He pointed across the hall. I glanced above him and saw for the first time that there were two ticket windows at the far end with only a few people standing in front of them. I bumped, jostled, and apologized my way through twenty-plus lines until I broke free to these windows at the end. I knew I was in the right place because the only people in these lines were foreign backpackers like me.
It turned out that the lines were divided by the three ways to travel by train in China. The peasants were in line for hard seats, the cheapest tickets. There was no assigned seating: They were crushed into train cars with wooden benches where they had to press for a seat. Many chose to sit on their bags in the aisles. Tickets in the next class were for hard beds, which were individually assigned. These were a series of open rooms with six beds, stacked three high on either wall. Tickets in the highest class were for soft beds, the very rough equivalent of sleeper cars in America or Europe: private rooms with only four beds. These booths at the end sold only soft-bed tickets, which were about ten times as expensive as hard-seat tickets and required FEC to buy. I paid about $30 for the eight-hour overnight ticket to Zheng Zhou with great relief. I would have paid almost anything not to have to wait for days in the hard-seat lines.
A night of fitful sleep on a rocky train further jostled my scrambled circadian clock. I walked out of the Zheng Zhou train station with newly intensified jet lag. It was six in the morning and I desperately wanted to find some place where I could go back to sleep.
Zheng Zhou is the capital of Henan Province, a landlocked agricultural state in the center of the country. It is a small city by Chinese standards, with a population of only two million. Being far from the ocean, it had not yet felt the deluge of foreign investment that was transforming China’s coastal regions and bringing foreigners over in large numbers.
The locals were surprised to see a laowai in their midst. Little kids pointed at me and ran away. Women smiled before hiding their faces in embarrassment. Men shouted out “Hallo! Hallo!” It was as if a celebrity were in their midst. A man stopped me to take a picture with him. I grinned for the picture until I realized that the man next to me was standing stiffly with no expression on his face. The Chinese don’t smile for pictures.
Zheng Zhou was gray and dirty. The sky was dark with pollution and the threat of rain. The concrete buildings surrounding the square were gritty with dirt. It was a city in desperate need of a bath. So was I. The train station was surrounded by hotels, most around ten stories high. I picked out the one whose Chinese neon-sign name was accompanied by an English translation, The Greenhouse Inn, assuming its bilingual facade indicated it was superior to the rest. I was disabused of this notion as soon as I walked inside. The Greenhouse Inn apparently got its name from the verdant color of its mold. Unlike the people outside, the hotel clerk was not delighted to discover a foreigner ringing the desk bell. He grumbled and cursed, while taking his own sweet time filling out the extra paperwork required for foreigners, the better to keep track of us. I paid in FEC.
He handed me a piece of paper with the number 804 scrawled on it.
“What about the key?” I asked.
He waved me away, “Ask upstairs.”
When I arrived at the eighth floor and stepped off, I realized that each floor had its own key girl, a young woman whose job it was to open doors for guests. Two goals in a Maoist economy are to keep people working whether their job is necessary or not (idleness is the bourgeoisie’s workshop) and to make sure everyone is keeping an eye on everyone else. The key girl was a perfect example of these two goals in action, a spy on every floor. Deng Xiaoping had set about changing all of this after rising to power following Mao’s death in 1976, attempting to shift the economy slowly from communism to capitalism, a gradual privatization. His catchwords were gaige (change) and kaifang (openness). The presence of key girls or lack thereof was a good indication of where you were on the openness/ change spectrum. The Beijing Sheraton, a foreign-Chinese joint venture, had given me my own key card.
My key girl looked in every way like an average twenty-something Chinese urbanite. Her radiant black hair fell to her shoulders. Her slightly rounded face was pleasant but unexpressive. Over her slender body, she wore a white blouse of thin material and a medium-length skirt. I looked down at her name tag. It had her Chinese name and its English translation: Moon.
Finding herself suddenly in front of a foreign male had unnerved her. Her hands were shaking slightly. I smiled and told her my room number in Chinese.
“Aiya, you speak Chinese!” she cried clapping her hands to her mouth.
“Just a little.”
“Your Chinese is so good!”
“Better than Dashan’s?”
She clapped her hands together. “Are you friends with Dashan? He’s very famous!”
“No,” I said.
She visibly deflated. I was really starting to hate the guy.
She opened my door and brought me a hot-water bottle for tea. I offered her a tip. She waved it off, “Tips are against regulations.”
She hesitated for a moment before deciding to pour me a cup of tea. She hesitated another moment before deciding to pour herself a cup and join me.
I sat down in a chair, hoping for a short conversation. She sat on the bed.
“What country are you from?”
“America.”
“America is a great country. Very powerful. Not like China.”
“But China has advanced rapidly,” I said.
“No, it is inadequate. It will take seventy years before it is acceptable.”
“I have heard it will only take fifty years.”
“Who told you that?”
“A cab driver in Beijing.”
“Well, Beijing is different. It is rich. Not like here. We are very poor.”
I yawned. Moon froze, caught between her professional obligation to leave and her desire to continue this welcome relief from the boredom of her job. She decided to stay.
“Why are you in Zheng Zhou?” she asked.
