American Shaolin

by Matthew Polly

  Deqing cocked his head and cupped his hand behind his ear, and sure enough I could hear Shou Ting’s voice in the distance. I followed the sound of Shou Ting’s cries and curses to the training hall. “You stupid egg! You want to go back to prison? I won’t bail you out this time!”

  Coach Cheng was trying to look abashed, but his smile ruined the effect.

  “Why are you still here?” I asked him.

  “No one recognized me. They only told the cops about Big Wang.”

  At the sound of his name, Shou Ting was off on another line of attack. “Why do you always follow him around? You are a fool to do his bidding.”

  “He’s my martial arts older brother.”

  “So you’ll follow him to jail? I won’t bail you out this time. I’m warning you—”

  “His father was my master.”

  And with that, Coach Cheng went to the police station to negotiate for Big Wang.

  It took five weeks before Big Wang returned. He tried to laugh it off, but he was clearly ashamed.

  The final price of his fine was settled at 6,000RMB ($750). It was more than the average Henan farmer made in two years. It was also less than half of what I spent per month at Shaolin.

  6

  THE SACRED AND THE PROFANE

  For a Buddhist monastery, there wasn’t much Buddhism happening at the Shaolin Temple. Under Mao and especially during the Cultural Revolution, the government had been openly hostile to religion, banning the opiate of the masses, throwing monks in jail. With the shift to the profit principle of capitalism, the attitude changed to one of indifference. Tourists paid to see performances; they weren’t interested in buying tickets to watch monks sit quietly and meditate. It is not exactly riveting entertainment. The younger monks, adapting quickly to changing values, recognized that their worth depended on their martial skills, not their spiritual depth, and they arranged their focus accordingly.

  As a student of Eastern religions, this was a profound disappointment. As long as I had gone to all this trouble to journey to Shaolin, I wanted the complete package-tour experience. I didn’t just want to be a badass; I wanted to be an enlightened badass.

  “What happened to all the Buddhism?” I asked Deqing one day.

  “There is some,” he smiled embarrassedly. “But we should do more. We should do more. Sometimes I try to meditate before breakfast.”

  I tried to do the same, once my body had adjusted to the rigors of daily practice and I no longer had to sleep ten to twelve hours a night to recover. Deqing taught me the basics. The practitioner sits in lotus or half-lotus—or if he is particularly inflexible like me, Indian style. Men are supposed to place the left palm on top of the right in their laps, while women do it the other way around (the reason for this had been lost, but the tradition remained and was insisted upon). Eyelids are half-closed and the eyes are to focus on the tip of the nose without crossing. The breathing is in through the mouth and out through the nose. And the mind is to remain completely blank. Repetition of the phrase Amituofo is used to help extinguish all extraneous thoughts.

  That’s the theory at least. For the beginner, the reality is more like ten seconds of blankness, before various random trains of thought start pulling into the station: my back itches…my friends are probably still in bed…no, it’s a fourteen-hour time difference, they are probably out partying…this is the single dumbest decision of your entire dumb life…I miss ice cream…I hope the Chiefs make the playoffs this year…no, I miss peanut butter more. Each one of these trains of thought is quickly interrupted by self-recrimination: stop thinking…focus on your breathing…you lack discipline. And then the random thoughts start again.

  After what seems like hours of this back and forth, the desire to look at your watch becomes overwhelming. The goal is thirty minutes, and surely you have passed that mark. A quick glance down reveals it has been slightly less than three minutes since you first sat down. Then begins the internal debate (interrupted with more calls to focus) about whether it is okay to reset the goal for fifteen minutes, because you are after all just a beginner and no one finishes the marathon their first time out on the track, or if this would simply be the latest in the long mental list of abandoned resolutions.

