Shaolin Temple

Every kid pines for super powers. But as you get older, you settle for obtaining such petty things as popularity and/or money. But kungfu movies led me to believe that if I only received lectures from a wizened, scraggly-bearded Chinese elder, kicked and punched the air a lot and walked through an occasional sidewalk of hot coals, I could run up walls, do double back flips, and most importantly, kick anyone’s ass.

Kungfu was my last, best hope for obtaining super powers.

But in one winter day in Cleveland, my hopes were dashed. The auditorium was stacked with about two thousand kungfu aficionados sitting in the bleachers. I was 15.

I had been in kungfu classes for about two years, and my “master” pronounced me good enough to enter a local competition. But while I was waiting to do my form, I saw something so disturbing, it made me quit kungfu forever.

It was a demonstration of “qi” or internal energy. The announcer started: “When his friends were busy building careers and starting families, Steve was busy developing his qi.” I remember thinking: if you sacrificed your life for this, Steve, this better be good. An unassuming guy walked out. He resembled an auto mechanic, burly but also quiet fat. He squatted down, meditating and breathing deeply. His body started to shake; his breaths grew louder and deeper, like he was having a mild standing-seizure. Then, he stopped and gave a nod.

A square-shouldered Asian man walked up to Steve. Steve stood with his legs apart and gave the man a little bow. The man politely bowed back. Then, he proceeded to kicked Steve in the crotch with jewel-destroying swiftness, not once, but several times, each blow raising Steve slightly off the ground. The crowd gasped but Steve did not, his face unchanged. He must have endured seven blows all told. In exchange for career and family, Steve got iron balls.

I didn’t want that kind of super power. I placed second-to-last in the forms competition. I stopped training soon after.

SHAOLIN, HENAN

Nearly eight years later, I found myself in China, the country of kungfu’s origin. I had one month to travel. If there was one place I wanted to go, it was surely the birthplace of kungfu, the Shaolin Temple in Henan province.

Legend has it, Shaolin kungfu was created by Shaolin Temple monks who imitated animals to strengthen their bodies against long bouts of meditation. While not totally untrue, a more rational explanation is that kungfu was created over many centuries by former soldiers and generals seeking haven from ancient battlefields. Within the safety of the Shaolin walls, they could turn their practical martial skill into an art. In time, Shaolin kungfu would emerge as an institution, used in the service of emperor and revolutionary alike, and most importantly, in awesome kungfu movies. And I was going to where it all started.

But as I got off the bus in Dengfeng, I realized that many kungfu fans had the same idea. That was evident from the taxi. It was a mobile tourist center. Before we were a half mile from the bus station, the taxi driver pulled over, whipped out the business card of a bald kungfu monk and offered to take me to him. I refused. He refused to move. Then, he called a tour guide who tried to browbeat me into purchasing her translating services in the temple, saying, “You will be lost. No one speaks English.” After I refused her, the taxi driver started to drive, only to pull over at a crappy hotel. I just kept repeating “Shaolin Temple…Shaolin Temple,” like it was a Buddhist mantra. Eventually, he dumped me out in what looked like just a parking lot.

After dodging the assaults of old women begging me to stay at their hotels, I found my way into the Shaolin Temple park. It was as I imagined it: a lush verdant valley, a tranquil brook to my left with stone bridges spanning over it. Concrete stones were neatly organized on the path, with lazy drooping willows arching up out of dirt squares in between the stones. But as I looked closer, it seemed not so much clean as sterilized. I paid 100 Yuan to get in.

I saw packs of Chinese tourist groups walking around with their golden flags. Their children licked ice cream cones with one hand while vanquishing invisible enemies with the other, changing it up with a kick or two. Others swung wooden swords and axes as the tourist carts sped up and down the pathway.




I wandered around the grounds. My first stop was the “Kungfu Show” at a performance amphitheater. The monks filed out, dressed in neon orange flowing robes; their legs wrapped in tight black cloth; their bodies taunt and cut. They sat cross-legged on the floor, feigning meditation. Each held a small gourd and a small wooden mallet, which they knocked to peaceful flute music. But soon, the lead monk let out a grunt and they flew to their feet. Their rhythm became furious as they wielded the mallets to wound.

