What is XinYiBa?
What exactly is XinYiBa? The question perplexes even experienced practitioners. Ask around and you will hear two different answers. Some describe a specific set of movements: guarded, rarely taught, dangerous to learn wrongly. Others describe something no set of movements can contain: a meditative state at the far end of cultivation.
I am Ben Lucas. I have spent the past two years as a student of XinYiBa’s foundation under Shifu Wu Nanfang, and longer researching the question. Shifu calls XinYiBa the supreme Chan skill. The name arrives wrapped in legend: the ultimate Shaolin skill, guarded for centuries.
The practitioner Xing Kong writes that a single XinYiBa technique is worth more than a thousand others and can crush any other method.
This article is an attempt to demystify XinYiBa: to put the legends beside what the masters actually say.
My own ideas are modest next to theirs, so the article leans heavily on the recorded words of the three teachers whose XinYiBa is most fully on the record: Shifu Wu Nanfang of the Wu family line, Hu Zhengsheng of the Yang Guiwu line, and the Sanhuangzhai line recorded around Master Shi Dejian.
XinYiBa (心意把) is the highest form of Shaolin Kung Fu — a single internal practice the Yonghua Hall tradition calls Wushang Chan Gong XinYiBa (无上禅功心意把), the Supreme Chan Skill, Heart-Mind-Hold.
The tradition was founded at Shaolin Temple in 1592 by Master Wuyan Zhengdao (1547–1623), 26th-generation Shaolin abbot, and is held today by Shifu Wu Nanfang, who teaches at the school on Songshan Mountain in Henan, China.
Shifu Wu Nanfang is the 5th-generation Wu family inheritor, the 19th-generation Yonghua Hall holder, and the 31st-generation transmitter from the original Shaolin line. The transmission left Shaolin Temple in 1869, when Shifu’s great-great-grandfather Wu Gulun (1831–1914) became the last monk in the temple’s recorded history to pass the Mountain Gate Test.
Three branches of the lineage document the same early history independently: the Wu family bloodline of Shifu Wu Nanfang, the line through Yang Guiwu (1931–2010) whose records are published by Hu Zhengsheng’s Shaolin XinYiBa Research Society, and the monastic Sanhuangzhai line of Master Shi Dejian.
Shifu Wu Nanfang
Key Facts
What does XinYiBa mean?
The name is three characters.
Shifu Wu Nanfang explains the name in one sentence:
The doctrinal expansion in the Yonghua Hall lineage is Wushang Chan Gong XinYiBa (无上禅功心意把). Wushang (无上) derives from the Sanskrit anuttara, meaning the supreme, the unsurpassed. Chan Gong (禅功) names the link between physical cultivation and Zen meditation. The full expansion reads: the Supreme Chan Skill, Heart-Mind-Hold.
XinYiBa is not, in this reading, technique. It is the standard a practitioner is being polished toward, expressed through technique.
The other lines of the lineage read the same three characters in their own registers. Hu Zhengsheng (b. 1977), who holds the Yang Guiwu line’s manuscripts, gives the name a mechanical reading first:
Hu Zhengsheng, recorded teaching
The monastic branch’s fullest recorded exposition runs the three characters into a complete doctrine:
There are three concepts in Xin. The first is to develop the mind of a Pusa to accumulate virtuous thoughts, to take Buddhism as the foundation and Chan as the basis to neutralise the aggressiveness in Wushu. The second is to develop a righteous mind, to use the body and mind with nature, and discard all thoughts of the self, death, enemies, and fear. The third is to develop a mind void of longings and cravings, to follow the commandments strictly — for example, the Ten Commandments promoted by the renowned monk Jueyuan.
The unity of mind and Qi means to use the mind to develop, train, and circulate Qi, so that the Qi from the Dan Tian can be unified with nature and directed into the muscles and all parts of the body. This on one hand fills the body with internal energy to be able to manipulate the opponent with a simple movement, and on the other to preserve internal serenity to maintain bodily health. Where the mind goes, the Qi follows; where the Qi goes, the body follows. As a result, we cannot see the fists, but the fists are all over the body.
What is meant by control is to first understand oneself and control one’s power, so that one can control the exact amount of force used and the exact body part the force is to be executed from. The second thing to do is to understand one’s opponent. Before the opponent moves, one is already expecting that move; hence, at the moment when the opponent moves, one can move faster ahead of him. All movements of the body are in full control and can defeat the opponent in a split second. While defeating the opponent, one should not maim him too seriously and should avoid at all times to kill.