  It was at this stage that I found my earlier religious training in Catholic guilt particularly useful. I found I could eat up ten more minutes in self-laceration before it became too mentally painful to sit there trying and failing to clear my mind. I also found that it worked better if I repeated, Our Fathers and Hail Marys instead of Amituofos. The Catholic monk Thomas Merton called this practice deep prayer. But it was more like daily penance to me. I never made it past twenty-five minutes in my two years at Shaolin, and my best guess for the longest amount of time my mind was blank is thirty seconds.

  The technique that helped my deep prayer the most was physical exhaustion. It was a discovery that shed a different light on the balance between Buddhism and kungfu. At Shaolin, it was a life-cycle relationship. When the monks were young and full of piss and vinegar, their focus was primarily on hard kungfu: it burned off the excess energy and taught them physical and mental discipline. The monks in their late twenties shifted their attention from the hard stuff to softer styles like Chen-style tai chi. And at the age when American men begin to feel that an eventful day is rearranging themselves on the Barcalounger while sipping a beer and watching younger men exert themselves on TV, the monks shift their focus to more sedentary forms of Buddhist practice like meditation and chanting.

  I realized Deqing had been chewing over my criticism of Shaolin’s lack of religious practice, because one Sunday night he came to my room and invited me to see a Buddhist ceremony at the temple. Ever the staunch defender of Shaolin’s reputation, he wanted to prove to me there was still some devotion to the old ways, however attenuated.

  When we arrived at the temple, we were held up by the guard at Shaolin’s back gate. He didn’t recognize Deqing and refused to let us pass without paying him. The argument quickly grew heated. Deqing was as surprised as I was by the guard’s rude tone. People tended to take one look at Deqing with the sword scars on his face and hands like pincushions and make way for him. Finally, Deqing—who by the cataclysmic expression on his face was clearly calculating the numerous ways he could hospitalize the guard—grabbed him by the shoulders, lifted him in the air like a toddler, and set him to the side. We walked past the stunned guard and into the temple.

  By the time we made it to the central prayer hall—a large room with a gigantic statue of Buddha in the center—the ceremony was already underway. After straightening his robes, Deqing joined the other monks who were walking round and round the Buddha statue while chanting ancient Buddhist prayers and banging wooden bells at rhythmic intervals. The room was filled with a dense, silvery, sweet-smelling smoke from burning incense sticks.

  What struck me the most was not the devotion of the monks, which was evident, but rather an overwhelming feeling of alienation. Standing in that room, I felt as alone as I’d ever felt, a stranger in a strange land. Suddenly, I realized how desperately far away from home I was. It took my breath away, and I had to fight an instinct to flee the room. I’d never felt so Catholic in all my life as I did at that moment, and I barely managed to avoid crossing myself when the ceremony thankfully ended a half-hour later.

  Eager to think about something other than my fears, I asked Deqing as we walked back to the Wushu Center, “Do the old monks practice sitting meditation?”

  “They do, but they do it on their own, not in groups like in the past. With all the tourists, it is impossible to meditate together during the day. But you should keep meditating in the morning. It will help your focus in studying kungfu.”

  Deqing didn’t understand why that made me laugh. Kungfu had started as physical exercises meant to help the monks focus on their sitting meditation. Now sitting meditation was used to help the monks focus on their kungfu. The evolution was complete. I had come to Shaolin interested
in both Buddhism and kungfu, but it was obvious to me now that at Shaolin they were one and the same. Kungfu practice was the way they practiced Buddhism—the traditional forms were a kind of moving meditation. Like the young monks, I decided to make that my focus.

  In college, I’d become obsessed with mystical experiences as a result of a problem that had been itching at my brain and soul since I was thirteen. One day I had been riding my bike home from middle school when it struck me that according to the scientific method—observation, hypothesis, experimentation, theory—religious doctrine could be neither proved nor disproved, relying as it did on events too far in the past for any of us to observe. This insight caused a crisis of faith and it left me torn between rationality and strongly held religious beliefs.

  But in the mystics, I felt I’d discovered a bridge between the dichotomy of science and faith. Their spiritual experiences were like data points that could be indirectly observed, assuming that they were being honest and were not suffering from some sort of delusion. These indirect observations could be compared and contrasted against each other, and on this basis certain working theories could be developed about the nature of God.