After this initial outburst, one after another, they demonstrated their martial art skill. One monk broke two metal bars over his head; another bent a spear against the floor using his neck. Another monk threw a needle through a glass rectangle, popping a balloon on the other side. There were also the 18 weapons of Shaolin: Whirling staffs, slicing swords, spinning metal hooks and metal chains going the speed of helicopter blades. It was an ancient armory of weapons.






They were good. Especially that spear neck guy. After the show, I saw him come out of the bathroom, holding a tissue to his bleeding neck. His wound wasn’t in vain. They had dazzled me. I was so impressed I decided to renew my kungfu training. Maybe I wouldn’t pierce my neck with a spear, but I would watch someone else do it again.



TAGOU


However, I had to choose a school. I could train at the Shaolin Guan, which was the expensive, official Shaolin Temple hotel or I could train at the other school on the grounds, the Tagou School, which just happens to be the biggest martial art school in the world.

As I was trying to make up my mind, I met a pointy-faced Ukrainian woman who was at the Tagou School learning internal energy healing techniques. When I asked her who her teacher was, she said, “Everything.” When I asked for clarification, she said, “A bird can be your teacher if you know how to learn.” I wanted to go where she was going. I signed up for the Tagou school.

I made my way to the foreign affairs office and met Ying Ying. Ying Ying was the foreign affairs representative. She seemed bored with my presence until I decided to tell her I was a journalist. Seven months in China will teach you to say, “What the hell?”

In all our future interactions, Ying Ying wore a fake PR smile that snapped from zero to full-face-flex with the least provocation. She said that if I needed anything, I could come to her. I said that I would. For 100 dollars, she gave me four days of kungfu classes with room and board, as well as free range of the Shaolin Temple. It was a deal.

From my run-down hotel room, I saw an army of red-shirted children practicing in the courtyard amid gray, cracking concrete. They were organized in little kungfu companies, throwing punches and kicks in unison. Others stabbed the air with thin cutlasses that wobbled with every movement like thick tinfoil.

I could hear the cries out in the training field, across the path, of more children practicing on the razed foundations of other fallen schools. There were thousands of them, doing kungfu drills and calisthenics as a man in a guard tower shouted into a loudspeaker.






The Tagou School was divided into two campuses. The largest, the new campus, housed most of the students and was located in the nearby town of Dengfeng. The old campus consisted of approximately 4,000 students and was still on the Shaolin Temple grounds. All together, the Tagou School considered itself the biggest martial art school in the world, with about 18,000 students. I counted myself as 18,001.



TRAINING


Training began at 8:30 the next morning. Although Sunday was the students’ one day off, Ying Ying made special arrangements for me. The training room was dilapidated, with dusty, concrete floors and a large puddle collecting mosquitoes at the end of the hall. The ceiling was stained in parts and missing several panels in others. A rusty rack of spears, staffs, swords and battle-axes lay against one wall. It was perfect.




While on my way to the training hall, I decided that for the rest of my time at the school, I would judge people by whether they seemed like they would be a good guy or a bad guy in a kungfu movie. Initially, I decided my trainer was a good guy. He was young, short and trim, with a bemused smile on his face at all times. He looked like the sort of young man who was nice enough until his father is murdered and he becomes duty-bound to take revenge.

We started out by running in a circle but soon he had me kicking over my head. In eight years, I had forgotten all my forms but I still had the flexibility. We did some light sparring with gloves and before I knew, it was lunchtime.

However, after lunch, he was not so easy. First, he made me stand on one leg for about five minutes. Then, it was kicking and punching at the same time. He couldn’t speak English but he knew the necessary words like, “OK. Quicker.” I would do it quicker and he would say, “Ok. Relax.” I would relax and he would say, “OK. Quicker” and so on and so fourth for about an hour. How am I supposed to relax when I’m trying to punch through someone’s face?

At some point, he must have gotten frustrated because then he just made me do calisthenics. I was doing marine push-ups and sprinting to the other side of the hall only to do them again. At one point, when I was going to collapse, I thought that he wasn’t a martial arts instructor at all, but rather some sicko nationalist who paid the school for the privilege of torturing a foreigner.

I came to my senses. I reminded myself that I may be at kungfu school, but I was first and foremost a tourist. I didn’t have to do anything. I just kind of stopped moving. We ended the class 30 minutes early.





