Serving the Emperor 47
the monastery’s vicinity. When he assumed his leadership position in 1999,
Yongxin expelled from the monastery several high-profile carnivorous fighting
monks. Backed by the Henan provincial authorities, he proceeded in the fol-
lowing year with an ambitious plan of dismantling hundreds of schools, restau-
rants, gift shops, and residential shacks from the temple’s surroundings. The
controversial project, which was critically reviewed in the foreign press, was mo-
tivated in part by aesthetic considerations. Like fellow-minded government offi-
cials, Yongxin wished to restore Shaolin to its pristine beauty, valued not only in
its own right but also as a means of securing the temple’s bid to become a
UNESCO-recognized World Heritage Site.^81 However, religious concerns con-
tributed to the relocation project as well. Apparently, Yongxin was attempting
to create a physical boundary between his Buddhist sanctuary and the larger
Shaolin community, which does not necessarily adhere to monastic laws.
Equipped with the example of Yongxin’s purge, we may begin our “back-
wards” journey in time with a similar attempt to purify the Shaolin Monastery
that was ordered by an emperor two and a half centuries earlier. In 1735, the
governor-general of Henan and Shandong, Wang Shijun (?–1756), reported to
the throne his plan to renovate the Shaolin Temple. The governor-general in-
cluded in his memorial detailed drawings of the planned reconstruction. It
was perhaps typical of the reigning emperor, who prided himself on reading
government documents late into the night, that he did not perfunctorily ap-
prove the plan. Instead, the diligent Yongzheng emperor (reigned 1723–1735)
carefully reviewed the sketches with an eye not to their architectural elegance,
but to their implications for the monastery’s supervision. The temple’s recon-
struction, the sovereign ordered, should be executed so as to get rid of fake
monks, who violate monastic regulations:
We have inspected the drawings and noticed that there are twenty-five
gate-houses, which are located at some distance from the monastery
proper. Like stars scattered far apart, none is situated within the temple.
Throughout our empire, it has always been the case that most subsidiary
shrine monk-types do not observe monastic regulations. Doing evil and
creating disturbances, they are Buddhism’s inferior sorts. Today, as the
Shaolin Monastery is undergoing renovation, and it is becoming one
temple, these subsidiary shrine monks should not be allowed to stay
outside of it, where they are hard to supervise and control.^82According to the eighteenth-century emperor, corrupt monks did not reside
inside Shaolin proper, but in scattered residences in its vicinity. This is not un-
like the modern situation where most carnivorous practitioners—ordained
and lay alike—live in private Shaolin martial schools, which are spread
throughout Dengfeng County. The monarch alluded to these unscrupulous
disciples as fangtou seng (“subsidiary shrine monks”). In the Buddhist idiom of
late imperial times, the term fangtou designated either a monastic building