Shi Zhenxu

Shi Zhenxu (釋貞緒, 1893–1955), born Li Zhengyin, with the courtesy name Yaizong and the self-given sobriquet Rufeng, was the 43rd patriarch of the Yonghua Hall dharma line at Shaolin and, in the temple’s own numbering, its 30th abbot. He held the monastery through its burnt decades: the end of the monk-soldiers, the fire of 1928, the rebuilding, the war years, and the transmission of the lineage to the Su- and De-generation masters who carried Shaolin boxing into the present.[1][6]

A name and a generation

His family name was Li; the monastic name Zhenxu fixes his place in the 70-character Caodong dharma poem of the temple — 福慧智子覚…湛寂淳貞素 — where he stands in the 贞 generation, the line below the 淳 generation of his tonsuring teacher Chunzhi, and above the 素 generation of his dharma heir Suxi.[6] He is the abbot under whom the temple’s martial teaching survived between Henglin, its warrior-abbot, and the famous monk-fighters of the next two generations.

Ordained at six

The temple and provincial accounts agree he was tonsured in 1899, the 25th year of the Guangxu reign, at Longxing Temple (龙兴寺) in his home county — a sub-temple of Shaolin — at the age of six, drought having ruined the family.[7] A minority of genealogical websites give 1903; the reign-year formula in the standard sources fits 1899, and the archive follows the mainstream dating. In 1920 he went up to the mountain with his teacher, entered the Shaolin Temple itself, studied martial arts under the abbot Henglin (恒林大和尚), and received the Caodong dharma transmission as heir to the Yonghua Hall line.[6][7]

The guard regiment

The Republican era began with a resurrection of the temple’s old soldier-monk role. In 1912 the Yonghua Hall re-formed the monk-soldiers as the Shaolin Guard Regiment: Henglin (恒林) as commandant, the famous Miaoxing (妙兴) as his deputy, Zhenxu as chief instructor of arms — drilling the sangha, patrolling the precincts, guarding the temple and the surrounding villages against bandits.[7] The arrangement did not last. Henglin died in 1923; Miaoxing, his successor as abbot, carried the regiment into alliance with a northern warlord and its fighting, ending the temple’s armed autonomy; and Miaoxing himself was killed in a warlord engagement in 1927. At thirty-four, Zhenxu was made the temple’s 30th abbot.[6][7]

Abbot amid ashes

A year later the temple burned. Troops under the warlord Shi Yousan (石友三) set fire to Shaolin’s main halls in 1928 — the catastrophe that frames every account of this period.[12] Zhenxu took brief refuge at his sister’s village home in Gongxian before returning to organize recovery.[11] The rebuilding consumed the abbotship: repairs to more than two hundred rooms — the First Patriarch Hall (初祖庵), funded in 1930 with the monk Sudian (素典) and others, the abbot’s quarters, the Standing Snow Pavilion — and roughly 200 cypresses planted along the axis from the Heavenly Kings Hall to the Dharma Hall.[1][11] Temple records of the unsettled years give him the officer-titles 监院 (temple steward, from 1929) and 当家 (bursar-head, from 1938) alongside the abbacy; the lists reckon his tenure 1927–1955, while the titles moved with the post-fire reorganization of the sangha.[6] He also organized a monks’ martial training group and, crossing the wall between monastic and lay lines, brought the returned-to-worlds Shaolin fighter Wu Shanlin in to help train it.[7]

Schools inside the temple

Zhenxu’s quietest innovation was educational. He had already founded a temple primary school when, in 1941, he co-established Shaolin Middle School and served as its chairman; he hired teachers without regard to their politics — among them the Communist underground member Wei Nianming (韦念铭) — and remitted the fees of poor families, opening the temple’s gates to village children.[1][3][11] In famine years he is recorded opening the temple granary to the destitute.[3]

The temple and the war

In October 1944 the Yuxi Anti-Japanese Independent Detachment (豫西抗日独立支队) under Pi Dingjun (皮定均) passed through Songshan. Wei Nianming, then working openly and secretly with the temple, explained the Eighth Route Army’s program to the abbot, and the temple’s posture shifted from wary neutrality to active support.[5] Zhenxu sent five students to the Eighth Route Army, and allowed disciples including Suxiang and Xingxiang to join the anti-Japanese detachments; the burnt monastery became a way-station for cadres moving north and south.[5][11] In early 1945 the Shaolin Anti-Japanese District Government was organized in the temple’s shadow, with Wei Nianming as its head and the monk Shi Yonggui (释永贵) as deputy — a remarkable civic role for a community still rebuilding from the fire.[1][11]

The martial line

The transmission was fist and weapon first: liuhe fist (六和拳), long-arm fist (通臂拳), cannon fist (炮拳), the great and small flood fists (大洪拳、小洪拳), Shaolin linked fist (少林连环拳), arhat fist (罗汉拳), and the small martial set; the spring-and-autumn saber, dragon-spring sword, hooks, double canes, the eighteen golden halberds, the staff-on-a-chain and shield-and-saber.[3][7] His four celebrated devices were the thousand-jin kick, the wind-boring kick, the iron body-lean and the wheel palm, used in combination at close quarters. The sources record, and the archive repeats as reported feat rather than physics, that he drilled the iron body-lean nightly against a pillar of the Thousand Buddha Hall (千佛殿) until the dust shook loose, and that he kicked the nose of a temple bell of some two hundred jin more than a pace across the floor.[3][7] His two transmitted sayings are the method and the morality of the school: 人能于我者学之，我能于人者授之 — learn what others can, teach what you can — and 习武心要正：一作国杰，二为民除恶，三健身延寿, the heart in training must be upright: first serve the nation, second rid the people of harm, third keep the body whole.[3]