I had to sit down for a while. Luckily, it was dinnertime. I watched the kids file into the mess halls after their hard day of training to gobble bowls of slop. I was shocked to see an occasional chubby child. There weren’t many but there were enough for me to take notice. Being that they did martial arts all day, I wanted to ask them, “How did you do that?”

But I only had to take one look at the food, most of which consisted of some form of grease. Line cooks stir-fried meat and vegetables beyond recognition, causing a grease fire almost every time. Other fare included fried bananas and chicken fingers, coke, ice cream, sandwiches lathered with mayonnaise, hot dogs, donuts and of course, ramen noodles. In another testament to unhealthiness, the hotel kiosk operator sold packs of cigarettes to children who couldn’t have been older than 13. But I guess if I trained all day for my health and fitness, I would want ways to make my efforts futile too.



DAILY ROUTINE



That night, I slept soundly. For some reason, I had the idea that I would wake up with the thousands of Chinese students at 5:30 and participate in their morning exercises. I heard them screaming outside at around 5:40 and I briefly joined in their screaming…when I tried to move my body. I managed to get out of bed at 6:00 and off the floor at 6:15.

When I somehow got dressed and made it outside, the students were still out, marching in their companies under the pale dawn fog, yelling “Eee-eeer-eeee,” or “one-two-one!” Other regiments did various calisthenics on the packed earth of the training fields. Some regiments did squats while they sat on each other’s shoulders or held each other’s feet to do wheelbarrows across the dirt. The youngest company looked to be comprised of children not older than 4. The oldest wasn’t older than 18. And it all happened before the sun was fully up.

As I would later learn, this sun-up practice was the easiest part of their day. Talking to a teacher at the Wushu College, Shan Yuxiao, I learned how hard a student’s day actually was. They have twenty alarms regulating their day, indicating when to eat, sleep and move. After training for two hours at dawn, they have breakfast at 7.

At 8, they manage to get some schooling in, but the students are really here to learn kungfu. “Maybe their education is inferior to a normal school,” Shan said. They go to school for about three hours, learning English, Chinese, history, politics and science, with lunch at 11.

There’s a rest at 12, as some children drag out mattresses and sleep outside on the concrete courtyard. Kungfu starts again at 3 when they practice forms and train in a type of fighting known as sanda, which is like Murry Tai kickboxing with throwing techniques. There’s dinner at 6 and then more kungfu. In all, they train for about 5 hours a day, she said. However, I never saw any schooling; I rarely saw any resting; as far as I saw, there was kungfu going on most of the day.


KUNGFU FATE



It was fine to see the teenagers running around all day but it was a bit disconcerting to see the four-year-olds doing the same. At the age I was running around my basement with underwear on my head, they are learning how to take out a kneecap. What kind of childhood is that? Sure, they were learning to be kungfu badasses, but at the age of four, you certainly don’t know if you’re a badass. You should be running around on the playground, being a child.

Now, if you find yourself spending most of your free time pummeling other children, well then by all means, join a kungfu school. But the four-year-olds spent most of their day mastering forms and doing awkward aerials in a place that resembled an army barracks. The building’s only childhood touch was the occasional puffy, mushroom-shaped trashcan. It seemed out of place amid the gray concrete of everything.

What would compel a parent to send their four-year-old to grow up at a kungfu school? The teacher said that the school fee was rather expensive: 6,000 RMB per year for the older children and 8,000 RMB per year for the “babies.” The price increase was to pay for the “life teachers,” who act as the children’s surrogate mothers.

For 8,000 RMB, parents could actually send their kids to a good private school for a quality education. I asked Shan why their parents picked kungfu school instead. “Some of the children are bad,” she said. “Maybe their parents love them very much but they can’t handle them so they send them here.” I always thought that if you have a bad child, you beat his ass, not teach him how to beat yours.






“Some also don’t do well in school so they come here.” All levels of Chinese education require placement tests. The Tagou School did not have high academic standards. And some parents are just too busy for their children. “Maybe they are business people. But many leave the children sometimes only for two or three years,” she said. Whatever their case, while attending the school, the children go home for as little as one month in a year.

“But some of the children have the special kungfu,” she said. When I asked her what this meant, she mentioned Hong Chi Hung, a petite six-year-old boy from Sichuan province who is the face of public relations for the school. Chinese media flock to the school to videotape the boy standing upright and putting his foot in his mouth. “He will have a very bright future,” she said.