“I’m going to the Shaolin Temple to study kungfu.”
“Really? My little brother is in Shaolin studying kungfu.”
This woke me up. Finally, I had confirmation that the Shaolin Temple still trained students.
“I need to go there tomorrow,” I said. “What is the best way to get there?”
“You need to go tomorrow? Why not stay in Zheng Zhou for a couple of days and see the sights?”
“What sights?”
“There is the Yellow River.”
“I need to get to Shaolin. Can you tell me what is the best way?”
“There is a tourist bus that leaves for Shaolin at eight o’clock in the morning,” she sighed, disappointed. We sipped our tea without looking at each other for a couple of minutes. “Did you know that China invented kungfu?”
“Yes, I did.”
“Chinese culture is very deep.”
“Yes, it is.”
We fell into silence again.
“Do you know the history of Shaolin?”
“Not really.”
So Moon taught me the history of the Shaolin Temple.
Shaolin was founded in 492 A.D. The Chinese emperor had noticed that one of his favorite Buddhist monks, an Indian named Batuo, preferred meditating in isolated areas away from the imperial court, located at the time in Luoyang—a city about 200 miles west of present-day Zheng Zhou. So the emperor built Batuo a temple in a forested valley inside the Song Mountains, halfway between Luoyang and Zheng Zhou. Batuo became Shaolin’s first abbot and was soon joined by a small community of monks.
Shaolin might have remained just another nameless monastic community if not for the arrival, circa 525 A.D., of another Indian Buddhist missionary named Damo—Bodhidharma in Sanskrit. According to certain versions of the story, Shaolin’s abbot refused Damo admittance. The exact reason is unknown, but Damo had a tendency to rub people the wrong way. He had had to leave the Southern imperial court—Ch
ina was split into two polities at the time—after upsetting the devout Emperor Liang Wudi by dismissing his good works (building temples, publishing scriptures, supporting monastic communities) and his personal dedication (the emperor was a vegetarian, prayed frequently, attended Buddhist rituals, and wore monk’s robes) as having no spiritual merit.
After the abbot’s rejection, Damo climbed Mt. Song, which rises about 2,000 feet above Shaolin, and entered a cave barely big enough for two men to sit in. He vowed not to leave until he achieved enlightenment. In the religious texts written half a millennium later, he is said to have remained there for nine years before he achieved his goal, meditating with such intensity that his image was burned onto a rock in the cave. A stone with his visage painted on it sits in Shaolin today. He is pictured as a hairy man with round, bulging eyes—one legend has it that he cut off his eyelids so he wouldn’t fall asleep while meditating. In keeping with the self-mutilation theme, his first disciple, Huike, is believed to have cut off his right arm to prove his dedication.
When he came down, Damo was made abbot of Shaolin and taught the other monks that meditation was the key to achieving enlightenment. As he had with the emperor, he rejected the idea that religious ritual and good deeds helped the seeker. In fact, they could be a hindrance, because they tended to increase the ego and spiritual pride of the practitioner. A complete negation of self could be achieved only through morning-to-evening sessions of sitting meditation in which the monks sought to keep their minds completely blank. His teaching became the basis of the Zen sect of Buddhism.
But Damo soon discovered a problem. Days of doing nothing but sitting turned the monks’ muscles to mush (a problem familiar to many modern-day office workers). His answer was to introduce a set of eighteen calisthenic exercises. These exercises ultimately developed into kungfu, or so it is believed in China.
Whether the Chinese invented kungfu or it was previously developed elsewhere (India, possibly Greece) and brought to China, it is clear that the martial arts captured the imagination of the Shaolin monks, and they in turn captured the imagination of China. Shaolin was the first known Buddhist monastery to develop its own fighting system—quite unusual for a religion whose pacifism rivals that of the Quakers.
The most common explanation for this anomaly is self-defense. China’s political landscape was in turmoil at the time; an isolated mountain monastery was a tempting target for roving bands of marauders. The tradition of martial monks probably began with guards who were responsible for defending the temple. Their individual fighting techniques were strung together into series of movements, or forms, for teaching purposes. Over time the interaction between the guards and the monks ritualized these fighting forms into a kind of moving meditation, commingling the practical with the spiritual, the martial with the art.
In the sixth century, several factions were vying for control of the empire. One was led by the evil warlord Wang Shichong. To help his cause, he kidnapped the Tang prince, Li Shimin. That was his first mistake. His second was to ransack the Shaolin Temple. According to the legend, thirteen Shaolin monks (there were probably more) entered his camp, defeated his guards with their superior martial skill, killed Wang Shichong, and rescued the prince, who later became the first Tang emperor. One of Li Shimin’s first acts was to grant the Shaolin Temple extra land and the monks a special imperial dispensation to eat meat and drink alcohol, making Shaolin the only Buddhist monastery in China that is not vegetarian and dry. (Today the monks have a joke that goes: What do you get for extending the life of an emperor? He shortens yours.) The emperor had set up for himself a military academy of celibate men, a force loyal to him and unencumbered by the worry and entanglements that affect warriors with wives and children. The monks who focused on kungfu became known as martial monks (wu seng), while those who remained exclusively devoted to Buddhist practice were called cultural monks (wen seng).
