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More simply known as ‘Batuo’, Buddhabhadra was a wandering Buddhist monk from India who has been immortalised as the founder of the Shaolin Temple, which is synonymous with wushu in China.

Batuo drifted into China around 464 AD, where he began preaching Buddhism. It must have taken him a while to achieve the necessary popularity, because only in 495 AD did the Emperor Xiaowendi (at the time busy with his attempts to make Northern China more united, including forcing its inhabitants to wear the traditional garb) give permission and the necessary funds for a shaolin si (’young forest temple’) to be built as Batuo’s base.

It was, by all accounts, something of a modest structure, with a round dome as its shrine and a small platform where Indian and Chinese monks translated Buddhist texts from Indian into Chinese.

It’s worth noting here that, at that time in China, Buddhism was praised more as being an educational system concerning how one should lead one’s life, rather than as a religion.

Thus, under Xiaowendi’s rule life did get a bit easier for his subjects. Short periods of imprisonment replaced mutilation as a punishment for many (not particularly serious) crimes, while the sick and the poor could expect to receive a certain amount of what we might now refer to as ‘care in the community’.