| Travel Study Taijiquan (tai chi or taiqi) or Shaolin Gongfu at Buddhist Temple in China
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|  | | Unidentified Buddhist Monk, Abbot Shi Yanfo (centre), Taijiquan Student Ken Sproul |
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This is not a commercial website. I am a professor of Chinese history and culture and I want to share my unique travel experience with others interested in China travel and study.
In the Summer 2005 I spent two weeks studying Taijiquan (also called tai chi chaun or tai qi) at the Fawang Buddhist Temple on Song Shan Mountain in Deng Feng, Henan Province, China.
Martial arts enthusiasts may be familiar with the Songshan Mountain range as it is the home of the world famous Shaolin Temple, the birthplace of both Zen (Chen) Buddhism and Chinese martial arts, also referred to as gongfu (kung fu) although the term 'wushu' is more accurate.
But Songshan Mountain is also the home of a Buddhist temple that is more than 400 years older than the Shaolin Temple, Fawang Temple. Fawang Temple is the second oldest Buddhist Temple in China, only three years younger than the parent temple in the ancient capital, Luoyang.
What else is special about Fawang Temple? It is the only temple on the mountain where one can study martial arts. Thanks to the fame of the Shaolin Temple, there are about 85 martial arts schools in the city of Deng Feng but martial arts are no longer practiced at the Shaolin Temple.
But martial arts are practiced at Fawang Temple and I spent two weeks there amongst much younger students who were studying northern style Shaolin fighting under Master Liu, a former soldier-monk of the Shaolin Temple. While the students, some of whom have been studying there for three years, practiced the flying acrobatics of Shaolin wushu, I studied the more gentle form of Chen-style Taijiquan.
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 | | Fawang Temple - 2nd oldest Buddhist Temple in China |
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If you’ve been to China before you’ve probably seen one temple too many already. Tour packages seem to be heavy on temples. But what’s different about Fawang Temple is that there are simply almost no tourists. One day, we went to the Shaolin Temple and you couldn’t see the monks for the tourists.
Who is this trip for?
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> If you are interested in the martial arts even as a novice.
> If you’d like an active yet relaxing vacation.
> If you want to get a feel for the real China away from the tourist-heavy areas. I saw fellow Caucasians only twice in two weeks!
> If it’s your first trip to China and you can tack on a 3rd week at the end to do the usual tourist thing maybe 3 days in Beijing and three or four days in Shanghai.
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| For other questions you might have:
Trip FAQ
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| Or, contact me directly
here
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 | | Practicing Taijiquan with Master Liu |
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|  | | A temple moon-gate |
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|  | | Young Shaolin student flying |
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| * There are several ways of rendering taijiquan and I will spell them out as it will help the rankings of this site: taijiquan, tai chi, taichi chaun, taichi ch'aun, tai qi, taiqi and probably others.)
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