Home / Eighteen Lohan Palm / Lineage
傳承 · · Line of transmission
Where it
comes from.
A complete system of cultivation that travelled, survived, and came back — told as the tradition tells it, with the uncertain parts marked as uncertain.
The account as the tradition gives it
According to the tradition passed down by Grandmaster Chen Qiming 陳其明, the lineage originated in the Southern Shaolin Temple in the Song Mountains of Henan. When the temple was destroyed in 1647, its surviving masters scattered across China and a few travelled into Tibet, where the practice is said to have survived.
The modern history becomes clear with Chen himself (1953–2022), a doctor of traditional Chinese medicine in Guangzhou. In the 1970s a Tibetan lama travelling there to visit Chinese Buddhist monks fell ill, and Chen cared for him and restored him to health free of charge. In gratitude the lama taught him the Eighteen Lohan Palm, by then carrying elements of Tibetan Buddhist practice. Chen practised it for the rest of his life.
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To 1647 · Song Mountains
The Southern Shaolin Temple
Lohan practice as the lineage account preserves it. When the temple was destroyed in 1647, its surviving masters scattered across China and a few travelled into Tibet.
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1647–1970s · Tibet
Tibetan transmission
The practice survives in Tibet through a Buddhist line, taking on its character along the way.
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1970s · Guangzhou, then Canada
Grandmaster Chen Qiming 陳其明 (1953–2022)
A Tibetan lama transmits the surviving Lohan to Dr Chen. Chen develops and refines the system across his life, and emigrates to Canada in 2003, teaching until his death in 2022.
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2003–2022 · Canada
Sifu Neil Ripski
Neil trained with Grandmaster Chen as a formal inner-door disciple from 2003 until Chen's death in 2022, inheriting the Dharma lineage. He carries the Eighteen Lohan Palm transmission forward through his teaching.
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Now · Scotland
This practice
Before he passed, Grandmaster Chen asked that the Lohan lineage be carried to future generations. Ian trained in the system with Neil Ripski and is an authorised instructor. That transmission is what reaches this school.
A living tradition is not preserved by copying its outer shape. It survives through practice, experience, understanding and transmission.
Carrying it on
What transmission means here
Ian trained in the system with Sifu Neil Ripski and is an authorised instructor. That is a specific and limited claim: it means the material is taught as it was received, and that there is someone above him in the line to be answerable to. It is not a claim to have completed anything.
Neil visits the UK from time to time to teach the system directly, which is the clearest way for students here to meet the transmission at first hand. Dates appear on the classes page once confirmed.
Grandmaster Chen's own account of the internal work, Secrets of Longevity Revealed, has been translated in full into English by Ian — see study and texts.