Shaolin History Su Kong Tai Jin
Ie Chang Ming
Elder Master Garry Mullins
Associate Master Tommy Hitchcock
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Bodidharma (Tamo in Chinese) traveled to China to see the Emperor. The Emperor had ordered Buddhist monks of a local Temple to translate Buddhist texts from Sanskrit to Chinese. His intent was to allow more of the general populace to practice this belief system. The Emperor thought this to be a noble project, but while he believed this to be his path to Nirvana, Tamo disagreed. Tamo's view on Buddhism was that you could not achieve your goal just through good actions performed by others in your name. At this point the Emperor and Tamo decided to part ways and Tamo traveled to the nearby Buddhist temple to meet with the monks who were translating the Buddhist texts.
The temple had been built years before in the remains of a forest that had been cleared. At the time of the building of the temple, the emperor's gardeners had also planted new trees. Thus the temple was named "young (or new) forest," (Shaolin in Mandarin, Sil Lum in Cantonese). When Tamo joined the monks, he observed that they were in poor physical condition. They spent hours each day hunched over tables where they transcribed handwritten texts. Consequently, the Shaolin monks lacked the physical and mental stamina needed to perform even the most basic of Buddhist meditation practices. Because they were unable to remain awake during meditaion, Bodidharma introduced a series of 49 excersises known as the I-CHIN-CHING(Book of Muscle and Tendon Changes), designed to both enhanced ch'i flow and build strength. Each of the 49 excersises would be performed 49 times daily. These sets were based on the movements of the 18 main animals in Indo-Chinese iconography (e.g., tiger, deer, leopard, 
cobra, snake, dragon, etc.) These exercises toughened the monks and allowed them to meditate for greater periods and made them physically stronger and able to defend themselves. Thus I-CHIN-CHING may have been the foundation of Shaolin Kung Fu. In the 200 years following Bodidharma's stay at Shaolin, the fighting arts became a great tradition in the temple. During the Tang Dynasty(618 A.D.), 13 fighting monks from the Shaolin Temple were said to have saved the Tang Emperor from an entire division (somewhere between 10,000 and 30,000 soldiers depending on the era) of the ruling Sui Dynasty's army. When in power the Tang Emperor granted the temple favors and great tracts of land. The number of monks at Shaolin increased to nearly 2000. Over the past 1500 years Chinese Shaolin Kung Fu has spread across China as well as the world, eventually reaching the United States. This long process began with Su Kong Tai JIn.