Originally Posted by
RenDaHai
There is. I say so. I actually went to this place. When I first went there there was no bus and no good road so I had to walk from the nearest town. It is well up in the mountains to the north of the temple.
History of the village says it is so. The villagers say it is so. The 90 y.o master, the village training hall with dents in the floor like the SHaolin temple, this tells me it is so. History of the other villages near it and even far say it is so. History from the Shaolin temple say it is so. The written Quan pu (manuals) they have say it is so. The language of the manuals implies it is so. The style is too different to be a recent digression and yet too similar to be not Shaolin Hong Quan (and if you have seen how similar modern wushu styles are, you know this is not a recent thing to change the method dramatically). You can literally SEE the evolution of Hong Quan when you compare this style to the current and to the other villages (one of which is the perfect intermediate, inheriting its kung fu from a monk fleeing the massacre in 1641). Shaolin culture is engraved into the mountains. Every village, every tradition. These things take many generations to form.
This style won't fit your preconception of what Shaolin looks like, because these people are not pro MA. They are farmers. They don't do this style for someone else to watch. They do it because it is the culture of their clan passed on for many generations.
Our society owes everything it is to our culture. But because it is hard to analyse, hard to know what the essence of culture is, it is disregarded. And in this time when traditional culture is crumbling beneath our feet, it is wonderful to see it preserved somewhere, and experience it.