Years ago when I bought 72 Consummate Arts Secrets of the Shaolin Temple it was newly printed and hard to find. It was also a lot cheaper than it is now. At least for the time being, the book is available on Amazon, and when 72 Consummate Arts disappears from there it'll probably still be available to the good hunter/gatherer/shopper who's willing to search.

My copy of this book was printed in Beijing in 1992, compiled by Wu Jiaming, translated by Rou Gang, and revised by Yang Yinrong. This is a very popular book in The People's Republic of China but not famous at all in the West, where such things are still looked upon as magical and silly. In China people train to actually do these things. Most of the books about wushu kung fu are published only in Chinese and the western resources we do have are pitiful primers in comparison, often written by people with very sketchy knowledge. We think we've got all the good knowledge over here in the west, but most of the Orient's storehouse of wisdom hasn't even been translated to English. Tibet and China both must have tons of volumes westerners haven't even seen yet. All that material isn't a collection of bright and shining gem amongst the trash, but I'm sure we're missing some really good stuff.

This book is a great example of what we're missing and will certainly be totally misunderstood by nearly every westerner who reads it. We don't think in the traditional Chinese way and don't have the same foundation of knowledge. We're technical. We believe in hardware, strength, and intellectual prowess.

Our first mistake when reading this book: skipping the little introductory section on Four Step Exercise. Eh, that's just a warm-up, let's get to the real stuff. Back up, that is the real stuff, essential to all the rest of it, and every system of internal training has a counterpart to it that westerners find equally pointless and boring and skip. If you don't do this training you don't get the rest of it.

Second mistake: westerners will read this book and think it's superstition. Those who train in these concepts will train in purely physical ways, from a western viewpoint; pass very few of the level tests included in the practices; and conclude that it's really all about being strong, tough, and limber and the stories were exaggerated. If you don't train in the Four Steps, don't live the lifestyle, don't follow the rules, you just get strong. Probably you'll also get badly hurt. If you follow the steps and make those changes in your life, you'll be going far beyond anything westerners know as physical training. A typical commando in the western military spends six months in training; some of these Consummate Arts require ten, and masters may train for forty.

Third mistake: westerners will think that they personally couldn't do any of this. Wrong again. The old systems were not based on body type or innate athletic skill. If you do the work you get the benefits. You may decide you don't want to spend your life training in a skill you probably won't ever use, and that's understandable. Getting a taste of it has been satisfactory for me, and I've gone on to things less martial but ultimately more important, or at least so I hope.

Many unusual skills and training methods are described in the book and most of them you probably haven't heard of or seen even in fancy chop-socky movies. Every now and then I hear of somebody who does these things and I say, oh yeah, I remember that one, or I see part of the old training in a documentary and I recognize where it came from and where it leads. Nice to at least understand what's behind it. I haven't run out of years yet, maybe I'll take up one of the arts and see what happens in the rest of my life. Everybody needs a hobby.