Shaolin Temple is known in the West as the home of kung fu. Fintan O'Toole meets the controversial abbot who has secured the temple's future by cultivating that myth.
If you were an adolescent in the early 1970s, you might half-expect Shi Yong Xin to have a slice of a ping-pong ball covering his eyes to make him look blind and to instruct you to walk along a sheet of ricepaper without ripping it or leaving a mark. He is, after all, the abbot of Shaolin Temple in the central Chinese province of Henan, where David Carradine's Kwai Chang Caine supposedly learned his awesome skills in the American TV series that introduced most westerners to a term they had never heard before: Kung Fu.
But in fact he is sitting at a polished desk in his office in the bustling provincial capital, Zhengzhou, a 90-minute drive from the temple. His head is shaved, he wears a simple yellow robe, and the shelves behind his desk are loaded with sacred Buddhist icons. But pride of place on his desk goes to a photograph of the abbot with Sepp Blatter, the head of Fifa, at the recent World Cup finals in Germany. He can see perfectly well, and instead of uttering lapidary words of wisdom he hands you a business card that says simply, "Shi Yong Xin, Buddhist abbot".
The setting would, admittedly, have been more romantic if we had met, as originally planned, at the Shaolin Temple itself, nestling among the rich vegetation and sweeping prospects of the sacred mountain Songshan, regarded as an exceptionally holy place in both the Buddhist and Taoist traditions. Though it was ransacked during the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s (and before that by a local warlord in the 1930s), and though it is now a buzzing tourist trap, Shaolin retains much of the dignity of an institution that has stood for 1,500 years.
In AD 496, Emperor Wen Di of the Northern Wei Dynasty built Shaolin for an Indian Buddhist monk named Batuo. In AD 527 another Indian monk, Bodhidharma, or Da Mo, arrived at Shaolin Monastery and founded another branch of Buddhism, Zen, or, in Chinese, Chan. In one of Shaolin's chapels, you can still see the stone in front of which Da Mo meditated for nine years, so that his shadow was imprinted on its surface. In another, you can see the potholes worn in the floor by centuries of hard training by Shaolin's monks seeking to master the martial arts that were supposedly invented by Da Mo to improve the fitness of his acolytes and stop them falling asleep during meditation. All around you can see the tough, super-fit young monks whose years of training in kung fu (or gong fu as the Chinese call it) have made them adept at the skills that make Shaolin such an alluring international brand name.
Sanctified as Shaolin may be by its long history and spiritual standing, it is this legendary status as the birthplace of Chinese martial arts that gives it its special glamour, not just around the world, but in China itself. Even in the early 1970s, when "Red China" was still a pariah state for most Americans and attitudes to the Chinese had not advanced very far beyond Fu Manchu and the Yellow Peril, Shaolin's inherent fascination was such that it could serve as a fount of benevolent power and wisdom in one of the most popular American TV shows of the time. Carradine's turn in Kung Fu - as a former Shaolin monk forced to flee to the Wild West - in turn inspired the burgeoning Hong Kong kung fu movie industry to evoke the temple's mysterious power in Five Shaolin Masters, The 36th Chamber of Shaolin, Shaolin Si and The New Legend of Shaolin, in which new stars such as Gordon Chang and Jet Li emerged as masters of the ancient martial arts, reluctantly using their deadly techniques to protect the innocent from the bad guys. Shaolin and kung fu became synonymous.
NONE OF THIS would have made much difference to the real Shaolin Temple had it not been for a combination of China's transformation into a globalised market economy on the one hand and the astuteness of Abbot Shi on the other. I met him last week in the suite of offices in Zhengzhou, occupied by the temple's commercial arm, because he had been detained in the city for a long meeting with the local government. A few days earlier, he had been awarded a sleek black sports car worth a million yuan (€100,000) by the government of the nearest city to Shaolin, Dengfeng, in recognition of his immense contribution to local tourism: the temple attracted three million domestic and foreign tourists last year. Short and well-rounded, with keen, dark eyes and an expressionless face, he may not be anybody's idea of a martial arts hero, but he has shown amazing dexterity in turning Shaolin the myth into Shaolin the brand. If his feat of triangulating Buddhism, communism and capitalism could be filmed, it would be worth its place in the best of the kung fu movies.
He was born as Liu Yin Cheng in 1965, in the dirt-poor rural province of Anhui. Because, he says, he was a bright boy with an interest in Buddhism, his parents sent him to study at Shaolin when he was 16. His talents were quickly recognised by the abbot of what was then a famous but neglected and much-reduced temple, and after three years of basic training in the scriptures he was accepted as a monk and began to assist in the management of Shaolin's affairs. Though he was still only 22 when the abbot died in 1987, and though he had yet to attain the level of Buddhist sanctity at which he could be considered a master, Shi Yong Xin effectively took over the running of the temple. In 1995, having completed his studies and been accepted as a living incarnation of the Buddha, he was named as abbot, and in 1999 he was formally made the 33rd abbot of Shaolin.
