Chinese boxing but with Japanese names

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I think if you look at Shorinji Kempo it is hard to see anything that resembles Chinese arts

yes thats what th chinese said too, when the japanese shorinji kenpo and its story came to their knowlege....as i have read some time ago doshin so met an learned from a monk at the shaolin temple.....the same monk(same name) wang xiangzhai met that monk too at his visit to the shaplin temple..according to wangs story, the elderly monk was the only one at the temple that knew some boxing at that time, and only two exercises from the xingyiba system, and wang was not impressed.......later xingyiba has been "recreated" at the shaolin.......so what doshin so learned at shaolin was probably at most the two exercises wang was not impressed about.......i would guess the basic block straight punch drill and their ready(block/guard) stance in shorinji kenpo are what doshin so picked up at shaolin, the rest is karate kicks and aikijutsu mixed in.

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In Japan these days it seems that Shorinji Kempo groups themselves say from the start that they are not related to shaolinquan.

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In Japan these days it seems that Shorinji Kempo groups themselves say from the start that they are not related to shaolinquan.

Don’t know exactly when in the 80’s when the shorinji Kempo Organisation sent delegations to China to show the real Shaolin boxing. Some say they where invited to reintroduce Shaolin boxing. Anyhow, the shorinji kempo Organisation became more humbled in their claims after their China visits.....in the early 80’s there where an Japanese guy in my hometown who was/is a shorinji kempo guy but he called his school/boxing -North Shaolin KungFu..the school is still around, but the Japanese teacher now residing in Denmark and is now basically all into Buddhism rather than martial arts....however back then he was an very accomplished martial artist and many of his students reach high skill.

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Yeah - with more information available to everyone through the Internet now, it is good that people are becoming more accurate in their claims. Shorinji Kempo is fine as its own martial art, that goes back to Doshin So.

In a way, the Japanese teacher being more into Buddhism now is very "Shaolin" of him - since Shaolin is the birthplace of Zen after all, and really Shaolin martial arts were not the "main course" so to say, but just a kind of a side dish.

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In a way, the Japanese teacher being more into Buddhism now is very "Shaolin" of him - since Shaolin is the birthplace of Zen after all, and really Shaolin martial arts were not the "main course" so to say, but just a kind of a side dish.

Yes, that’s what I thought when I got the latest info on that Shorinji Kempo teacher...going back to the core of the Shaolin......However I then to think/(guess) that Doshin So with his Shorinji Kempo was also more into Buddhism/Zen in their daily practice than what many other of the “modern” Japanese martial arts where ?

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They do like to say that their martial art is "katsujinken" (life-person-fist).

It is of course fairly easy to get into Zen in Japan for those that are inclined (temples around every corner).

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Just an update for language/MA nerds.

I found a fairly extensive online Okinawa language dictionary: http://ryukyu-lang.lib.u-ryukyu.ac.jp/
Of course it is only in Japanese and requires Japanese ability to read or use.

But anyway, I did a little research and my guess now is that Okinawan karate kata names are NOT in Okinawan language, but rather Okinawan attempts at pronouncing Chinese names that they learned. (This is similar to how we now attempt to call CMA sets in the original languages.)

Many of the kata names do not have known Chinese characters for them, so we can only guess; however, the few that we know the meanings for we can compare with the original Chinese sounds. So, which kind of Chinese was it? Well, comparing with Hokkien numbers gives totally different sounds - so that does not match. In the mid 1800s, the new Beijing version of Mandarin became dominant - so I think that those were the sounds used by whoever taught the Okinawans CMA back then. As an older version of Mandarin, it may have been before the g/k shift to j/ch sounds. Also, as a southern province, they probably pronounced the sh as s - just like today.

So the good news is that you can somewhat try to "reverse" guess the meanings of kata names if you know Mandarin Chinese - but of course it will still be a very big long shot (also noting that even the same kata names tend to vary in pronunciation, too). The easiest to go on are the numbers: typically in kata, nii (2), san (3), uu (5), ruu (6), paa (8), sei (10), etc. (So for example maybe Ubo was 5-something.)

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Thanks for that link, I will see if I can make something out of it . yes many Okinawan Karate Kata was named copying the sound of the Chinese works and names, later when recorded(written down)it became how it became..The katas Kushanku and Wanshu for example are named after two respectively Chinese envoys to Okinawa who supposedly knew boxing, later on researchers have tried to make out the Chinese names