Recorded in The Shaolin Chanwuyi (2010)
The same book compresses the three characters into a third reading: “Buddha (Xin), Chan (Yi), and Power (Ba).” Different registers, one destination: the mastery of one’s own heart, which is where Shifu Wu Nanfang’s teaching begins and ends.
Where does XinYiBa come from?
XinYiBa comes out of the Yonghua Hall (永化堂), the research house for Chan Buddhism, martial arts, and medicine founded at Shaolin Temple in 1592 by Master Wuyan Zhengdao. Beyond that point the record splits: the two documentary branches of the lineage give different accounts of where the practice itself began, and this article gives both as they stand.
Shifu Wu Nanfang’s account is the Wu family’s own, and it is emphatic:
On the relationship with the civilian Xinyi arts, in the same conversation:
He adds that Xinyi Liuhe Quan is a folk art, not a Shaolin one, and that its training method differs: larger movements, where the Shaolin practice keeps them small.
The institutional history behind his account is well documented. The Yonghua Hall was funded by the Zhou Princely House of Kaifeng, and Wuyan Zhengdao, the 26th-generation Shaolin abbot, served for thirty-one years. For fourteen generations after him the hall’s transmission passed from master to disciple inside the temple walls.
The Yang Guiwu branch preserves a different account. Its manuscripts, published by the Shaolin XinYiBa Research Society as The Essentials of Shaolin Kung Fu, state it in one sentence:
The Essentials of Shaolin Kung Fu
The chain the book records is named and dated. Ji Long, better known as Ji Longfeng, was active in the “destroy the Qing, restore the Ming” resistance and converted his spear art to the fist when commoners were forbidden weapons.
His disciple Zheng Wukui (郑武奎, b. 1660) came from Dengfeng, the town beside Shaolin Temple; the book judges him the most likely first point of contact between the temple and the practice. Zheng’s disciple Wang Zhicheng (王志诚, b. 1680), of Xin’an county in Henan, wrote down what he had learned.
His manuscripts summarise the theory of XinYiBa and Liuhequan. Several of Wang Zhicheng’s original writings survive in Hu Zhengsheng’s keeping today. The two accounts do not agree, and neither branch pretends they do.
What the documentary record cannot fix is precisely when the name XinYiBa attached to the practice. The earliest reliable written occurrences of the term are late Qing. The practice itself is older. The Yonghua Hall tradition holds that XinYiBa emerged from generations of Shaolin monks at agricultural labour: hoeing earth, lifting water, swinging implements.
The form preserves the body mechanics of that work, refined into a meditation. An older name in the lineage for the same practice is the Hoeing Stance. The claim goes back to Wu Gulun himself, in words his son Wu Shanlin repeated to his own students:
Wu Shanlin, recorded in Chan-Wu-Yi (Sanhuangzhai)
The clearest physical record of the older practice is at Shaolin Temple itself. In the Thousand Buddha Hall (千佛殿), built in 1588, the brick floor is worn with forty-eight deep depressions in the arrangement of practitioners’ feet.
The Yonghua Hall lineage holds these to be the wear patterns of XinYiBa training during the Qing, when public martial practice was suppressed and the deepest forms moved to night-time training inside the hall.
He names the three generations directly preceding the Wu family. Heifa (黑发). Haifa (海发). Zhanmo (湛谟). The fourth was his great-great-grandfather Wu Gulun.
Who has held the XinYiBa lineage?
The Yonghua Hall succession was recorded by the Compilation Committee of Local Chronicles of Dengfeng City (登封市地方史志编纂委员会), the municipal government body responsible for the local historical record. The chain runs from Wuyan Zhengdao to the present.
The teaching line
The final three rows carry the teaching line that branches from Wu Shanlin at generation 16.
Shifu Wu Nanfang’s own self-designation in his written hand reads simply: 少林永化堂心意把十九代传人, Shaolin Yonghua Hall XinYiBa 19th-Generation Inheritor.
The Research Society’s book puts flesh on the late-Qing names. Shi Haifa (释海法, b. c. 1750), also called Xiang Bo and nicknamed “Black Whirlwind”, took the temple’s senior teacher Ru Xiang as his master: the same Ruxiang who stands at generation 12 of the Dengfeng chronicle’s chain.
