Depends on how you define boxing
Quote:
Originally Posted by
bawang
nope. shaolin didn't start training boxing until 1600s
This is the documented beginning, but there may well have been some form of defense established from it's inception. Such may be true of all medieval monasteries. They all kept treasures that needed to be defended. While it's true that Kung Fu as we know it doesn't appear in the lit until around the 16th, defensive methods have surely been with us for significantly longer.
Shaolin temple's official records
invalid ideas, like bawang's, about Shaolin and other Chinese martial arts history and traditions mostly originate from researching from afar, based on insufficient and sometimes improper resources. Shaolin and other ancestral schools have always had big libraries recording the important facts and happenings which could be operative in their tradition. most such texts have always been kept like treasures. one major text has been "Shaolin Quan Pu (少林拳谱)," which were officially compiled under the supervision of abbot FuJu, during the gatherings of the masters of the 18 families in about 960 AD. they documented the details of their compiled kung fu styles in that manual, which consisted of tens of volumes, and kept it in the temple to be updated generation by generation by the senior monks. though, of course, the narration style of the manual is expected to be the Buddhist style, which tends to narrate the facts from a unifying, generalized viewpoint, the text is the main source of the history and tradition of the temple, its kung fu, and people. besides this Quan Pu as a major resource, there are other such major and hundreds of minor resources of such importance in the temple and its related places.
now, most the people, whether inside or outside China, don't have access to such texts but to far less reliable texts found here and there, mostly even in the other provinces, which are hundreds of kilometers far from the temple region, which have gained familiarization with the temple hundreds of years later, and may even haven't had any direct or strong linkage with the temple, its people, or kung fu.
the "Encyclopedia of Shaolin Wushu" by monk Shi Deqian, which is referenced in this forum very often, used parts of the survived copied parts of that 'Shaolin Quan Pu' manual, which were copied by Shi Deqian's master, Shi Yongxiang, before the 1928 destruction. When talking about the traditional styles of Shaolin kung fu, or the eminent monks' biographies, the monks, the Encyclopedia, instructional resources, etc, often reference 'Shaolin Quan Pu.' those survived copied parts of the manual were given to Shi Deqian by Shi Yongxiang in the 1980s, and the book has recently been publicized. i'm aware of 8 volumes so far:
The Shaolin Quan Pu, 8 vols: http://item.jd.com/10753524.html
i see no way in which those resources with outspread bits of major or minor information are, by any reliable means, more reliable than Shaolin temple's own official account of its kung fu, history, and traditions.