The Shaolin Monastery: History, Religion, and the Chinese Martial Arts

Meir Shahar is a scholar of Chinese religion and martial arts history, and this University of Hawaii Press book is his scholarly history of the Shaolin monastery, covering both its Buddhist religious life and the historical development of its martial arts tradition. Its strength is treating the two as genuinely connected rather than separate subjects, tracing documented evidence for when and how Shaolin monks actually took up martial training and how that practice related to the monastery's Chan Buddhist identity, correcting popular legend with archival and textual evidence. Its limit is that it focuses on Shaolin specifically, so a claim about Chinese Buddhist monastic life more broadly, at a monastery without this particular martial tradition, needs a source with that different focus.