  What I discovered from studying the Zen monks, the Sufi mystics, and the Catholic saints was a similarity in the descriptions of their experiences. They used different images, metaphors, and theological concepts, but they seemed to me to be pointing in the same direction. It brought to mind a saying from the Upanishads I’d always liked: “God is one, but the scholars call him by many different names.” Whatever their faith, mystics experienced an overwhelming power that for a brief moment extinguished their sense of self, an explosion of divinity that created a feeling in them of tremendous peace or ecstasy, a moment so transcendent that words could never fully capture it. As Lao-tzu put it, “The sayers do not know and the knowers do not say.”

  From these similarities, I followed along Aldous Huxley’s path and started to develop what I jokingly called my Unified Field Theory of Religion. My working hypothesis was that the cosmos was made up of spirit and matter, heaven and earth, and that humans consisted of both elements, a body and a soul, dust and divinity. The mystical experience was what happened when the divine or God or Allah or whatever name you prefer breaks through the mundane in a particular soul and exposes it to the universal spirit.

  As I studied the subject more and more in college, I’d find myself in these odd conversations. When I’d mention on a plane or over a lunch counter or at a party that my major was religion and my focus was mysticism, a surprising number of times ordinary people would start talking excitedly about some extraordinary spiritual experience they had experienced. Feelings, visions, miracles (usually involving cancer) are apparently fairly commonplace. After several years of these conversations, I felt both reassured and envious. Why hadn’t it happened to me? Which is to say, I was more than open to the possibility of a mystical experience, I was actively seeking it, praying for it. It is one thing to hear others tell of these moments, quite another to experience it for oneself—the difference between indirect and indisputable proof.

  It was during the afternoon practice on November 10, eight weeks into my study at Shaolin, that it finally happened to me. I had just completed a series of one of Shaolin’s eighteen basic movements, which had a 360-degree spinning kick. It was a movement I had done hundreds of times (in Zen Buddhism the repetition of physical movements—washing pans, archery, the tea ceremony—is considered a crucial means for achieving enlightenment). As I turned at the end of the mat to repeat the same movement back across, I was overwhelmed by a feeling of absolute peace. It wasn’t visual, aural, or tactile. It was emotional. And it was like nothing I’d ever experienced before. It was like all the background noise in my soul—the stress, the anxiety, the worry—suddenly went silent, like all the static in the universe stopped, and for a moment there was only God.

  I froze and turned to Deqing, my mind unable to find the right words to describe what was happening. All I could say was, “I feel peaceful.” I must have been smiling in a beatific way, because Deqing grinned and nodded back at me like he knew what I meant, and waited patiently for me to return. I wandered the room in no particular direction. It struck me that this was what Heaven must feel like. I immediately understood why mystics and monks would give up all the pleasures of the world for their spiritual journey: This experience seemed worth any sacrifice.

  I can’t say how long the feeling of absolute peace lasted, less than a minute probably. But it seemed longer, long enough for me to think that if this was not definitive proof I couldn’t imagine what would be; long enough to believe this was absolute proof; long enough to know I’d never doubt again.

  Time stopped. I lost all awareness of self.

  But then a niggling thought, a worm in the apple, nudged itself through the heavenly clouds of my consciousness. Deqing hadn’t said anything to me when I told him what I was feeling. He knew but hadn’t said. But I’d said something. Had I jinxed it? Would I ever feel like this again?

  And just like that, the sensation of absolute peace was gone, replaced by all the old anxiety and stress and worry. The static was deafening. My soul was pressed by this crushing certainty, as sad as cancer, that I’d never touch the divine again. Not in this life, at least. My soul wasn’t wise enough to pass over to the other side while in this world.

  After that training session, a debilitating depression fell over me, like true love lost. It lasted for days. I wandered through practices listless.