Thus, though he is just 41, Shi Yong Xin (all monks at Shaolin take the name Shi and lose their previous identities) has managed a 20-year transition that in many ways is a mirror of the transformation of China itself. Inheriting an institution that had barely clung on to existence in an anti-theist state, he turned it into one that is embraced both by the state and the global marketplace. He persuaded the Henan government of Shaolin's value as a tourist magnet, and it was public money that allowed him to restore the damaged drum tower, bell tower and Dharma hall that are the monastery's main architectural treasures. His political nous is such that he is now a deputy in the National People's Congress, the consultative parliament that, in principle at least, has a veto over government policy. At the same time, he also turned the temple's TV and movie mythology into a tangible asset, registering "Shaolin" and "Shaolin Temple" as trademarks in 1994, establishing a company to manage its intellectual property rights, developing slick Shaolin Monk martial arts performances to tour abroad and establishing an official website as early as 1996.
All of this is especially impressive because much of the Shaolin myth has at best a tenuous relationship with the real temple. Shaolin is almost certainly not the fount of Chinese martial arts, which existed long before the Indian monk Da Mo arrived at the temple. The exercises he developed to keep his monks awake were more like calisthenics than kung fu. The literature on famous kung fu schools and styles from the Chinese middle ages doesn't mention Shaolin. The temple, like all landowners in unsettled rural China, did have its own defensive militia, made up of young monks, but they were renowned for their prowess at staff- fighting, not at what we think of as kung fu. The notion of Shaolin as the ultimate keeper of kung fu mysteries can in fact be traced back no further than a novel, Travels of Lao Can, written between 1904 and 1907. It entered the mythological atmosphere, got transmuted into an American TV series, mutated into Hong Kong movies and was brought back home by Shi Yong Xin's shrewd realisation that it was the key to his monastery's future.
IN SPITE OF all of this strange history, the abbot insists that Shaolin remains a primarily religious enterprise. "Shaolin is 1,500 years old and it has had a big effect on China, on the development of Buddhism and also on Buddhist history in Japan," he says. "It was at Shaolin that eastern and western Buddhist traditions merged. The temple translated Indian learning to China. It also united Chinese knowledge and traditions into Indian Buddhism, creating a very strong Chan (Zen) philosophy. So Shaolin isn't just a famous name for now. It has very deep roots."
Kung fu, he points out, is just one of three strings to Shaolin's bow. "If a boy comes here, wanting to be a monk, we will ask him to train for three years in Buddhist philosophy and basic skills. Then, he has to decide which path to follow. Some will learn Chan and try to master its sacred texts and ideas. Some will learn kung fu and try to reach the highest levels of physical skills. Some will concentrate on learning traditional Chinese medicine, which is also a very important part of Shaolin's history."
He himself took the first path, and obviously sees Buddhist scholarship as the core of the temple's mission. I ask him if there is not a contradiction between the severe, self-denying pursuit of spiritual perfection on the one hand and Shaolin's emergence as a tourism and performance business on the other?
"This is not a problem. Firstly, there is a very close relationship between Chan Buddhism and kung fu and we teach and practise it. If you utilise the philosophy, you follow a path of discipline and seek to train your mind to control your body. One way to express this is through kung fu, but you cannot achieve perfection in kung fu unless your great strength is an expression of a great heart. This is the big difference between Shaolin kung fu and the rest: it is built on the basis of a Buddhist understanding. Secondly, Shaolin kung fu mainly depends on the spirit. It is about controlling and limiting violence. The Buddhist spirit affects the person who is training, and lets that person become a good person, who will use their skills to protect themselves and other people."
This deeper intention, though, is hardly what attracts audiences, especially in the West, to the shows that the Shaolin monks have mounted around the world. The abbot accepts that people may come to the Shaolin shows more for the physical spectacle than for the spiritual enlightenment.
"The performances are always successful and audiences react very strongly to them, but of course most people don't understand them in a Buddhist context. The temple sends groups of performers out in co-ordination with people in whatever country they are going to, and they will naturally present it in their own way. But this is not a problem. We are not trying to convert people to Buddhism because they like kung fu. If you want to be a Buddhist you have to understand it first, then believe in it. It depends on yourself and on a long period of study. You need better reasons to believe than the fact that you enjoy a show. But travelling and meeting other people is good for our monks. Buddhism is an open and tolerant system, and good Buddhists want to encounter other cultures and lifestyles."
His own lifestyle now includes that very fancy sports car donated by the local government, and his acceptance of the gift has generated a great deal of criticism among devotees whose notion of a Buddhist abbot centres on austerity and self-sacrifice. Shi Yong Xin defends himself on the grounds that Buddhist holy men have always wanted to contribute to the wider society and that the car recognises his success in doing so. "In this regard, I hope to be awarded a bigger prize next year, because it would mean we have achieved more."
To be fair, his acumen does mean that Shaolin's immediate future is guaranteed, if not by its sanctity, then by its status as a valuable economic asset. Buddhism is increasingly appealing to young Chinese people as an alternative but unthreatening philosophy, and Shi Yong Xin has developed an image of Buddhism that is in keeping with their ideals: rich, cosmopolitan, at once traditional and glamorous, and able, if need be, to somersault away from trouble.