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!