Return to Shaolin by Mathew Polly

Return to Shaolin by Mathew Polly

In 1992, when Mathew Polly was 21, he went to China for two years to learn Kung Fu at the Shaolin Temple, birthplace of both Kung Fu and Zen Buddhism. He recently travelled back on a personal ten-year reunion. 

The Shaolin Temple had a rough twentieth century. Located in the Songshan mountain range in Henan province, the temple was occupied and partially burnt in the civil war of the 1920s and further destroyed by Japanese in the early 1940s. Mao Tse-tung, who wanted break with China’s feudal past, banned kung fu in the 1950s.

The temple was an abandoned wreck in1981 when actor and martial art expert Jet Li made Shaolin Temple, a movie celebrating the legend of the 13 Shaolin monks who rescued a Tang emperor from an evil warlord. It was a Asian blockbuster.

In 1999, a well-connected and controversial new abbot named Shi Yongxin recognized that Shaolin’s reputation and spiritual life were undermined by the commercialism. He called in his markets inside the army and police force and they eventually removed the merchants and their buildings. Shaolin was always unique in having two types of monks: the Buddhist monks and the martial monks. It seems they now have a third type: the performance monks. Two of the martial monks who used to be on team, Little Wang and Baotung, are now running their own kung fu school in nearby Dengfeng. A group of monks has gathered for evening prayers. A sixth-century Indian Buddhist missionary, Bodhidharma, known as Damo in China, is said to have meditated in cave for nine years, and then taught the shaolin monks that sitting meditation was the key to enlightenment. Because the monks’ muscles went soft from sitting all day, he introduced 18 callisthenic exercises, from which Shaolin Kung fu evolved. Training would begin at 6 a.m. and continue for six hours, broken only meals and post-lunch nap. Ten thousand of us did the same thing every day at the same times. We ran. We stretched. We practiced our kicks and punches. We hardened our bodies. We learned how to spin our weapons. 

Shaolin Facts

·         Shoalin means “young forest” because the original monks planted tress there after clearing the surrounding forest to build the temple in A.D. 495.

·         The monastic order dates to A.D. 540 when a Buddhist missionary from India visited China.

·         China’s communist rules banned all martial arts as superstitious practices in 1949. Many monks left the temple.

·         The temple officially reopened in 1981 and tourist flocked to Shaolin.

·         Shi Yongxin ordered the destruction of the tourist traps surrounding the temple in April 2003 so it could win a place on the World Heritage List.