I don’t travel much in China.

I would love to, don’t get me wrong – but obviously, I’m working in the week, and my martial arts classes have always been on the weekend, and that means I’ve been afraid that going off on trips on the weekends would just totally disrupt what little training routine I have…

What this means is, I’ve never visited any of the martial arts ‘destinations’ such as the Shaolin Temple, Wudang Mountain, Chen Village etc etc…

Still, I’m disturbed by a recent article in the UK Independent, which was brought to my attention in a blog post by Dojo Rat.

The issue is the policy taken by the Temple’s Abbot, Shi Yongxin, to aggressively reclaim the Temple’s brand, using the legal tools of intellectual property protection, and so on – leading Dojo Rat to comment “Damned Capitalists“. This worries me, since it reflects what I think may be a seriously misguided understanding of what is likely happening there (and, again, I must emphasize that my views are also speculation, since I don’t know anyone at the Shaolin Temple).

I’ve written about this before, at this blog’s old home, but I need to explain my thoughts in more detail.

Ask yourself: “what is the purpose of a Buddhist monk?”.

The answer only takes one word…. ‘meditation’. That’s it. A monk takes his vows in order to retreat from the world, so that he can obtain the seclusion necessary to focus on meditation and thus achievement of Nirvana or Enlightenment (for the Theravada and Mahayana branches respectively). Of course, this is not universally true, but it’s the ideal.

Thus (influenced particularly by a very famous monk from the Himalayas, who I won’t name because I don’t want my blog to be blocked again), the Western public thinks that Buddhist monks should be unworldly, unconcerned with things like wealth and and profit and property management etc etc.

And they’re right to think so.

But….

How do you think all those meditating monks get food to eat?

How do you think that the walls around them are kept sturdy, and the roof doesn’t fall in on their heads from neglect?

The fact is, a temple or monastery is a complex organisation, and it needs a lot of monks who don’t meditate – in order to support those who do. What’s most relevant is that this is not a modern thing, it’s always been the case.

In The Zen Monastic Experience, Robert Buswell Jr has this to say about the job of Abbot in a Zen monastery:

While the position of abbot would seem to bring with it much prestige, the monks typically view it as an onerous one. The heavy workload and constant responsibility do not endear the position to many of the monks qualified to serve, and the monastery family may have to go through considerable machinations to cajole someone into accepting the job.

[There follows a long anecdote on the extreme lengths some monks will go to in order to avoid being appointed abbot]

I noted among the meditation monks a muted feeling that they are above the dictates of the abbot, since he is only an administrator, not a meditator. The abbot is, as often as not, relatively inexperienced in meditation, and some of the practice monks are patently supercilious toward him. The rector, who is superior in rank to the abbot, is the director of the meditation unit, and the practice monks place their respect more in him than in the abbot.

Buswell was writing about his time in a Zen monastery in Korea rather than China, but to my limited knowledge the difference is not great. He has a great deal more to say about the economy of the monastery which, having been gifted land by devotees, is landlord to many farmers who pay rent to the monastery’s administrative branch – which is how the practice (ie meditation) monks are fed.

In China, of course, there was the Cultural Revolution. The temples were closed, or destroyed, and the monks were forced back into lay life. Over the last couple of decades, of course, things have become far more tolerant, and religion is acceptable again. Old monks have returned to the temples, and a new generation of monks has emerged from those too young to remember the days of the 60s and 70s.

However….

As Red Pine points out in Zen Baggage, although the Chinese government has returned the temples to the monks, it hasn’t returned the farmland. As a result, these monasteries are left high and dry, financially unable to maintain themselves.

This is the context in which we have to look at what’s happening in Shaolin. As I understand it, the abbot there is reclaiming the Shaolin name, and getting rid of all the hangers-on who were trying to exploit it – with the purpose of generating a revenue stream that will allow the temple to return to its proper role as a centre of Buddhist contemplation….

Even monks need to eat… and that means that even monks (via their despised administrative officers) need money…

I rather feel that we should be feeling sorry for Shi Yongxin in his thankless role, rather than accusing him of selling out….

[See also: Chinese Buddhist monks enroll in MBA programs]

They didn’t say much, but I enjoyed hanging out with them.

Later on, things calmed down:

Here’s another miscellany of links that I found interesting:

• Washington Post: Study finds that meditation physically changes the structure of the brain.
• Japanese study finds that humans give off light in visible spectrum. (Does this mean that there’s truth to ‘auras’?)
• A guide to Zen meditation techniques.
• A review of Vibram Five Fingers shoes. Interesting for its discussion of how normal shoes change the shape of our feet, the way we walk, and our posture. This reminds me of a number of ways in which I can feel my body changing now that I’m practicing yiquan and zhan zhuang.

