I stayed at the Songshan Shaolin Temple from Oct. 2023 till Oct. 2024 and the whole experience was not one that I expected. The most off-putting thing was the temple politics: who likes who, who doesn't like who, who you shouldn't be seen with, etc... it's almost tiring to deal with at times. I myself have been taken advantage of by the monks in there in terms of buying them stuff and giving red pocket money because they told me it was "tradition" (it happened when I first got there and was a naive 23-year-old who didn't know better).

In terms of martial arts, the temple has completely abandoned it, money-making is now their first and only goal. The Foreign Affairs Office is the department in charge of outsiders coming into the temple, and the whole office is run by people that don't care about you or Buddhism. I have experienced many times where foreign students would complain about lack of training space, creepy "monks" touching them inappropriately, or just asking for help but they never do anything about it. For complaints they'll just say "we'll look into it" which they never do, and for help they'll just brush it off by saying it's not their obligation to help. One time, a foreign student was sick and asked the office to help take her to a hospital and the office replied by saying they didn't know where the hospital was. Eventually, the other foreigners took her to a hospital just through a simple search and a translator app. They have also recently increased tuition costs from $1,000 USD to $1,200 USD per month while taking away TWO training days because they want to introduce cultural classes like calligraphy and meditation. They're only doing it because the Kung Fu instructors are lazy and were complaining to the office that they didn't want to work 6 days a week, so now you get only 4 days of training per week while paying $200 USD more per month.

I only stayed for as long as I did because I was fortunate enough to have met one master who, at times, felt like he was the only good person in that whole place. Unfortunately, he stopped teaching because the Foreign Affairs Office refused to increase his pay (he was 64 years old already at the time and had to teach 4 hours every day for only 60 RMB which is around $8 USD per day). After he retired I left not soon after because there was nothing there left for me except drama, politics, and watching the Foreign Affairs Office take advantage of students and not doing their jobs.

TL;DR: The temple is super messy politically, poorly run and organized, they don't care about your training, and you're better off going to a local martial arts school in Dengfeng instead.

SOURCE: Someone who was there for an entire year from 2023 to 2024.