Many other students also have the “special kungfu.” The school boasts some 1000 Wushu Championships and recently, it had 4 champions in the US-China Wushu Championships. In addition to the tournaments, it also has former students in movies and T.V. series. If they have the “special kungfu,” they rarely go home. They’re too busy performing in the school’s touring groups.

I saw many examples of “special kungfu” during my stay. One such practitioner came into the training hall every day to punish a heavy bag with nasty flying sidekicks, later moving to the mat to do a succession of back flips and finishing his workout by posing for pictures doing a one-finger push-up.






But many others don’t have the “special kungfu.” Not everyone can be Jet Li. So what do most students do? Ms. Shan ticked them off. “Many go into the army, police, coaching, teaching, being a guard, secretary…many things.” Tagou students can also continue on to the Tagou Wushu College and further their studies in such fields as applied English, office management, security, traditional medicine, health and tourism, she said.

Ms. Shan told me all this while sitting on the mat during the second day of training. As I had severe problems moving my body, I spend a lot of that day sitting with her. I tried to train a little, but my teacher had the idea that he would make me do running leaps off a mat while doing flying crescent kicks. To make sure I jumped high enough, he swung a bamboo stick under my feet. I changed my mind. Definitely bad guy.



THE INTERVIEW



I didn’t train in the afternoon. I was planning to, but Ying Ying informed me that she had set up an interview with “a very important person.” She told me I should be “very excited.” I was to interview Liu Hai Chao, the President of the Wushu College!

Liu Hai Chao’s father founded Tagou school in 1978. As the story goes, he was a simple farmer who just happened to be a kungfu master in his spare time. His fame spread throughout the land until three pupils traveled to Dengfeng to be his disciples. In 25 years, his school grew from three students in a field to 18,000 students in two massive complexes. A man who could do that must be pretty good at kungfu and/or business.

But his son showed no signs of his father’s prowess. His office indicated more CEO than kungfu master, with fine stained wooden paneling, a coffee maker in the corner (rare in China) and a bright blue-haired Buddha statue as a paperweight.

Mr. Liu was a coarse, ogre of a man, massively middle-aged with a wreath of jet-black hair around his otherwise bald head. He was the type of person who talked at you instead of to you, visibly titillated by his own words while hardly listening to yours. He showed no signs of health, having what the Chinese call a “General Belly” (beer gut) and chain-smoking four cigarettes during the course of our 15-minute interview.

I was beginning to think that he had no kungfu training at all. But then, about one minute in, he lifted his right butt cheek completely off his seat and set forth a fart of such power and fury that I knew he had to have some kungfu training.

I started with a basic question. What do the students actually learn? At the biggest martial art school in the world, they do not learn kungfu. They learn Wushu.

After the Communist revolution in 1949, officials attempted to ban kungfu, branding it as superstitious and backward. But when they couldn’t beat it, they joined it. They legalized it but watered down much of the spiritual elements and made it more of an acrobatic dance rather than a system of self-defense, with flamboyant aerials and a well-defined point system. They also added the kickboxing-like Sanda for combat competition. Mr. Liu said, “Theory is the same. External forms are different.”

The school advertises itself as teaching “Shaolin kungfu.” I asked them if the students learn any Buddhism. He laughed in my face. “The students learn about Buddhism scholarship and culture. They also learn there is no God in the sky or on earth.” It made sense for a kungfu school in Communist China to stay on the safe side and stick with the government’s official atheist line.

But if you take out the religion, what the Chinese government calls “superstition,” how do you explain the “superpowers” of kungfu? For instance: Qi or the “life force” that animates every living thing. Both kungfu and Wushu practitioners believe that if they focus their “life energy” at a certain point in their body, they can strengthen it (like Steve and his iron balls), causing increased damage to other objects or people. Or they can use their qi for healing. Does this life force just appear naturally or is there a reality beyond our reality?

Mr. Liu was adamant and shouted his response. “Most foreigners misunderstand this. We assimilate energy from the cosmos and increase our life potential by practicing ourselves. We refine our life essence and increase life energy for the purpose of fortifying our internal organs.”

Ok. So students from the age of four all the way up to 22 train at least five hours a day and for what? What was the point? Being really good at kungfu? Its practical use went out the door with the advent of firearms.