When the Qing prohibition of 1828 came down, Haifa and his most outstanding student Shi Zhanmo (释湛谟, b. c. 1780) hid at Shigou Temple below the mountain and continued in secret. Zhanmo slept on a bench for twelve years while he trained.
By day he practised medicine and saw the villagers’ sick; by night he practised XinYiBa with his young disciple Jiqin, the boy who would become Wu Gulun. The book records that the older villagers of Shigou still tell stories of the pair.
The branch point of the living lines is Wu Shanlin, at generation 16. From him the transmission ran in at least three directions, and each runs the same three generations deep.
Yang Guiwu later served as chief instructor of traditional kung fu to the Shaolin warrior monks, and was filmed practising XinYiBa in the Thousand Buddha Hall.
The branches diverged; the documents agree. The Wu family’s account of the early transmission and the account published by Hu Zhengsheng’s line were recorded independently, and they attest the same chain: Haifa, Zhanmo, Shigou Temple, Wu Gulun, Wu Shanlin. Two branches, one root.
How did XinYiBa leave Shaolin Temple?
The transmission left Shaolin Temple in 1869, in the eighth year of the Qing Tongzhi reign. The events that led to that point are preserved in the lineage’s own historical record.
In 1828 the Manchu official Linqing (romanised Li Qing in the Research Society’s book) visited Shaolin and asked to see the temple’s martial practice. The Qing court had banned civilian martial arts; an official inspection placed the monks at risk.
After the demonstration, the abbot dispersed the senior practitioners to the temple’s subsidiary houses in the surrounding mountains to continue practising in secret. Master Haifa, the 13th-generation Yonghua Hall holder, and his disciple Zhanmo, the 14th generation, settled at Shi Gou Temple (石沟寺), a remote sub-temple at the foot of the mountain.
In 1836 a five-year-old boy from a poor family at Yangshi village was sent there to become a monk under Zhanmo. He took the dharma name Jiqin (寂勤). His secular name was Wu Gulun. He trained under Zhanmo at Shi Gou Temple for the next thirty-three years.
The lineage preserves the story that Zhanmo would not teach XinYiBa directly. He had practised the form himself for twelve years, sleeping on a single Zen bench. When Wu Gulun first asked to learn, Zhanmo refused.
The boy then spent three years secretly watching his master practise through the window of the White Robe Hall, wetting the paper with his saliva to see clearly. When he was eventually discovered, Zhanmo asked him to demonstrate what he had taken.
His power surpassed that of senior disciples who had been formally taught for ten years. The next six years were direct instruction. Eighteen more years at the main Shaolin Temple followed, sparring with the temple monks.
In 1869, with the Qing court tightening its watch and Wu Gulun’s joint practice with his uncle Zhanju attracting attention, Zhanmo decided the transmission had to leave the temple. According to Shaolin rule, an inheritor of the direct XinYiBa line could not return to lay life without fighting his way out of the mountain gate.
Wu Gulun began at the front of the Thousand Buddha Hall, defeated the monks guarding each pass, and at the gate vaulted over the assembled monks using their heads as footing. He was the last monk in Shaolin Temple’s recorded history to fight his way out.
The Yang Guiwu line’s book preserves the same rule under its own term: a departing monk had to defeat the “eighteen guardians” of the temple, and Wu Gulun, it records, was the last monk ever to do it.
He settled first at Tangzhuang in Dengfeng, then at Yangshu Miao village in the Baiyu valley, behind Bodhidharma’s Cave. The lineage continued in the family from there. He raised two sons, Wu Shuanglin and Wu Shanlin. The younger, Wu Shanlin, inherited the system in full, together with the old manuscripts the temple’s masters had entrusted to his father decades earlier.
In 1928 the warlord Shi Yousan burned the Shaolin Temple, destroying the Sutra Depository and the temple’s accumulated martial arts manuals. Wu Shanlin was invited back by the surviving abbots Zheng Xu and Zeng Jun to retrain the surviving monks; Shi Yongxin records the invitation in his own published history Shaolin Wushu.
On what happened next, the three branches interlock. The Wu family account holds that he taught over forty practitioners at the temple, including the masters Shi Dechan and Shi Degen.
The Dejian branch’s record agrees on the forty, and adds the limit: unable to find a suitable candidate, Wu Shanlin left after three years without teaching XinYiBa itself.
