I totally forgot that their practices might be a key part of why they can live on rice, buns and what looks like a meager amount of steamed vegetable soup. Seemed to me that there was a fair amount of dilution, the student teachers did not go beyond the form although the master had advanced powers.
ofc, you need to have full mastery, the form they taught us did not go to that extreme. (don't know how Bodhi and Lin Chi fit together) There is a practice in that form designed to reduce the need for food. As the story goes, Bodhidharma taught the monks tian gong as a healing because they were all half dead from their austere practices. I learned a form of chi gong which has lineage back to Shaolin and Lin Chi called Tian Gong. Indeed, it is hard to know whether this novel apology for carnivorousness preceded the movie, or originated with it. When interviewed about their dietary habits, they explain that Shaolin fighting monks have always consumed meat, sometimes citing the legend celebrated in the film SHAOLIN TEMPLE, according to which it was Emperor Li Shimin who absolved the monks of vegetarianism. Indeed they give the impression that carnivorousness is an integral element of the martial monk's (wuseng) ethos. These tough martial artists continue to present themselves as monks, donning Buddhist uniforms, all the while consuming animal flesh. Most of those fighting monks who have left the monastery to open private schools do eat meat. It is striking, though, that ordained martial-monks do so as well. It is not surprising, perhaps, that the monastery's "performing monks" consume meat, just as lay disciples do. By contrast, most other "Shaolin monks" are openly carnivorous. Meat is not served in today's Shaolin Temple, and Buddhist monks who live inside the monastery adhere to a vegetarian diet. 1931).Īs to Buddhist dietary laws, they are kept by the first type of Shaolin-residing clerics only. Indeed, some of the greatest masters of the Shaolin fighting-style are lay practitioners such as Liang Yiquan(b. Many of the latter were born in the monastery's vicinity of Dengfeng County, and their families have been practicing Shaolin fighting for generations.
Finally, there is the vast category of lay disciples (sujia dizi): accomplished martial artists who have been trained at the monastery, but have never been ordained as - nor do they presume to be - Buddhist clerics. Sometimes dubbed "fake monks" or "performance monks," these martial artists have been assigned their stage roles by Shaolin's abbot.
A third "Shaolin-monk" group is made of professional martial artists, who have never been ordained as Buddhist clerics, but nevertheless - since they belong to the monastery's performing company - don monastic robes. Then there is the much larger category of Shaolin-ordained monks, who having graduated from the monastery's martial program, left it to pursue an itinerant military career, often opening their own "Shaolin" martial-art schools.
The Shaolin fraternity includes at least four disciple-types: At the core stand Buddhist-ordained clerics who reside in the historical monastery itself. The title "Shaolin Monk" has been assumed by practitioners so divers that it stretches our very understanding of Buddhist monasticism.
In a series of essays published in the California-based magazine KUNG FU TAI CHI, Gene Ching has unraveled the complexities of the Shaolin community.