88 Systemizing Martial Practice
stood astride Song Mountain and the “Imperial Fort” (Yuzhai). The Red
Troops disintegrated and withdrew.
The monastery’s residents marveled at this event. A monk addressed
the crowd saying: “Do you know who drove away the Red Troops? He is the
Mahâsattva Avalokitešvara (Guanyin dashi), incarnated as the Kiœnara
King ( Jinnaluo wang).” Therefore they wove a wickerwork statue of him,
and to this day they continue to practice his [fighting] technique.”^20Cheng Zongyou’s version of the legend contains a curious element:
Kiœnara, he tells us, threw himself into the stove from which he emerged to
stand astride Mt. Song and the “Imperial Fort.” Situated atop the Shaoshi
mountain peak, the “Imperial Fort” is five miles away from Mt. Song.^21 Only
a giant of supernormal dimensions could have stood astride both, indicating
that inside the blazing stove Kiœnara underwent a process of magic transfor-
mation. That this is what Cheng Zongyou had in mind is confirmed both by
the woodblock illustration that accompanies his text (figure 12), and by Fu
Mei’s version of the legend, which specifies that Kiœnara’s “figure was trans-
formed (bianxing) and he grew several hundred feet tall.”^22 Kiœnara’s gigan-
tic proportions explain why the terrorized bandits dispersed upon seeing
him. He was revealed to them not as a mortal but as a deity.
The significance of Vajrapâÿi, now called Kiœnara, in Shaolin’s pantheon
of divinities is attested by numerous icons, which are still extant at the monas-
tery. Shaolin’s Standing-in-the-Snow Pavilion contains a (seventeenth-century?)
statue of the staff-brandishing deity, and the monastery’s White-Attired-
Mahâsattva Hall (Baiyi dashi dian) is decorated with a nineteenth-century
mural of the gigantic Kiœnara treading Mt. Song and the “Imperial Fort.” Fur-
thermore, by the eighteenth century at the latest, Kiœnara was accorded his
own ritual space when a chapel was erected in his honor. A wickerwork statue of
the deity occupied the center of a “Kiœnara Hall,” which also contained bronze
and iron icons of the deity (figure 13).^23 The wickerwork sculpture is mentioned
already in Cheng Zongyou’s seventeenth-century Shaolin Staff Method, which
specifies that it was woven by the monks. However, a century later the common
view was that the god himself sculpted it, for which reason the likeness was accu-
rate.^24 This addition to the K iœnara legend mirrors an anxiety, not uncommon
in Chinese religion, concerning the truthfulness of a deity’s image. The myths
of several Chinese deities have their protagonists create their own icons, proba-
bly to relieve the believers’ concern lest they pay homage to a wrong one.^25
Kiœnara’s self-made wickerwork statue no longer survives. In 1928, the entire
Kiœnara Hall burnt down when Warlord Shi Yousan set fire to the monastery.
The shrine was reconstructed in 1984 and again in 2004, and it houses three
new statues of the deity, who is the object of a rejuvenated religious cult.^26
Shaolin’s legend of its tutelary deity penetrated the local culture of sur-
rounding villages. A late eighteenth-century manuscript discovered in Changzi
County, southeastern Shanxi, near the Henan border, reveals that Kiœnara’s