Serving the Emperor 45
dozens of fighting schools around it. Thus, reality imitated fiction, as the suc-
cess of a movie on Shaolin contributed to the monastery’s revival.^77
Playing a major role in the monastery’s modern history, Shaolin Temple fur-
nishes a striking example of historical continuity. The film’s subject matter is
the monks’ historical assistance to Li Shimin, which took place thirteen hun-
dred years earlier. Indeed, the movie features the authentic Shaolin Monastery
stele of 728, with which we have been concerned in preceding pages. This is
not to say that history is not fictionally embellished. In the movie, the monks
do not merely fight for Li Shimin, but they also save his life. In gratitude the
emperor travels to Shaolin, where he himself exempts the monks from their
faith’s dietary rules, permitting them to consume meat. The political sanction
is joined by a theological one; after they feast on dog meat, the monks pro-
nounce, “When the Buddha is in your heart, meat and wine are nothing.”
The stubborn recurrence of meat eating in fighting monks’ fiction—from
Zhang Zhuo’s Tang period story of monk Sengchou to the 1980s movie Shaolin
Te m p l e—suggests that it might not be historically unfounded. Perhaps literary
carnivorous monks had been fashioned after real Shaolin warriors. If so, at
least some Shaolin monks disregarded not only their faith’s prohibition of war,
but also its proscription of meat. In his Historian’s Craft, Marc Bloch notes that
it is sometimes useful to conduct historical investigations “backwards”—from
the present to the past—“for the natural progression of all research is from the
best (or least badly) understood to the most obscure.”^78 We may therefore fol-
low his clue and begin our inquiry into Shaolin dietary history by an examina-
tion of the monastery’s current conditions.
In a series of essays published in the California-based magazine Kung Fu
Ta i C h i, Gene Ching has unraveled the complexities of the Shaolin community.
The title “Shaolin Monk” has been assumed by practitioners so diverse that it
stretches our very understanding of Buddhist monasticism. The Shaolin frater-
nity includes at least four disciple types. At the core stand Buddhist-ordained
clerics who reside inside the historical monastery itself. Then there is the much
larger category of Shaolin-ordained monks, who, having graduated from the
monastery’s martial program, left it to pursue an itinerant military career,
often opening up their own Shaolin martial schools. A third “Shaolin monk”
group is made of professional martial artists, who have never been ordained as
Buddhist clerics, but nevertheless—since they belong to the monastery’s per-
forming company—don monastic robes. Sometimes dubbed “fake monks” or
“performance monks,” they appear either in local shows for tourists or in inter-
national tours. Finally, there is the vast category of lay disciples (sujia dizi), ac -
complished martial artists who have been trained at the monastery but have
never been ordained as Buddhist clerics (which they do not presume to be).
Many of the latter were born in the monastery’s Dengfeng County vicinity, and
their families have been practicing Shaolin fighting for generations. Indeed,
some of the greatest masters of the Shaolin fighting style are lay practitioners
such as Liang Yiquan (b. 1931) and Liu Baoshan (b. 1931).^79