  But at some point the darkness lifted. I’d had my proof, my miracle. I might not make it, but I’d seen the Promised Land. And that alone made the decision to come to Shaolin the best of my life.

  The to-do list flashed in my head:

  THINGS THAT ARE WRONG WITH MATT

  Cowardly

  Still a boy/not a man

  Unattractive to the opposite sex

  Spiritually confused

  In November, a different kind of prayer was answered: God sent an English-speaking laowai to Shaolin. Carlos was from Spain. He was in his thirties, a husband and father. His face was gaunt, which made his prominent Roman nose and moist brown eyes seem outsized. His passion was teaching kungfu, but his school back home was small and he had to supplement his income by teaching driving lessons. He’d saved for years to come to Shaolin for a month or two, thinking of it as a kind of graduate school where he could acquire the necessary accreditation to attract more kungfu students.

  He was a charming man, but by his own repeated admissions a nightmare as a husband. Watching and listening to him I was fascinated by how he represented the seamless reconciliation of Catholic guilt and Mediterranean libido.

  “Oh, Mateo, you do not know how wonderful my wife is—a saint—and how I make her suffer so,” he’d say, eyes wet, each night at dinner. “I have been with so many women, too many. I must change. These women who want to learn stick shift, oh you have to see them. There was this mujer bonita—my, oh my!—she kept missing the shift and grabbing my leg. My poor wife! But what was I to do?”

  And so it would go for hours as he alternated between his poor wife and tales of his conquests, only pausing when this particular waitress, a young country girl with whom he was obsessed, came over to our table, whereupon he’d focus his entire attention upon her, flirting in his pidgin Chinese, trying to get her to “visit” him in his room.

  “She likes me,” he’d say, after she left us. “Don’t you think she likes me?”

  I’d play my part, reassuring him that of course she liked him (she didn’t) but that he had to understand that we were in rural China, and the sexual mores were very conservative. If she ever went alone to his room, first, everyone would hear about it immediately, second, she’d be considered worse than a whore, and third, she would have to leave the village in shame. I explained that despite his obvious charms, he was offering her the equivalent of a scarlet letter, and maybe he ought to tone down the seduction offensive.


  After I finished with the gentle reprimand, Carlos would sigh and return to his sainted, suffering wife and more stories of romantic liaisons past, until the waitress walked past our table again.

  One of Carlos’s equally quixotic desires was to perform a two-finger handstand. It is what had drawn him to Shaolin. A Shaolin photo-book had attracted quite a deal of attention in Europe when the monks had visited in 1990. In it was a picture of a monk performing a two-finger handstand. He was holding the entire weight of his body upright, perpendicular to the earth, with only his right index and middle fingers. Carlos had been training to accomplish this feat for the last two years, and he’d come to Shaolin to meet the monk in the photo.

  I didn’t have the heart to tell him the handstand was impossible for him. He’d never be able to complete it. The monk in the photo was Lipeng, Doc’s son. I’d asked Lipeng about the photo previously. It was taken when Lipeng was sixteen, and even he couldn’t do the two-finger handstand any longer. It was a stunt only teenagers could perform, before their muscles and bones acquired a greater density. At twenty years of age, Lipeng was only a few pounds heavier but that was too much for his fingers to support.

  I introduced Carlos to Lipeng, who told him he didn’t do the two-finger handstand any longer, but Carlos was undaunted. He even tried to convert me to his two-finger practice routine. The beginner starts in the upright push-up position on all ten fingers, instead of the fists or palms, and simply holds it for as long as possible. Once you are able to hold for five minutes, you start over again but without the pinkie fingers of both hands. Again, after five minutes, you remove the ring finger. Then the thumbs. Then the left hand. After that, you start elevating your body: first feet on a chair, then higher and higher until you reach ninety degrees.

  After two years of practice, Carlos could do three minutes with the index and middle fingers of both hands in the push-up position. During my first session with all five fingers, I passed my pain threshold at around two minutes.