The Yang Guiwu line’s book is blunter still: he judged the monks of poor character, taught only basic movements, and gave the complete transmission, XinYiBa included, to a handful of chosen disciples outside the walls, among them Shi Degen and Yang Guiwu. The supreme form never returned to the monastic institution.
It stayed with the successors Wu Shanlin chose himself.
What does XinYiBa actually involve?
XinYiBa is described in the lineage as one form that contains many. The Wu family historical text preserves the structural claim that the system is twelve sequences that condense to one: the mother grasp (mu ba, 母把), a single foundational stance with infinite variation. Shifu Wu Nanfang places it precisely:
The foundation and the goal, in one breath. Gulun Kung Fu is what a practitioner learns; XinYiBa is what the learning is for.
The shape of the mother grasp is the hoeing movement from which the lineage took its older name: rise, draw breath, drop weight, fall like splitting a brick, root through the legs, release force from the centre.
As the Wu family practice rhyme preserved by Wu Shanlin puts it: XinYiBa has simple stances; it is a Shaolin internal kung fu.
Wu Shanlin, recorded in Chan-Wu-Yi (Sanhuangzhai)
Shifu Wu Nanfang describes the live end of that scale in nine characters:
Power in XinYiBa comes from rotation, alignment, and unified breath, not from muscular contraction. A turn of the hip transmits through the spine, through the shoulder, through the hand. The whole body participates in any single action.
The lineage’s names for the two governing principles are plain: softness taken to its extreme gives birth to hardness, and Hunyuan Yiqi (混元一气), the unified primordial qi of a body working as one piece.
XinYiBa cannot be approached without the foundation. Gulun Kung Fu begins every practitioner with standing meditation (Zhan Zhuang), dantian breathing, and the foundational stances. Years of that work precede the XinYiBa form itself. What the twelve sequences then do, over years more, is subtract.
Xing Kong, “Ten Characteristics of Shaolin Gong Fu”
Hu Zhengsheng, teaching the form on camera, compresses the same point twice over:
What does Shifu Wu Nanfang say XinYiBa is for?
The central definitional passage Shifu gives reduces the practice to two characters: wuxin (悟心), realising the heart.
In this reading XinYiBa is not separable from Chan. The form is the method by which Chan is realised through the body rather than through seated meditation alone. The destination is the classical Chan goal: ming xin jian xing (明心见性), illuminate the mind, see your original nature. Shifu compresses it to six words:
Beyond the technical mechanics, Shifu returns again and again to what the practice does to the practitioner:
The lineage holds that XinYiBa is taught only when skill and that heart have been developed together.
Is XinYiBa a set of movements or a level of attainment?
Both positions circulate among practitioners, and the dispute is real. One school of thought holds that XinYiBa is a level: the highest stage of kung fu, reachable in principle through any art practised deeply enough.
The other holds that it is a specific body of movements, taught late and to few, with a reputation for being dangerous to learn wrongly. The lineage’s own sources hold both, and they fit together without strain.
Shifu Wu Nanfang teaches the first reading, and he has been asked the question head-on. Everyone everywhere claims their kung fu is the best, a student challenged him in a recorded teaching; who says XinYiBa is the highest?
Later in the same conversation he gives the dispute its answer in a single word. XinYiBa is a tongcheng (通称), a general name:
The monastic branch holds the same position. Master Shi Dejian, 18th-generation holder of the Sanhuangzhai line, defines it as a summit:
Master Shi Dejian, recorded in The Shaolin Chanwuyi (2010)
The same record states the cross-school reach outright:
The movements are equally real, and other schools within the tradition lead with them. The form exists: twelve sequences condensing to the mother grasp, with body mechanics descended from spear work and farm labour. The Research Society’s book counts them bluntly:
The Essentials of Shaolin Kung Fu
An old saying inside the temple, preserved in the Sanhuangzhai record, marks the difference:
The same record preserves the entry conditions Zhanmo set at Shigou Temple:
Yang Guiwu’s teaching, printed in the Research Society’s book, is the plainest statement of the guarded-movements view on record:
Yang Guiwu, The Essentials of Shaolin Kung Fu
Shifu confirms the fierce reputation from his own side. Asked why practitioners call XinYiBa the most ruthless of Shaolin’s arts:
And in the same breath he denies that the movements alone are the thing:
Wu Shanlin’s summary, kept in the sister line’s record, cuts between the two readings:
The question also arrives at the school in person. New students at Gulun Kung Fu ask when XinYiBa will be taught, as if one set of movements were XinYiBa and the rest merely foundation. A student put exactly that to Shifu: are some movements Gulun Kung Fu, and other movements XinYiBa?
