Mark Gibson

The Shaolin Temple

Posted on April 28th, 2007 by mark.
Categories: General News, Travelogue, China 2007.

During the journey to Henan I read through the guide book on what I could expect to find at the temple and the image I was left with was somewhat colourful leading to expectations of a Chinese version of Sodom and Gomorrah. Crowds of merchants hawking all manor of goods fake martial arts schools lining the road all the way to the temple. The noise apparently drowns out everything in the local area - so much for peaceful meditation.

The reality turned out to be a little different to the reports. Shi Yongxin when he achieved his appointment as the 33rd Abbott of the Shaolin Temple a few years ago had built enough influence with politicians and the military to wrestle control of the shaolin temple back from the local government. In the past the temple was an extension of the government tourist service who paid a fee for the upkeep of the temple. Once in control Shi Yongxin cleared out the market stalls, tore down all the individual schools and moved them to nearby Deng Feng and now the place has been replanted with trees and bamboo and is a well kept beautiful place and relatively peaceful too.

Deng Feng is the nearest town about 12Km from the temple, all the schools except for the wushu guan and one campus of the Tagou school has been transplanted into new buildings built for the purpose in Deng Feng. Our local contact who picked us up from the train station and delivered us the our hotel informed us that the Tagou school remained within the scenic area as it would have meant making 13,000 kids homeless, this may be true, however I expect that a school as large as Tagou would have a certain amount of political influence of their own and proximity to the temple adds to their reputation.

The temple itself has had many buildings rebuilt during 2004/2005 to restore the temple to it’s former glory. The first impressions of some of these new buildings are that they are built for the tourist industry, which of course they are, but it helps to note that it has been the practise throughout history that the wooden pagoda style buildings, as they all are, are often torn down when they reach the end of their natural life and rebuilt in the exact same style to last for another generation. So it is possible over hundreds of years to see new buildings built in a Tang dynasty style, continuing a long tradition. Other examples of this can be seen in the forbidden city.

There have been a number of other initiatives taken by the venerable 33rd patriarch Shi Yongxin, which don’t seem to be so widely publicised and like many of the things he’s done seem to be aimed at preserving and promoting the tradition. In the last few years he has re-introduced buddhist scholar monks into the temple, by this I mean monks who are there exclusively to study buddism not Gong Fu there are currently about 50 of these Wei Seng. The number of Wu Seng or warrior monks is between 60 or 80. There is only a total of about 200 people living at Shaolin the remainder being made up of workmen and caretaker personnel. With the fame of the temple I was expecting to see a lot more than 60 to 80 warrior monks especially when there are 40,000 students studying Gong Fu down the road in Deng Feng. However there is a big difference, it does seem that the monks in the temple are actually the ones who want to take their vows and spend a portion of their time in meditation and other religious practices, whereas the students outside the temple are placed their by their parents either because they have shown an interest, wish to become movie stars or body guards or in some cases where the parents are using it as a sort of military school for kids who get into trouble with their peers back home.

Another of Shi Yongxin’s initiatives is a type of forum for safeguarding the future of their art, by looking out to secular martial artists to bring their skills and knowledge into the temple so their systems are not lost and the temple becomes what it was hundreds of years ago - the centre of learning for martial arts.

Photos on the road to Shaolin

The Shaolin Temple Gallery

Ta Lin - Stone Towers

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