Luohan 羅漢

Luohan 羅漢 is the focus of our tradition and training. While the term is often reduced in popular understanding to the Shaolin temple, our research into primary Chinese sources has revealed a far deeper and more expansive tradition. Luohan 羅漢 carries within it the martial arts of the monastic tradition, and it is this fuller inheritance that the Warrior Heart 戰士心 School preserves and transmits.

Luohan 羅漢, or more completely Luohan Dao 羅漢道, describes the path of the wandering monastic seeker of esoteric knowledge. In times gone by, the journey to distant lands was fraught with danger, and the tradition holds that nine in ten who set out did not survive the road. It was this very precarity that drove practitioners of Luohan to cultivate and broaden their martial knowledge as an inseparable part of the path.

The martial art was originally known as Luohan Shou 羅漢手, the “Hand of Luohan.” By the Qing dynasty, the name had shifted to Luohan Quan 羅漢拳, the “Fist of Luohan.” This was not merely a change of label. The renaming narrowed the art’s self-understanding, drawing it away from its original breadth of concept and philosophy. The Warrior Heart 戰士心 tradition strives to keep the original Luohan Shou 羅漢手 as it was understood in those earlier times.

The practice of Luohan Shou 羅漢手 encompasses three inseparable domains: martial arts, original Chan 禪, and the health-and-medicine tradition. At the centre of all three stands the Chan Mind 禪心. Without it, the art loses its root completely.

=The Luohan path, as transmitted through the Warrior Heart 戰士心 School, is both spiritual and physical. The practitioner is called to seek not merely the outward form of the art, but its living meaning as a way of life.