When the same when-do-we-start question reached him again in July 2026, he answered with an aphorism in the lineage’s old vocabulary, where the chui (锤), the hammer, is the fist work and the ba (把) is XinYiBa:
A beginner pressed the same point from the other end: do brand-new students practise XinYiBa at all?
The question was put to Shifu one final time in July 2026, days before this article was published: some say XinYiBa is a state, the highest reach of Bagua and Tai Chi alike; others say it is a set of special movements. Which is it? His answer holds both without strain:
Asked about the single movement most often demonstrated as XinYiBa today, he places it without demoting it:
The two readings meet where Shifu says they do. The movements are the method; the state is what the method produces; at the end the two are indistinguishable:
His last word on it dissolves the question of whose XinYiBa is the real one:
The monastic line keeps a sentence that explains why no two look alike:
Within Gulun Kung Fu the movements remain the vehicle, guarded as the lineage has always guarded them. The form is the door. XinYiBa, finally, is the name of what is on the other side, whichever door an artist walks through.
How is XinYiBa different from Xingyi Quan and Wudang internal arts?
XinYiBa and the civilian internal arts share family resemblance. Whole-body rotation, force rising from the dantian, breath unified with form, power released from the centre: the underlying mechanics overlap with Xinyi Liuhe Quan (the Henan tradition associated with Ji Longfeng) and with the older internal Shaolin material from which Wudang and Tai Chi later drew.
The Research Society’s book describes the kinship from its own side. Shaolin’s XinYiBa, it observes, kept a handful of movements close to the late-Ming spear methods, while sister lines from the same source developed further: the Luoyang branch of Ma Xueli (1714–1790) and the Dai family line from which Xingyi Quan later grew.
On the internal-external labels themselves, Master Xingxing (Zhang Qinghe), who carried the monastic line, kept a blunt correction:
The manual line he cites is the same sentence Wu Shanlin’s practice rhyme preserves in the Wu family. Two branches, one sentence.
The historical relationships are contested.
The Yonghua Hall lineage preserves transmission stories linking XinYiBa to several of these later traditions; the rigorous historiography of Tang Hao (1930), Xu Zhen (1930), Stanley Henning, and Peter Lorge reads the relationships as convergent rather than ancestor-descendant, a late-Qing cross-pollination between Shaolin practice and the civilian internal arts of Henan and Shanxi.
The Bodhidharma and Yue Fei origin claims that circulate widely in popular sources are decisively rejected by serious scholarship.
Shifu Wu Nanfang draws the distinction at the level of method:
Asked to rank the traditions against each other, he declines the game entirely:
The honest position is that XinYiBa is a sister tradition to several civilian internal arts, distinct from each, and the strongest claim that can be made is the one the lineage’s own teaching makes: Shaolin itself is Chan kung fu.
How can XinYiBa be learned today?
Foundation first.
Gulun Kung Fu does not teach XinYiBa to beginners. Practitioners spend their first two years on standing meditation, dantian breathing, the eight foundational exercises, and the basic stances. The form itself is opened only when the body has been brought to the state where it can hold what XinYiBa carries.
There is no moment when the teaching switches from ordinary movements to XinYiBa movements. The foundation ripens into the form. Shifu Wu Nanfang set the benchmark for one of his own students in exactly those terms:
The sister line kept the same rule generations earlier. Wu Youde, Wu Shanlin’s son, put it in one sentence:
Shifu is unsentimental about how rare the full transmission has become:
Three pathways
Shifu is plain about who the form itself is for:
Frequently Asked Questions
Is XinYiBa related to Xinyi Liuhe Quan and Ji Longfeng?
Shifu Wu Nanfang holds that XinYiBa is Shaolin Temple’s own: passed down from Wuyan Zhengdao in the Ming Wanli reign, with no outside influence on the Wu line. A relationship with the civilian Xinyi arts “may exist”, he says, but “cannot be determined”. The document published by the Shaolin XinYiBa Research Society records a different account, tracing a chain from the spear master Ji Longfeng (b. 1620) through his Dengfeng disciple Zheng Wukui (b. 1660) into the Shaolin district, with Xinyi Liuhe Quan descending from the same source through the Luoyang line of Ma Xueli (1714–1790). Historians read the family of Xinyi arts as convergent cross-pollination. All three positions are on the record; no single chain is proven.
