Zen + Kungfu = Shaolin Temple

Shaolin Temple is a monastery in the Songshan Mountains of Henan, but it is not the kind of monastery where one finds pious, kindly old men gently sauntering about. The monks at Shaolin are gentle, yes, but also fierce as tigers. They have calm eyes and big biceps. As strong and agile as they are committed to spiritual enlightenment, Shaolin monks have dedicated their lives to the twin arts of kungfu and zen meditation. You may be thinking: is this not a contradiction? While this monastic practice is certainly unusual, they would actually fight only in self-defense, and rarely, if at all, do they use it in this way. Primarily, the practice in itself of kungfu is an intense physical and spiritual exercise. The result: fierce, dedicated, passionate monks in tip-top physical condition.

While I visited, Shaolin Temple was hosting a kungfu camp for youth, and twice a day over a thousand boys spread out onto the campus to practice. They jumped, punched, kicked, and shouted in unison and in formation. I marveled at the discipline, and they seemed to take such joy out of such hard work. The scene reminded me of the summer soccer camps I used to do as a child, with one noticeable difference: with soccer and other sports, one trained to defeat an opponent; in kungfu, it seemed, one trained to develop oneself.

I had the chance to spend some time with one of the monks, who was about my age. He had lived at Shaolin for ten years already and fully planned to live there for the rest of his life. The reason he decided to come in the first place? He loved kungfu. He also loved, I discovered, to discuss Buddhist theology. I never refuse a good theological conversation; unfortunately, my Chinese vocabulary quickly revealed its limitations (they didn’t teach me metaphysical terms in Chinese school), so our conversations were not as engaging as they could have been.

For those who may not be aware, in addition to being the first institution to develop Chinese martial arts, Shaolin Temple is the birthplace of Zen Buddhism. Zen is the Japanese word for Chan (禅), which simply means meditation. In the 5^th century C.E., one of the monks who had travelled from India decided to go to a nearby cave, where he purportedly sat facing a wall for nine years, whereupon he became enlightened. This man, Bodhidharma, eventually took in a disciple, whom he taught the simple discipline of sitting meditation. This disciple eventually took on a disciple, who, in turn, took on a disciple, who took on a disciple, who, then, took on a handful of disciples. Within this bunch, now the sixth generation, one of these disciples taught sitting meditation to hundreds of people, whereupon Chan/Zen Buddhism truly began to flower and spread throughout China, and eventually to Japan and other places.

[Bodhidharma in meditative posture]

On my second day at Shaolin, my new cloistered friend invited me into his room for lunch, where he proceeded to show me his meditation posture. In my personal practice, I had temporarily given up on the lotus position because I sometimes cramped and lost circulation in my legs. But he persuaded me to return to the lotus position, or at least half-lotus, as it conserves and circulates qi much better. In fact, in the Chan/Zen tradition, at least in China, meditators place a a blanket over their torso and legs precisely to conserve qi. I assumed that the Shaolin monks would have a special room, a kind of zendo, where they all meditated together, but I was wrong. They do what, in fact, I do: they simply sit on their bed!

Ode To Beijing

City of a hundred million lights

A daily explosion of culture, growth, and people

Spilling onto the streets and alleyways

Amongst the bicycles, pedicabs, peddlers, and pedestrians

Vendors, fruit stands, shopkeepers, and hawkers of all kinds.

Around the globe people come

Willing to explore the wild, rough, and unready.

Modernity in Beijing has surely asserted itself

Capitalism and industry have come to the fore

As it turns out, free markets are a gift

And machinery is the machinery for change

How can you argue with the ending of poverty

Just don’t worship the money and the glitz

Stay rooted in your deep Chinese roots

You have lived a long time, and you know this.