I’m a few days away from a month of travelling and holidays. I’m looking forward very much to the clean air of Wales, and practicing yiquan under the apple trees in my parents’ garden

I have a great deal on my mind, which is buzzing with things I want to blog about. Not sure where to start; I need to get everything in some kind of order…

I don’t know whether you’re the same, but I tend to keep interesting pages open in browser tabs until I get round to blogging them. At the moment, I must have a dozen such pages open, and Firefox is getting slower and slower, so here’s a rag-tag of links.

More about Red Pine, aka Bill Porter. Quite apart from him being a fascinating person, he said something extremely interesting about Buddhism in China. Like most foreigners, I’m aware that Buddhist monasteries suffered a lot during the Cultural Revolution, with monks being forced back into lay life (if they weren’t killed), monastic lands being confiscated, and so on. Although there is a religious revival in contemporary China, the assumption is that there’s no longer any learning; that modern Chinese Buddhism is starting afresh, as it were. It’s natural to see that this must be the case, and the online Buddhist fora I belong to certainly assume this to be the truth.

As so often in China, though, the reality is more complicated. I’ve spoken to a monk myself whose temple survived the Cultural Revolution unscathed – because Zhou En Lai ordered the People’s Liberation Army to protect it from the Red Guards. The monk said that the temple was basically under siege for several years, with the monks inside, the Red Guards outside, and the PLA in between… There were a lot of temples in the same situation, I gather.

Furthermore, Porter has explained the relationship between hermits and monks in a way that I hadn’t considered. I suppose most of us Westerners think of hermits as reclusive, rejecting the world and society. This probably comes from the Christian tradition, especially the Irish, I guess, who sought out the most remote and inaccessible locations for solitude. Even this is an inaccurate understanding – many of the early Christian hermits, especially in Egypt, were constantly in touch with society. In Chinese Buddhism, it’s completely wrong to think of hermits in this way. Porter compares monasteries to universities, where monks learn the fundamental concepts and practices of their particular brand of Buddhism, be it Zen or Pure Land. Some then go into the hills, and can be considered as graduate students – learning to take the basic ideas, and make them their own, to truly live them. Even in the hills, a hermit is never far from other hermits; they get to know each other, and the established hermits teach newcomers the skills they will need to survive. Eventually, local villagers may help once they believe that a given hermit is truly committed.

Eventually, after years in the hills living close to nature, the hermits will often return to the monastery. The insights and experiences they have acquired in their time away from the modern world equip them to become the ‘Professors’ – those who can inspire new monks in training with the true nature of Zen. It’s this stage that Porter discusses, and which suggests that Buddhism in China today can rebound more quickly, and in a more authentic fashion, than many outsiders think. The Cultural Revolution broke up the monasteries, but those were the undergraduates. The majority of the hermits, it seems, passed through that time almost completely unaffected, in some cases completely unaware of what was happening outside their mountains, and are now re-emerging. The reconstituted monasteries are thus regaining teachers who belong to the authentic Chinese tradition, and who possess the knowledge gained before the monasteries were broken up. I find this extremely encouraging.

Some interviews with Bill Porter, aka Red Pine:

• Interview on the Tricycle blog
• Interview at the Kyoto Journal
• Article on The Beijinger
• Article by China Daily

And now for something completely different.

Here’s a couple of parkour clips I really like, found via this Guardian article.

I went to The Bookworm this evening to catch a talk by Bill Porter, aka ‘Red Pine’. I’d been planning to go for well over a month, but hadn’t thought to pre-book a ticket. As it turned out, the talk was well over-subscribed, and I was lucky to get a ticket on standby.

He was talking about his new book, Zen Baggage – a personal pilgrimage around the significant historical sites of Zen (Ch’an) Buddhism in China. I actually bought the book about six weeks ago, and I’m not going to say anything about it now as I hope to review it at some point.

Since I’ve already read it, the readings were only mildly interesting. It was the conversation afterwards that gripped me. Porter, let’s just say, has made the hard choice to follow what he loves, even though it led to poverty. I have to respect that, especially in light of the choices I’m weighing. It turns out that he’s a friend of Daniel Reid – “He turned to Daoism, I turned to Buddhism, and we balance each other out”. Apparently Reid lives in Yunnan now. I’m vaguely aware of his work, although my friends H. and S. are big fans.

Anyway, I had a brief and enlightening chat with Porter after the talk. It seems that the book for which he is most well-known, Road to Heaven, will be re-published in September this year. I’ll look forward to getting a copy. I had planned to take my copy of Zen Baggage along for him to sign but, since I was kept late at work, I didn’t get a chance. Instead, I bought a copy of Cold Mountain.

No…. NOT the American Civil War novel that got made into a film a few years back! This is the collection of Chinese poems by a Daoist, or possibly Buddhist, hermit, made famous by Jack Kerouac in The Dharma Bums. Which is where I first heard of them, and I’ve been looking for a copy ever since….

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