Who was Wang Zhicheng?
Wang Zhicheng (王志诚, b. 1680) was a martial artist from Xin’an county, Henan, active during the Qianlong reign, and a disciple of Zheng Wukui. He wrote down the theory of XinYiBa and Liuhequan he had received; his early-Qing manuscripts, including the Ten Methods of boxing, passed through Wu Shanlin’s circle to Yang Guiwu and then to Hu Zhengsheng. The Shaolin XinYiBa Research Society’s book The Essentials of Shaolin Kung Fu is built on his writings.
What is the difference between the Wu family line and Hu Zhengsheng’s line?
Both descend from Wu Shanlin (1875–1970). The Wu family bloodline passed within the family at Yangshu Miao village to Shifu Wu Nanfang, the 5th-generation inheritor and 19th-generation Yonghua Hall holder. Hu Zhengsheng’s line runs through Wu Shanlin’s disciples Shi Degen (1914–1970) and Yang Guiwu (1931–2010), and holds the early-Qing manuscripts of Wang Zhicheng, published through the Shaolin XinYiBa Research Society. Two branches, one root: each documents the same early history independently.
What is the Shaolin XinYiBa Research Society?
The Shaolin XinYiBa Research Society (少林心意把研究会) was founded in 2012 by Hu Zhengsheng to fulfil the last wish of his master Yang Guiwu. Its work is the research, preservation, and sharing of traditional Shaolin and Xinyi boxing. It published The Essentials of Shaolin Kung Fu, the translation of the Wang Zhicheng manuscripts and Yang Guiwu’s writings prepared by Hu Zhengsheng and Joël Achermann.
Is XinYiBa a form or a level of kung fu?
Both, and Shifu Wu Nanfang has answered the question directly: XinYiBa is a tongcheng (通称), the general name for the highest state in any kung fu, whether Shaolin, Xingyi, Bagua or Tai Chi. Within Gulun Kung Fu it is also a specific guarded practice: twelve sequences condensing to a single mother grasp, taught late and only to selected disciples. Gulun Kung Fu is the foundation; XinYiBa is the state it arrives at. In Shifu’s words: “Gulun Kung Fu, arrived at that state, is Gulun XinYiBa.” And in his last recorded answer on the question, from July 2026: “It has many factors. It is not one single aspect.”
Who teaches XinYiBa today?
The Gulun branch of XinYiBa is taught by Shifu Wu Nanfang, 5th-generation Wu family inheritor and 19th-generation Yonghua Hall holder, at the school on Songshan Mountain in Henan, China. The parallel monastic branch is taught by Shi Dejian at Sanhuangzhai Monastery. Both lines trace to Wu Shanlin (1875–1970) and share the same Yonghua Hall foundation from 1592.
What is the Shaolin Mountain Gate Test?
A historical Shaolin rule: an inheritor of the direct XinYiBa transmission could not return to lay life without fighting his way out of the temple’s main gate, defeating the monks guarding each pass along the route. The Research Society’s book calls the examiners the “eighteen guardians” of the temple. The last person on record to pass the test was Wu Gulun in 1869. His departure took the orthodox XinYiBa transmission into the Wu family bloodline at Yangshu Miao village, where it has remained for five generations.
Sources
This article rests on lineage documents recorded independently by three branches of the same transmission. The first is the Wu family’s own record: Shifu Wu Nanfang’s recorded interviews and teachings, and the family historical texts held at Yangshu Miao.
The second is The Essentials of Shaolin Kung Fu (Shaolin XinYiBa Research Society, 1st edition): original documents by Wang Zhicheng and Yang Guiwu, translated and interpreted by Hu Zhengsheng and Joël Achermann. The third is the Dejian branch’s record: Chan-Wu-Yi: The Way of Sanhuangzhai (Master Shi Dejian) and Agnes S. Chan, The Shaolin Chanwuyi (Chanwuyi Foundation, 2010). Where the branches differ, the article says so.
External references: the Shaolin Temple official site (shaolin.org.cn) and Meir Shahar, The Shaolin Monastery (University of Hawai’i Press, 2008).
For readers who want the branches first-hand: Hu Zhengsheng teaches in Dengfeng and Shi Dejian’s line is at Sanhuangzhai Monastery; their schools maintain their own sites. Training with Shifu Wu Nanfang, in person on Songshan Mountain, is at Train in China.