Shaolin Greeting

Shown above is the standard Shaolin greeting with which most Kung Fu styles start and end their forms. When I asked various people what they thought what this hand form meant, most did not really know and thought it was just something that looked nice just like when you cross the hands down and up in the Wing Chun “Siu Lim Tao” form. They said you do that to look cool.

When I studied Hung style in Toronto the teacher said that the left hand represents the scholar, which you see in various photos of monks, and the right closed fist represents the warrior. The words martial art have two words MARTIAL meaning military, fighting, warrior and ART which is the intellectual, aesthetic, beauty and educated side. Some of the deepest martial arts thinkers were both warriors and also great philosophers whose words of wisdom are still studied today. The case in points are famous writers such as Sun Tsu and Musashi.

From Wikipedia

Sun Tzu was a Chinese general, military strategist, writer and philosopher who lived in the Eastern Zhou period of ancient China. Sun Tzu is traditionally credited as the author of The Art of War, an influential work of military strategy that has affected Western and East Asian philosophy and military thinking.

Miyamoto Musashi, also known as Shinmen Takezō, Miyamoto Bennosuke or, by his Buddhist name, Niten Dōraku, was a Japanese swordsman, philosopher, strategist, writer and rōnin.

The Ming dynasty (/mɪŋ/), officially the Great Ming, was the ruling dynasty of China from 1368 to 1644 following the collapse of the Mongol-led Yuan dynasty. The Ming dynasty was the last imperial dynasty of China ruled by Han Chinese.

The Qing dynasty, officially the Great Qing, was the last imperial dynasty of China. It was established in 1636, and ruled China proper from 1644 to 1911. It was preceded by the Ming dynasty and succeeded by the Republic of China.

When the Qing dynasty took over China, rebel forces wanted to restore the Ming dynasty. The word Ming means bright and in Chinese is represented by two characters one representing the sun and the other the moon. Together this means bright.

The left Chinese character is how you write the word for sun and the right Chinese character is how you write the word for moon. You can see that the character for the sun looks like a vertical Wing Chun fist and the longer character for the moon is more like the open Wing Chun guarding hand from the slow part of the “Little Idea Form.” So the Shaolin greeting above also came to be a hand signal meaning “Return the Ming Dynasty". which of course didn’t happen. Lots of Chinese Shaolin Kung Fu movies talk about this period of time. The Hung style people are usually shown as the fighters for the Ming Dynasty to return. Perhaps the Wing Chun people were a secret branch of those with the slow part of the first form starting with the fist and ending with the vertical guarding hand position. Before that is the crossing down and up of he hands to indicate the center and China was also known as the central kingdom.

Middle Kingdom or Middle Country, Mandarin Zhongguo, Chinese name for China. It dates from c. 1000 BC, when it designated the Chou empire situated on the North China Plain. The Chou people, unaware of high civilizations in the West, believed their empire occupied the middle of the earth, surrounded by barbarians.

To understand the Chinese characters, it is good to know that the Chinese written language was a picture language sort of like the Egyptian hieroglyphs.

Egyptian hieroglyphs were the formal writing system used in Ancient Egypt. Hieroglyphs combined logographic, syllabic and alphabetic elements, with a total of some 1,000 distinct characters. Cursive hieroglyphs were used for religious literature on papyrus and wood.

Originally the sun was drawn like a circle with ray’s coming out from the circle. Then this picture was simplified to a circle with just a dot in the center to represent all those rays. After that, China went through a phase of squaring off all the characters so then the picture of the sun which also could represent the word for day, took on the shape of a rectangle with a line down the middle. All the characters went through a process like that. Here is an illustration of this process: