186 Fist Fighting and Self-Cultivation
the monastery itself was never involved in a rebellion, some of its alumni might
have been.
Late Ming Destruction
The desolation that was revealed to Gu Yanwu at the Shaolin Monastery was
also witnessed by other visitors during the first decades of Qing rule. “After the
upheaval only a handful of monks have remained,” lamented Ye Feng (1623–
1687). “Who will preach here the Dharma?”^12 From the 1640s through the
1680s, the Shaolin Monastery had been largely deserted. Most of its monks had
left, and the majority of the buildings had been falling apart, some of the most
precious ones being past repair. Zhang Siming visited Shaolin in 1684:
When I arrived at the temple, I discovered that long ago it had been
consumed by the end-of-era’s fires (jiehuo; kalpâgni). The Dharma Hall
was overgrown with weeds, and the disciples had scattered. Sighing
there for a long time, I let my legs carry me west of the Thousand
Buddhas Hall. There I saw piles of dirt overgrown with thick bushes,
scattered tiles and fallen beams that were exposed to the wind and the
rain. Monk Yunshi pointed them out to me, lamenting: “This used to be
the White-Attired Mahâsattva [Guanyin] Hall. It was built during the
reign of the Northern Wei emperor Xiaowen (r. 471–499). It was a grand
building. Being subject to the bandits’ turmoil, it has been reduced to
this state!”^13The Buddhist concept of the kalpâgni—the cosmic fire that will burn the
world to ashes at the eon’s end—was applied by Zhang Siming to the devasta-
tion of the monastery that had accompanied the Ming’s demise. This same
metaphor was also used by Shen Quan (1624–1684), who nonetheless remained
hopeful that the monastery’s heritage would not be extinguished:
I have heard that the Shaolin Temple
Several times has endured the end-of-era’s ashes.
Broken steles covered by moss,
Shattered walls exposed to the blue sky....
Dense, the monastery’s ancient cypresses,
Forever protect its divine spirit.^14
The Qing-appointed governor of Henan left us a similar record of the
monastery’s dismal conditions in mid-century, except that his tone was less
sympathetic. Wang Jie (ca. 1620–ca. 1700) apparently disdained the miserable
few monks who had remained amongst their monastery’s ruins: “Today the