I was expecting Mr. Liu to have a vague answer about the value of heritage and discipline, which will help students no matter what they do, perhaps like a liberal arts professor defends what he or she teaches. But Mr. Liu was devastatingly practical. “If they know English and Chinese, the most suitable job is a secretary/body guard.” All that training to be a rich man’s toady. Sounded like the kungfu equivalent to flipping burgers.

I told him that I was shocked about the young age of some of the students. Mr. Liu agreed. “Their parents think it is suitable. But in my opinion, it is not good. The teachers only take care of them. They don’t teach them knowledge.”
“So why do you let them in?”
He became defensive. “I just manage the Wushu college. I don’t know about these things.”
“But I thought you owned the school.”
"The school belongs to human kind.”
“But it’s private right? Either your father owns it or you own it.”
“I only want to work hard and do my work well.”

He wouldn’t even answer a simple question. I changed the subject. When I would walk outside, I saw beautiful fields, lush mountains and a flowing brook. While not exactly quiet on account of the Chinese tourists, it was almost peaceful. In between the Tagou School and the Shaolin Temple, the space was relatively empty.

But even in the fields, one could see where foundations once stood. The impressions of buildings haunted the path to the temple. Massive structures that once stood there were now gone, and recently so. Mr. Liu told me that there used to be about 50 kungfu schools on the Shaolin Temple grounds but they have since moved out. “There were too many people near the monastery. It destroyed the climate.”

About five years ago, the newly ordained abbot of the Shaolin Temple, Shi Yongxin, ordered the grounds cleared of schools and farmers alike. The farmers protested and the schools moved to Dengfeng. The Tagou School is the last privately owned school left in Shaolin. But talk in the training hall was that the school was moving to nearby Dengfeng by next year. When I asked Mr. Liu about the school’s future, he said, “I have no idea about the future of the school.” I had to go to someone with less of his head up his own ass.

SHAOLIN, INC.


The hotel manager, Gou Deping, was more obliging. He told me the Abbot forced Tagou School to move next year. They are building extensions to their new school to prepare.

“Local people hate the abbot,” Gou said. “Because they thought it was his idea. I’m an outsider so I don’t care. I think it’s better for the environment. It makes the place cleaner and quieter. It’s good for tourism. But they shouldn’t move all the schools. Shaolin culture includes kungfu and schools. Only a temple and no kungfu is not good. It’s not fair.”

But there will be a kungfu school. Next to the Shaolin Temple, the exhibition hall also houses a small school that will be allowed to stay, which just happens to be owned by the abbot’s brother. Abbot Shi Yongxin said he wanted to clear the Shaolin Temple of elements corrosive to Buddhism but it is obvious that he also wants to turn Shaolin into a highly profitable business.

The monastery is in the midst of a legal battle to trademark the Shaolin name at home and abroad. They send hundreds of monks abroad to perform in kungfu shows to “spread our culture” but to also rake in handsome returns. They recently established the Shaolin Culture Broadcast Company to produce its own blockbuster films. And there are plans in the works for a kungfu version of American Idol. While these facts sully my dream of an enlightened Buddhist sanctuary where they can also kick your ass, I knew that it was appropriate. The current Shaolin Temple was conceived to resemble a dream.

The Shaolin Temple has been destroyed several times during its long history. The temple has always been rich. The Shaolin Temple had valuable possessions to protect, gained by courting the favor of powerful emperors. But then again, it has also housed dissidents and supported their activities. This combination caused the temple to be sacked repeatedly, most recently in the Ming Dynasty and Qing Dynasty. Then, the temple was destroyed almost irreparably in the Chinese Civil War in 1928, when a fire burned for 45 days destroying priceless literature and records.

Even when Mao Zedong banned kungfu, the temple held on. It wasn’t until the Cultural Revolution, when Red Guards ransacked the temple in the 1960s, that the monks were expelled. After that, only local farmers came to the temple. They used it to dry their corn.

But the reform era came in the late 1970s, and like much of China, things got better for the Shaolin Temple. Looking for a way to generate much needed income, the Chinese government cashed in on their cultural heritage and bankrolled their first kungfu film, “The Shaolin Temple” with a young Jet Li in his first starring role. Based on a legend of 13 monks defeating an entire army, the movie was a success. Realizing the tourism possibilities, the government rebuilt the temple and restocked it with monks. Shi Yongxin completed the set. So it really should resemble a movie set.





