Martial Arts Of The World - Webs

ing on boxing to try to bring it up to the standards of the famed Shaolin
Staff. In any case, during the mid-Ming, the monks had built up their reputation
as martial artists, and they responded to a call for volunteers to
fight Japanese pirates on the coast. Their everlasting fame as Shaolin Monk
Soldiers resulted from their participation in a campaign in the vicinity of
Shanghai, where a monk named Yue Kong led a group of thirty monks
armed with iron staves. They were instrumental in the ultimate victory
against the pirates, but sacrificed themselves to a man in the process.
Ironically, most of Shaolin Monastery and Zen Buddhism’s actual association
or lack of association with the martial arts has been obscured by
early nineteenth-century secret society activity and subsequent embellishments
in popular novels such as Emperor Qian Long Visits the South (by an
unknown author) and Liu E’s Travels of Lao-ts’an. The Heaven and Earth
Society (also known as the Triads or Hong League) associated themselves
with the monastery’s patriotic fame as a recruiting gimmick. Concocting a
story to suit their needs, however, the society members traced their origins to
a fictitious Shaolin Monastery said to have been located in Fujian province,
where the society had its beginnings in the 1760s. Around 1907, Liu E, in
his short but powerful critique of social conditions in late Qing China, refers
to Chinese boxing originating with Bodhidharma, the legendary patriarch of
Chinese Chan (Zen) Buddhism, who is said to have spent nine years meditating
facing a rock in the hills above Shaolin Monastery. Finally, on the eve
of the Revolution of 1911, the contents of a probable secret society
hongquan (Hong fist) boxing manual, Secrets of Shaolin Boxing Methods,
were published in Shanghai. This manual, more than any other single publication,
became a major source for much of the misinformation concerning
the association of Chinese boxing with Shaolin Monastery and Buddhism.
The Martial Arts and Popular Religious Daoism
While the Chinese martial arts are based on the philosophical Daoist
worldview, there is little evidence to show a serious connection to popular
religious Daoism, except in that some martial artists must certainly have incorporated
Daoist internal cultivation or qigong-type physical regimens
into their martial arts practices. However, these regimens were not the
unique preserve of Daoists, or any particular religious group for that matter.
The Daoist intellectual and onetime military official, Ge Hong
(290–370), practiced martial arts in his younger days and concentrated on
Daoist hygiene methods in his later years. He did not treat the martial arts
as Daoist activities. During the Tang dynasty, one old Buddhist monk in his
eighties named Yuan Jing from a monastery in the vicinity of Shaolin
Monastery (but not necessarily a Shaolin monk as has often been assumed)
involved himself in a rebellion.
460 Religion and Spiritual Development: China