Inheritance from generation to generation and the traditional way of heart-to-heart communication in Buddhist Chan Order are held in high regard in the matter of the authentic Shaolin gong-fu and Chan Cultivation. As is known to all, Patriarch Bodhidharma is the one who firstly propagated Chan in China, faithfully disseminating the following ideas that the Buddha left for us:
<1> The “Two Guidelines and Four Practices”(in Chinese: 二入四行), 
<2>“Striking a balance between Buddhist commandments and self-practice”,
<3>“self-cultivation should focus outright on informing a practitioner’s psyche”, 
<4>“To gain Buddhahood by way of suddenly acquired enlightenment is definitely feasible”，
<5>“The Order of Buddhist Chan rejects any form of written discourse as a means of perpetuating its own system of tenets”, and 
<6>“a separate tradition outside the scriptural teachings be established”.
And then due to the unremitting efforts of the Second Patriarch Huike, the Third Patriarch Sengcan, the Fourth Patriarch Daoxin, The Fifth Patriarch Hongren, and the Sixth Patriarch Huineng, five schools were derived from Chinese Zen Buddhism, also called five houses of Zen, becoming the largest sect of Chinese Buddhism. More importantly, the way of transmitting through minds from one generation to another is wherewithal for Buddhist Chan Order.
(From a speech by Shi Yongxin)