02-01-2008, 03:40 PM
The Shaolin Monastery: History, Religion, and the Chinese Martial Arts by Meir Shahar is the third book I've been involved with alongside American Shaolin http://brotherhoodofdoom.com/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=550 and Shaolin Temple of Zen http://brotherhoodofdoom.com/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=859. It's scholarly, and the best damn read on the history of Shaolin Temple ever. EVER. I'm very proud to have been associated with this work. Meir is a good friend - we met at Shaolin during the 1st Academic Symposium. Then he spent a year as a visiting professor at Stanford. His daughter and mine are about the same age and became good friends. Meir gives me a prominent thanks in the acknowledgments and my research is some of the most cited in his bibliography. But beyond all that, it's a phenomenal work and aggressively unravels the complexity of Shaolin Temple over the Ming and Qing dynasties. A must read for every literate martial artist. At $54, readership will be more selective, but anyone who drops the cash will be rewarded with the resource.
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