Not In My Words

Sunrise and Sunset

Scenes On the Streets

Living In the Hutongs

Literally meaning “recklessly connected,” the hutongs (胡同) are the rambling alleyways of Beijing and vestiges of Old Beijing community life. The buildings in these neighborhoods are typically low, one-story buildings - sometimes rudimentary, sometimes built in a gorgeous timber-frame style - usually contain some sort of courtyard, and are often as rambling and organic as the hutongs in which they are situated. Truly possessing a pre-modern community feel, the hutongs allow pedestrians to stroll in the Old Town unawares of the city’s now ubiquitous modern features of highways, skyscrapers, and the like.

I am fortunate to live in one of these neighborhoods. Growing out of the courtyard of a restaurant outside my bedroom window stands a tree, which neighbors tell me is approximately 300 years old. That sounds right: this country measures things by the hundreds of years, if not by the thousands. The neighborhood preserves the old way of life. Take a walk in this neighborhood one afternoon and you will see silent old men smoking pipes; women hanging out clothes to dry; small children peeing in public; retired folks gathered around for an intense, communal game of checkers; workers sitting in clusters outside for some lunchtime noodles. The noodles are dependably prepared by a young man and his wife, in a small see-through annex to the vegetable market, which is housed in an old temple, which also houses the bread makers, the rice vendors, and a semi-modern supermarket.

As everyone knows, Chinese people love to eat, preferably with company, and often in loud, festive restaurants. In Beijing, prepared food is readily available at every turn, and this neighborhood is no exception. For my dining needs, I often turn to the very affordable home-style cooking prepared and delivered by the friendly woman from Henan. I also discovered a nearby dumpling joint, from which one can select dozens of fillings, not least of which is pickled garlic, managed by a very smiley man who always wears pink. Most evenings I pass a very typical Beijing noodle place, lit by red lanterns, whose loyal patrons often spill out the doors and into the alleyway. When I am in the mood for western food, there is a bar around the corner that makes decent pizzas. And, my favorite restaurant in the neighborhood is a Yunnan restaurant, which literally makes my mouth water whenever I think about their delectable baked tofu dishes, mint salads, and stir-fried mushroom combinations. The closest restaurant of all, Lucky Dining Hall, the one in whose courtyard stood a 300-year-old tree, for some reason attracts hip musicians, friends, and adoring fans. Many a night I have passed their window to observe a bucolic scene of drinking and singing and scattered half-eaten dishes.

Besides the bountiful restaurants, our residence has other interesting neighbors. At number 28 of our hutong stands a mysterious building, in which people very inconspicuously entered and left. The building is clearly not a restaurant, but also not a business, and the small, high windows, reveal a meticulously painted interior and a gorgeous post-and-beam ceiling. I have yet to find out the purpose of this secret society. Around the corner from us live “hairdressers,” who rarely cut hair but keep a red light on for afterhours customers. They came to our fall-time barbeque, as did almost everyone on our little block, from the kiosk vendors to our next door neighbors, to whom we also give our recyclables in exchange for the occasional homemade stuffed bun.

How I love the oh-so-organic nature of the Beijing hutongs, always overflowing with life!

China (part 2)

- 2 -

In the USA

Where things seem so normal

And nothing is out of the ordinary

To everyone but me.

Oh, you nice quiet subdivisions

Beautiful boutique houses, and manicured lawns

Cars galore, a puppy dog, and all your household needs.

I would rather the people walking, the millions

Underneath the black canopy of the city sky

In their Saturday night best

The chefs, the vendors

The neighborhood strollers

The drunken street fighters

And curious onlookers

And leggy women dressed in Chinese silk.

Oh China, you country of a thousand constellations

Aware of the Confucian order of things

Yet very free, it seems to me:

Singing in the park, dancing in the street

Lovers in each other’s organic embrace

Little children in proud grandparents’ arms.

Sure, there are the ornery folk

The gruff, the grumpy, unruly and uncultured

But that’s okay, because they too belong

They are still countrymen and countrywomen.

You motherland, you five-thousand year reign

Of deep culture and self-respect

Having survived the turbulence of dynasties

Diverse as the Tianshan Mountains are to the Gobi Desert

You manage somehow to hold it together.