Before we get to the meat of this post, I would like to announce that the 2016 Advent Challenge ends today.
I want to thank everyone who stuck with it, those who fell off the wagon and crawled back on and even those who couldn't finish. There is always next year.
Enjoy your holiday.
Over at Skeptoid, there was an interesting article on the history of the Shaolin Temple. Below is an excerpt. The full post may be read here.
Today we're going up into the misty mountains of China's Henan Province, to
find an ancient red Zen Buddhist temple. It is the home of the Shaolin, said to
be the creators of kung fu, and the very birthplace of Zen Buddhism itself.
This ancient and mysterious order of orange or yellow robed monks have studied
here for centuries, and are the most accomplished of all martial artists, able
to withstand any blow or attack. At least, so the story goes.
Americans got their first big exposure to the Shaolin monks with the 1970s
TV series
Kung Fu starring David Carradine. In the intro, we see him
as a young monk completing a rite of passage ceremony where he had to lift and
move a heavy cauldron filled with glowing cinders, and in doing so his arms
were branded with a dragon and a tiger. For all his quiet wisdom and serenity,
this monk had fighting skills that were unsurpassed. It was a combination that
was deeply attractive to
Western
audiences of the seventies obsessed with the superiority of Eastern
enlightenment over Western materialism.
This obsession has not been lost on marketers. Today you can go to virtually
any city in the world and find a Shaolin martial arts school. You can go to a
theme park or aboard a cruise ship and catch a live stage show of Shaolin
masters demonstrating their amazing abilities. Never mind that almost none of
these have any connection with the actual Shaolin Temple. China is a land where
counterfeit Apple Stores outnumber real ones by hundreds to one; and just as
we'd expect, the name
Shaolin is exploited every bit as much. But even
the real Shaolin Temple licenses its name to anything and everything, even
including instant noodles, coffee, take-out foods, tea, car tires, beer, and
cigarettes, pulling in untold volumes of cash. The Shaolin Temple itself is
little more than a tourist attraction now: take a five-minute group kung fu
lesson with everyone else from the tour bus, and pose for your group photo
holding your certificate; then stay for the live show, a mind-blowing
combination of Cirque du Soleil and New Year's Eve at Times Square. It's little
wonder that many serious martial artists hold the modern Shaolin in such
disdain: the authentic ones sold out to be pawns for official government public
relations, and the inauthentic ones exist only to cheat extra dollars out of
naive martial arts students impressed with the venerable name.
In
short, it's very, very easy to find lots of uncomplimentary things to say about
the modern Shaolin.
But even if all of that's true, it merely poisons the well of the Shaolin
monks' actual history and actual abilities. It's still valuable to know these
things; real history offers real insight and real lessons. But we find we
quickly come up against a roadblock. It comes in the form of 1500 years of
shifting governments and recycled, repurposed histories. It's trivial to look
up and read about the history of the Shaolin, but the more scholarly the
research, the more likely you are to encounter qualifications like "many historians
consider this to be fictional" or "these stories are more accurately
considered traditions than facts". But one thing we can say for sure:
attempts to nail down the history of the Shaolin past 1928 are fraught with
peril.
1928 was a pivotal year for China. It was the end of the warlord era, and
the beginning of the reign of Chiang Kai-shek. For several years, growing
Republican sentiment had been separating the warlords, but with a complexity
far beyond the scope of a Skeptoid episode, combining ideologies, religious
differences, and political changes. Suffice it to say that in March of 1928,
the Shaolin found themselves with the wrong loyalties at the wrong time, the
temple was overrun along with the surrounding city, and some 200 monks were
killed. Elements of the National Army spent weeks systematically burning and
destroying this symbol of Old China. Modern histories are always quick to point
out that this loss included their library; more about that soon.
Prior to the 1928 destruction, the true history of the Shaolin Temple is
probably quite mundane compared to its traditional history, which is filled
with many more battles and cases of destruction. In particular it's said that
the Qing Dynasty, sometime in the 1600s or 1700s, destroyed the Shaolin Temple
and caused five fugitive monks to disperse throughout the land, thus creating a
surrogate history for some of the other Shaolin temples and the spread of kung
fu. Such stories are probably not true. Plenty of
photographs of Shaolin Temple taken in the 1920s and
earlier still exist, and show that the buildings were very old. Inscriptions
can be seen in the photos documenting other parts of its long history of not
being destroyed.
Nevertheless, there are times in its history when the Shaolin Temple was
ransacked and even abandoned for periods of time, but it does not seem to have
ever been destroyed prior to 1928.
Its original founding does indeed mark the probable start of both codified
martial arts and Zen Buddhism in China, which is pretty remarkable. In the 5th
century, an Indian Buddhist master named Buddhabhadra traveled to China to
spread Buddhism, and by the year 477, he had become influential enough that
Emperor Xiaowen of Northern Wei built the original Shaolin Temple for him to
begin teaching Chinese monks.
These
are among the few facts of the early Shaolin that scholars generally agree
upon.