But this has led to problems, as the temple was not recreated properly. Ying Ying led me to a pavilion and told me a story. As the legends goes, translated from her Chinglish, the “inventor” of Zen Buddhism, Damo, was at the Lixue Pavilion inside the temple when one of his followers knocked on the door. The follower had such a hankering to become a full fledged monk, that when Damo came outside, the follower cut off his own left arm, his blood spurting out over the newly-minted snow. Damo knew he now understood Zen Buddhism and awarded him his monk’s alms bowl, signifying full monkhood.

“Is this the exact ground where his blood fell?”
“Yes,” said Ying Ying. “Very famous.”
I imagined the whole scene, thinking this was the same ground, right here, where the blood spread, where the arm fell.
About 20 feet to the left, there was a building not open to the public. I asked Ying Ying what it was. She stalled for a second and said, “That’s the original pavilion.”
“So he didn’t really cut off his arm here?”
“No,” said Ying Ying. She was caught. She mumbled her reply. “They moved the pavilion in 1984.”

It made me wonder: what was the difference between an authentic historical site and a theme park? It reminded me of Colonial Williamsburg, with a mix of original and recreated buildings. And just like Colonial Williamsburg, the Shaolin Temple also had actors.

According to other westerners more familiar with the temple, most of the “monks” are not really monks. They are paid martial artists training with the real monks, who give them Buddhist names to sound genuine. In turn, they provide the public with the illusion that there are still a good number of “warrior monks.”

To some, it was definitely a job. I saw a young monk chain-smoking cigarettes in a red baseball hat, much like a historical re-enactor would suck down before starting work.



But the Shaolin Temple retained aspects of its former glory. Toward the back of the temple, there was Pilu Hall, built 500 years ago during the Ming Dynasty. It was also called 500 Buddha Hall because of its magnificent paintings of 500 Buddhas on the wall. With a wall like that, I couldn’t imagine that the monks would train there for fear of damaging it, but the proof was in the floor. It was evident that the monks held their stances for hours in the hall, because pocked all over the floor were deep indentations from where they pressed down. There was so much pressure over time that the worn stones had actually sunk down into the earth.

MONKEY KUNGFU

The next day, I doubted that my body could endure another game of jump-kick so I called Ying Ying. “What do you want to learn?” she asked.

I thought for a second. There was so much to learn. Modern Wushu has tons of insane forms with names like Poking Feet, Supreme Ultimate Fist, Praying Mantis Fist, Through the Back Boxing, Drunken Boxing and Cannon Punch.

But I knew which form I wanted. In high school, my friends made fun of me for my slight primate features, nicknaming me “monkey boy.” At the biggest martial art school in the world, I would turn that moniker of derision into a powerful weapon. I would turn Monkey Boy into Monkey Boxing.

The next day, my teacher arrived. I expected a master of the Simian arts, but what I got was a little boy. His head was shaven and he had baby-like rosy apple cheeks. He was only 15, but like a lot of Chinese youth, he looked younger. Ms. Shan said that he “majored in monkey and monkey stick” at the Tagou School. That had to be the best major I had ever heard of. He walked onto the training mat and said, “Look.”

All of a sudden, he was a monkey. He sucked in his cheeks and hunched his shoulders up. His wrists and fingers hung loosely and his legs sunk in a crouched position. His eyes widened and he started to pick imaginary lice out of his head. He looked around for enemies and then snatched some invisible fruit from an imaginary tree. He was totally serious.



He motioned for me to do whatever he did. So I assumed the monkey position and picked some air-fruit. He then started to walk on his haunches using his hands for support. Easy enough. He then broke into a monkey shuffle, which shortly became a monkey run and then into what best can be described as a flying ballerina spin with a leg extension and a smack down on the ground with his…what I guess were now paws. I had no idea how that would help me beat people up, but I had no time to think. I did my best to follow him, but at the ballerina spin, I flailed my body in the air and landed on an internal organ.

He looked down at me and shook his head as a human but quickly resumed monkey position. Next he did a leg sweep and hopped over his own foot, doing it three times while simultaneously spinning around, finishing the move by spinning on his ass. I tripped over my own foot and went right to the ass part.

Then, he ate some imaginary fruit but I guess it tasted bad, so he wobbled his fingers in front of his face, and made “monkey is mad” sounds (Wo-ahh-ahhh-ahhh!). That had me wobbling and Wo-ahh-ahh-ing, and then we were going back and forth being mad monkeys. What do mad monkeys do? Apparently, they hop on their asses. So there I was, bouncing my butt cheeks on the mat.

