The Shadow in the Stone Shaolin Monastery keeps a rock with a man in it. The stone is a slab of pale rock with a darker, vaguely human stain on its face, the outline of a figure sitting cross-legged. The monastery calls it the shadow stone. Visitors are told that a monk named Bodhidharma sat facing a cave wall on the mountain above the temple for nine years, and stared so hard that his shadow soaked into the rock. Generations of martial arts students have heard some version of that story. In plenty of schools it arrives in the first week of training, right after you learn where to put your shoes. It goes like this. An Indian monk walked to China, found the Shaolin monks too weak to sit through meditation and taught them exercises to toughen their bodies. The exercises became kung fu. Kung fu became karate, tae kwon do and everything else with a belt system. One stubborn man in a cave started it all. It’s a great story. It has a founder, a hardship, a secret and a payoff. It also has a problem: almost none of it can be found in the sources written by people who lived anywhere near the man. This book follows the story backward, the way a reporter follows a rumor. Who said it first? When? What did they have to gain?