"If your primary interest is tournament skills, I advise you to seek your training elsewhere! Most of what you will learn here is too lethal for tournament use. I teach the ancient system of Shao-lin Do, 'Art of survival, not of sport.' As did the immortals, we should learn to destroy, so that we may preserve! It is a way of truth. The knowledge I offer you is not an athletic training, it is a sacred trust."

- Shao-lin Grandmaster Sin Kwang Thé

"Shao-lin" literally means "young forest" and refers to the fact that the original Shao-lin Temple in Honan Province was built in the midst of a new forest of cypress and pine. "Kung Fu" literally means "Mastery through time and effort". Hence, "Shao-lin Kung Fu" is a term that describes the full variety of martial skills that were developed and preserved at the Shao-lin Temples over the last 1500 years.

The Buddhist monks at the original Shao-lin Temple began their physical training in the 6th century when Bodhidharma (Chinese: Ta Mo), the 28th Patriarch of orthodox Buddhism, taught them the I Chin Ching (Muscle Tendon Change Classic) in order to give the monks the physical endurance to stay awake and alert through their long breathing and meditation sessions.

The Monks expanded and developed this idea of physical and martial training over the next 1500 years into an amazingly broad repertoire of fighting styles and training practices. Wandering Shao-lin priests would also collect styles and martial innovations during their travels and bring them back to the temples, adding these outside developments to the collection of systems already practiced at the temples. Hence the Shao-lin art we practice today is the living result of one and a half millennia of refinement, development and preservation by innumerable generations of Shao-lin.