Then he did a roll back into the crouched monkey stance and I followed suit. Suddenly, he whipped out a flying sidekick, the first actual kungfu move in the whole performance. I could do that. I was relieved, until he did a one-handed back handspring. I couldn’t do that. I fell all over the place. He was patient with me, and told me where to place my hand and eventually, I pulled off a weak rendition. It was the only time he said, “Very good.”

He picked some lice out his head and did a punch. But the manliness of the punch was gone when he made me immediately go into a monkey prance on my toes, skipping along the mat picking imaginary fruit. I maintained my dignity by imagining I was plucking out my enemy’s eyeballs, but the prancing was still unnecessary.

After that, he picked some imaginary hair out of his head and blew it, which I guess was to blind the enemy. Then he was embarrassed for some reason, probably because we’d been acting like monkeys for the past five minutes and he resumed human form once again. Everyone in the gym stopped their own training to watch us. For the next two days, I would once again be called “monkey boy.”

We practiced it for about another hour and a half. The form was interesting, like a kungfu ballet. There were very few practical applications in the form but I thought it should have at least included the defensive move most natural to monkeys. Nowhere in the form did I see any throwing of feces. I asked him about it. Well, actually I just made a monkey nose and mimed the throwing of my own crap. He just laughed and informed me (through a translator) that nowhere in the monkey forms was there any poop throwing. Like many other Wushu forms, the Monkey form is for show, not combat.

PASSION

However, the question did lead to a conversation. His name was Houzhi Peng. He had been at the school six years, since the age of nine. I imagined his busy parents sending him off so they could log more hours in China’s expanding private sector but he said that wasn’t the case. “I chose it myself. I saw the school in an advertisement and asked my parents if I could go. They said yes.” He said he missed his family very much when he first started but it doesn’t bother him anymore. His major was the monkey form, but technically, it falls under Performance.

Like many students at the school, he wanted to go onto the Beijing Film Academy to become a kungfu action star. He already had the “special kungfu,” traveling around the world with the Tagou performance troupe. But as any Hollywood waitress knows, you need more than talent to be in the movies. You need an impossible amount of luck. He knows that but it doesn’t seem to matter. “I love Wushu very much,” he said.

I asked him why he loved it. He stumbled for an answer and finally said, “It is a myth to me. I want to learn the secrets. It is endless.” And then I realized what a stupid question that was. Passion is irrational. Why do you love a person or a thing? You can make stabs at it, fumble for concrete reasons but in the end, you just love it. It could be a movie you saw, a song you hear, a sentence you read or a glance you receive. It doesn’t matter. Something in you just clicks, fusing your identity with that person or thing, sometimes forever. For that boy, right now, what he loved was Wushu, specifically, Monkey Wushu. There was nothing more to say.

WISDOM

I didn’t know if the Shaolin Temple was real or fake. But then, that is the essence of Zen Buddhism, which has been practiced in the Shaolin Temple for nearly two millennia. It is the coexistence of opposites, the existence of contradictions. The Shaolin Temple is both Buddhism and business, theme park and temple.

It didn’t matter that the temple was pursuing major economic interests. The temple has almost always pursued its economic interests. Why stop now? Instead of donations, they’re doing things for themselves. Business and Buddhism seem just as outlandish as violence and Buddhism. But kungfu was the whole reason I was there.

The Shaolin Temple seemed to fit China, with its capitalist communism, its socialism with few social programs, its emerging superpower status with astonishing backwardness. It is the land of a million contradictions. As I took my last look at the Shaolin grounds, I realized that the Shaolin legends were probably just as real as the re-created temple. But that was OK.

Kungfu is more than the Shaolin Temple. It is organic. It spreads not from temple to the rest of the world but from teacher to student. When I remember learning kungfu, I remember all the kicks and the punches. I remember the weapons. But I also remember the non-western thought. It was the first time I meditated; the first time I sought spirituality in some place other than the church; the first time I really became curious about some place other than America.

In an age of firearms, no one really uses kungfu for self-defense. Now, kungfu defends Buddhist and Chinese heritage. It exposes curious people all over the world to a culture so vastly different from their own that perhaps within its mysterious confines, one can really attain super powers; or at least a different perspective.