http://forum.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?t=36364
"author goes to shaolin to find out about Xu shi you’s past.
found a monk who knew Xu, the monk’s dharma name in the order was de gen (“de gen”, root of good deeds, which machine translation translated as germany root, hahhaaa. de is also used to form the chinese word for germany, representing the “de” sound of “deutchland”) de gen and Xu were good buddy. trained under the same teacher for eight years.
goes in a bit how de gen came to shaolin. basically, famine forced the family to give him up, shaolin took him in as a child labor to sweep the floor. De gen was taken to where the under-age “monks” are kept and that’s where he met Xu (“yong le”, forever auspicious, it is a passable translation between friends). Xu comfort de gen and xu tells about how his family fell on hard time and gave him up. … xu is a year older … doing the job of bring tea and making beds, cleaning floors, if he screw up, get chews out…
only thing that makes xu happy is everyday his teacher teach him some kung-fu. althoug it is hard, he hope his teacher pass all the fighting skills onto him [xu]. so, one day, he can make a name for himself. De gen and xu became friends. buddhist lineage wise they are under different master, but b/c they trained their kung-fu under the same teacher, they refer to each other as kung-fu brothers.
… xu’s pillow was a big rock, de gen still keeps it, xu used to hit his head against it several time to train iron head before going to sleep each night [warning: don’t try this at home, kids…]
xu leads a group during training. … stance work, pole shaking, running, …, finger conditions (stabbing sands), …, wooden dummy work, kung-fu is gained through blood and sweats…
develop strong gong-li, learn 18 traditional weapons. learn lightness kung-fu by carrying heavy weights on body. go over wall easily [runing up the wall, running start, step on the wall with one foot, push off and get a small hop to go over the rest of the wall, these wall are about 5 feet] … [going over the rest of his skills, I am not going to translate in detail], wall crawling, stone breaking, etc.
during a training session, long march with ankle weights, de gen took the weights off. his body didn’t adjust fast enough and he fell while walking up the trail. xu put the weight back on de gen and helped him up the rest of the way. another student told the instructor how de gen cheated by taking off the weight. de gen was punished and collapsed at 2 AM from holding stance waiting for the incense to burn out. xu helped de gen out by cutting the incense down to the last bit and re-light it. with the last bit burned off, xu took de gen back to their dorm.
xu later got in trouble because he couldn’t finish a task of leaping off a stone monkey and tying the rope from the stone monkey onto a pole because he was too short and too much ankle weight was put on him. he got mad and kicked the stone monkey and broke its leg. so, xu ended up doing stance late at night waiting for the incense to burn out. de gen sneaked in and repeated what xu did, break the incense until the last bit and light it again. when the last bit burn out [chinese incense comes with a small wood stick, so when it burn out it leaves a small burn mark on the wooden stick, their taecher inspect that mark to verify if the incense burned completely through], de gen carryed xu back to the dorm."