioners. They train leg's power as leg's power, hand's power as hand's power. It is not unified."
— Shifu Wu Nanfang
The contrast extends into application.
"Only through rotation can you dissolve the opponent. Hard against hard, both are injured. When he is hard, you are soft. One rotation and you are down."
— Shifu Wu Nanfang
"At this moment it is gentle. The rotation gently strikes the opponent's hand, not the hand striking. Stick, adhere, connect, follow. And it is gone. Not hard meeting hard."
— Shifu Wu Nanfang
Rotation does not meet force. It dissolves it. The same principle, Shifu adds, governs more than combat.
"This is the principle of soft and hard. When we are human, when we do things, we dissolve the opponent this way, dissolve our own aggressive qi."
— Shifu Wu Nanfang
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.
"Kung fu, health cultivation and combat. Gulun Kung Fu's meaning: slow practice is health cultivation. Practised to consummate mastery, used formlessly and fast — that is combat, self-defence. Very simple."
— Shifu Wu Nanfang
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.
"Our Gulun Kung Fu is practised completely according to the requirements of Shaolin Temple's ancient boxing manuals. It is not however you want to practise. It is not for modern people to create new Kung Fu. You cannot change the art form."
— Shifu Wu Nanfang
Shortcuts produce only the shape of the practice without its content. The body learns the choreography. The integration never arrives.
"Now people want to learn a form in a week? This consumerist mindset will not do. Do not fear ignorance of a thousand forms. Fear only a mistake in one. A hair's breadth difference leads to an error of a thousand miles."
— Shifu Wu Nanfang
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.
"The Thousand Buddha Hall footprints were not formed in a short time. The Thousand Buddha Hall was built in the Ming dynasty. The kung fu especially was from the mid-Ming to mid-Qing period — equivalent to two hundred years of history, spanning several generations. Truly, this kung fu's core is Xinyiba. Xinyiba cultivation reached a high level, a peak."
— Shifu Wu Nanfang
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 core of our Gulun Kung Fu is Xinyi, heart-intention. This is the core of our boxing."
— Shifu Wu Nanfang
The "ba" in Xinyiba means "grasp." What the practitioner is learning to grasp, in the end, is themselves.
"When you throw this punch, can you achieve issuing power on demand? Now people ask: can you grasp yourself? You can grasp your hand, grasp your leg, grasp your body. But even more you should grasp your own heart. You cannot do it. A person's heart is most crucial. If you cannot even grasp your own heart, control it, master it, then what can you do? It will always be empty."
— Shifu Wu Nanfang
At its highest level, Shifu describes Xinyiba using a classical Chan phrase:
"At the final stage of kung fu, cultivating to the end, belonging to our Chan kung fu's Xinyiba — this is 'martial practice and meditation as one'. And this 'martial practice and meditation as one' combines with Buddhist Chan thought, illuminating the mind and seeing one's original nature."
— Shifu Wu Nanfang
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.
"Xinyiba is supreme Chan skill. Gulun Kung Fu can be popularised, but core Xinyiba depends on destiny. Without affinity it cannot be learned."
— Shifu Wu Nanfang
Form to Formlessness
The mature stage of internal practice does not look like more refined external practice. It looks like ordinary action.
"Superior kung fu, practised to maturity, used without form. No need for thought, no need for imagination. Like our ordinary eating, our using chopsticks. That simple."
— Shifu Wu Nanfang
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.
"First, you recognise the method. You observe the master with your eyes. Second, you understand the method. You know how to perform the movement. Third, you awaken to the method. This is a long process. The understanding is ingrained in your body. Finally, you forget the method. Reach the pure state of mind-intention unity. This is Xinyiba. The highest realm, no need to think."
— Shifu Wu Nanfang
"At first you want to learn everything. All the forms, all the techniques, vast as the sea, profound beyond measure. But the superior skill of Xinyiba is just one form. All movements return to one. Master one, comprehend a hundred."
— Shifu Wu Nanfang
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.
— Shifu Wu Nanfang
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.
"True kung fu exists within our everyday life. This knowledge and cultural essence requires heartfelt, gradual understanding. This is what we call awakening."
— Shifu Wu Nanfang