Writings

The one work securely attached to him is the 交手三十诀, the Thirty Measures for Engagement, a short combat manual on combining head, hands, arms, feet and legs in fighting.[3] The 打擂秘诀, 臀部制人法 and 点穴旨要 appear in some accounts as his — the body-lean and point-locus texts consistent with the recorded curriculum — but they are not visible in any published edition and are best read as titles circulating within the temple’s manuscript culture.[9] Later printed collections of “essential Shaolin combat verses” carry material of this family; descent from Zhenxu’s manuals is possible, not provable.[9]

The disciples

The securely documented circle divides by register. His dharma heir was Shi Suxi (释素喜, entered discipleship 1937), 44th patriarch of the Yonghua Hall, later the temple’s head monk and honorary abbot, called the boxing king of Shaolin in the gazetteer literature.[1][3] Suxiang (素祥) was counted his long-standing senior disciple and joined the anti-Japanese brigade and later the army. Degen (德根) — tonsured at six at Gongxian’s Chaomi Temple, returned to Shaolin at sixteen in 1930 to train under Zhenxu — became the emblematic warrior-monk of the mid-century temple.[3] Xingxiang (行香) joins the war record; the fighters Xingshu (行书, Diao Junqing 刁俊卿) and Xingfang (行方, Nie Zhiyuan 聂志元) studied across several masters, taking Zhenxu’s grappling into repertoires built first under other teachers. His lay nephew Chai Zonghan (柴宗汉), a disciple from nine, kept his deathbed.[1][3] Beyond this circle stand the many 素-generation monks of the Republican rolls — 素满、素会、素云、素光 among dozens — whose relation to him ranges from formal discipleship to mere generation; the name-poem fixes generation, not teacher.[6]

Claims examined

Two famous attributions fail on inspection, and the archive states why rather than repeating them. Haiteng (海灯), the Sichuanese monk who later built a global reputation on the claim of training at Shaolin, is listed in some secondary accounts as Zhenxu’s disciple, naming him “Rufeng.” The temple’s elders held that Haiteng first put up a lodging-bowl at Shaolin in 1946 and that no earlier discipleship was known; the geography of the 1920s claims is implausible; and the temple has never ratified the account. What can be written with the sources is that Haiteng sought instruction from Zhenxu — accounts place the request in 1936 or 1946 — not that he was his ordination-line disciple.[8][9] The general Xu Shiyou (许世友) lived at Shaolin roughly 1914–1921 as a lay boarder, before Zhenxu’s return to the mountain; the Dengfeng historical-materials study identifies his temple teachers among the 素 generation. The honest sentence is that Xu was formed in the guard-regiment era of the temple, not that he was Zhenxu’s student.[4] Other names popularly attached to the abbot by commemorative literature — no reliable record supports them — are simply not carried here.[8]

The line that reaches Liang Yiquan

The bridge to this archive’s modern Shaolin page runs through the name-poem. Liang Yiquan — heir of the sixteenth generation of the Liang family’s camel-cliff martial line — took the temple name Shi Suyi, placing him in the 素 generation and therefore, by the dharma registers, in the same generation as Suxi under Zhenxu.[7] The abbot’s upright-heart maxim, his schools-inside-the-temple program, and his habit of open transmission reappear, generation-skipped but unmistakable, in Liang’s 文武兼修 curriculum and in the first professional wushu school of the People’s Republic. One lamp passing to another: the temple’s dharma line and the village’s family line met in a single teacher-student bond, and out of that meeting came the modern history.[1][6]

Cautions

• Abbot-list numbering. The 30th-abbot reckoning is the temple’s own lineage count; other histories number the abbots differently. The dates 1927–1955 follow the standard lists, with the 监院/当家 titles in the same years read as offices within the post-fire reorganization rather than contradictions of the abbacy.
• Ordination year. 1899 (age six) is followed; 1903 appears in genealogical websites and is marked the minority reading.
• Haiteng. Instruction, not discipleship, is what the evidence supports; the “Rufeng” identification is his own later account.
• Xu Shiyou. Formed at Shaolin before Zhenxu’s arrival; not his student.
• Writings. Only the 交手三十诀 is securely attached; the other three titles are 据记载 within temple manuscript culture.
• Feats. The bell-kick and pillar-lean are transmitted accounts of martial skill, recorded with sources, not measured claims.
• Burial. The 中国少林武术大全 places his grave on the slope southeast of the temple, not in the pagoda forest.

The record continues

The temple’s rebuilt generations — Suxi’s dharma line, Degen’s martial line, and the lay-and-monastic teachers they trained — await their own records in this archive. The Dengfeng side of the story continues at Liang Yiquan.