Over the next thousand-plus years, the Shaolin monks became the heroes of the Chinese people. They battled against Mongol invaders and Japanese pirates. Shaolin was a rebel base against occupying foreign rulers, particularly the Manchus of the Qing dynasty. Shaolin was a center for the development of the martial arts across China, with fighters coming to Shaolin to train, and Shaolin monks evangelizing in other areas. It was also the first martial arts franchise. A second Shaolin Temple was built in Fujian Province. There is some evidence there were others. Japanese monks studied at Shaolin in the twelfth century, taking back its Zen teachings and its martial arts. The impact of the combination of the two on Japanese life was so dramatic that one could argue the entire country was one big Shaolin Temple until the Meiji period. Shaolin even inspired a rivalry with the Taoist Wu Tang Temple, which developed its own style of fighting to challenge Shaolin’s. Wu Tang disciples were famous for their skill with the sword (Chow Yun-Fat’s character in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon was a Wu Tang disciple), while Shaolin’s monks were famous for their skill with the staff, a less bloody weapon…
Actually, Moon’s history lesson didn’t take place at quite this level of sophistication. Her formal education had ended in the eighth grade, and I was at best a precocious child in Chinese. It took a couple years of research to piece together Shaolin’s early years—a mixture of fact and fiction written many centuries after the events by acolytes.
Our conversation went more like this:
“The Shaolin monks fought Japanese [something].”
“I am sorry, What does [something] mean?”
“Do you know the word for [something else]?”
“So sorry, what does [something else] mean?”
“Men who steal.”
“Oh, right, right, thieves.”
“So [something] are thieves who ride in boats.”
“Oh, pirates. Okay.”
The extent of her Shaolin knowledge eventually exceeded the limits of my Chinese vocabulary, and our discussion trailed into silence. She seemed forlorn. My head ached from always being about two sentences behind in the discussion. I stretched my arms into the air to show I was tired and maybe we should end the conversation. She sighed, glancing off at the floor, her neck at a chopping-block angle.
“What’s the matter?” I asked.
“Nothing,” she said, sighing again as she leaned her head back and exposed her throat.
Wanting to change the topic, I asked, “How do you like your job?”
Her response: another sigh.
I offered, “Just so-so?”
“Oh, you understand my heart,” she said touching her chest.
I hadn’t up until that moment. She was watching a romantic comedy where the international man of mystery meets the cute working-class girl with a heart of gold. He’s supposed to sweep her off her feet, not fall asleep. The problem was we were genre incompatible. I was starring in a quest movie: young man travels to exotic land, overcomes obstacles, acquires cool skills, learns important life lessons, comes of age. She was looking for love; I was looking for Yoda. She needed rescue; I needed my rest.
I cleared my throat, “Ah, well, yes, I probably should get some sleep. When is the bus to Shaolin tomorrow?”
Another sigh. “Eight in the morning.”
“Right, yes, well, I should get up around seven. Best for me to get some rest. How do I arrange for a wake-up call?”
“I will take care of it,” she said as she dragged herself from the room.
“Thank you, thank you, thank you,” I said.
In Chinese, you never say something once when you’re trying to be polite—it sounds curt. You have to say it at least three times.
As I undressed, I had a chance to contemplate the irony of my situation. For the last three years I had been reading Zen and other mystical texts with an ever increasing fervor. I had started to believe I might be called to a religious life. To test this possibility I had decided as soon as I landed in China that I would take a personal vow of celibacy. My goal was total personal transformation. It was simple spiritua
l physics. Personal change was a matter of applying enough pressure over a long enough period of time: C = pt2. And here I was less than a week into my trip being sorely tested. Maybe the vow didn’t take the effect of law until I reached the Shaolin Temple.
The phone rang. Over the line I heard the song, “I Love a Man Who Never Comes Home.” It was one of thousands of saccharine East Asian pop tunes, which made Air Supply sound like Metallica. As I was trying to figure out if this was some glitch in the telephone system or if someone was pranking me, I heard Moon’s giggle.
“Do you like the song?”
“Right, right, right, yes, okay. It is not bad.”
“I love this song.”
“Good, good, good,” I said. “Okay then, so you have arranged for my wake-up call, right?”
Sigh. “Yes.”
“Thank you, thank you, thank you.”
That night I dreamt I was sitting outside the gates of the Shaolin Temple, an isolated monastery on a windswept mountain. Each time I knocked on the massive doors, I was told to go away. After many months had passed, the gates finally opened from the inside. I stepped through to find myself standing above a void. I could hear myself scream as I fell.
I jolted awake to find a woman leaning over me. A nurse? Was I in a hospital? My body clock still haywire, it took me several moments to realize it was Moon. I stared around the room, trying to remember where I was. The early morning light was shining through the crack in the curtains.
“Good morning,” I said.
“Good morning,” she giggled.
“It’s you.”
I looked down. The sheet was covering my lower half. My clothes were on the chair in the corner. I was trapped.
“Yes, it’s me. I told my coworker to take the night off. I worked all night to make certain you woke up.”
Now I felt trapped and guilty.
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