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Bodhidharma, son of King Sugundha of India trained in martial arts. Despite royal lineage and gaining the respect of the warrior caste, Bodhidharma chose the life of priesthood and traveled afar. His journey included passing the Himalayan Mountains on foot to reach a Shaolin monastery on the Sonshan Mountain in the Honan Province of northern China. Bodhidarma is credited with introducing the Shaolin monks to training their bodies with 18 conditioning excercises. This training is the predecessor to Shaolin temple boxing, called "Eighteen Hands of Lo-Han." In addition, Bodhidharma brought Buddhism religion and philosophy to the monks. This evolved into the Ch'an philosophies, known as Zen. The Shotokan Karate concept of "karate ne sante nashe" follows the Buddhist respect for life with the exception of a life or death situation.
The Shaolin temple monks were respected as exceptional fighters for 500 years. This is the historical birthplace for kung fu. As centuries passed, Budhidharma's 18 excercies grew to 72 under Kwok Yuen who entered the temple in 1589. Kwok Yuen further expanded the temple forms when he explored his country in search of new kung fu instructors for the temple. His efforts led to 170 movements and five styles known as tiger, crane, leopard, snake, and dragon. Even though the symbol adopted by Shotokan karate is the tiger, there is no direct link to the tiger style kung fu as the shotokan tiger was drawn by a friend of Ginchin Funakoshi. His friend, Hoan Kusug, called Funakoshi's text, Karate-do Kyohan, a Tora no Maki meaning "a Scroll of the Master Text." The word Tora also means "tiger."