50 Origins of a Military Tradition
office holders). As early as the Ming period (1368–1644), Shaolin monastic
authorities were struggling to stem breaches of Buddhist law among their
congregation, weeding out monks who violated the monastic code. In 1595
the monastery’s superintendents (jiansi)—who were responsible for monas-
tic discipline—engraved in stone a warning to their fellow clerics not to
transgress Buddhist law. The inscription they authored implies that disre-
spect for the monastic code was related to Shaolin’s unique position as a mili-
tary temple; because the martial arts were practiced at the monastery, it
attracted monks who disregarded Buddhist law:
Since ancient times, the Shaolin Chan Monastery has been an ancestral
Buddhist temple. It ranks first among the world’s famous monasteries.
However, culture (wen) and warfare (wu) are cultivated there together,
and crowds of monks flock to it. Thus, there are some among them who
pay no respect to monastic regulations.... From now onwards, when-
ever cases occur where the code is breached and the regulations are
violated: If the transgression is small, the offender will be forthwith
punished by the abbot; if the transgression is serious, it will be reported
by the monks who hold office at the time to the county authorities, and
the offender will be punished in accordance with the law.^88We are now in a position to evaluate the evidence—literary, ethnographic, and
historical—of Shaolin dietary practices. Beginning in the Tang period and all
through the twentieth century, fiction and drama associated fighting monks
with the consumption of animal flesh. In novels, short stories, plays, and more
recently movies, martial monks are invariably depicted as meat gobblers. Field-
work conducted at the Shaolin Temple and its vicinity corroborates the testi-
mony of fiction, revealing that even as they present themselves as Buddhist
clerics and don monastic robes, most monks who have left the monastery to
pursue a martial career do eat meat. Finally, government documents and mo-
nastic correspondence—from the Ming and Qing periods alike—attest that
some Shaolin or Shaolin-affiliated monks transgressed Buddhist dietary regu-
lations. We may conclude, therefore, that throughout most, if not all, of Shao-
lin’s history meat eating has been closely related to the fighting monk’s ethos.
This is not to say that meat has been often consumed inside the temple.
Throughout most of Shaolin’s history, carnivorous monks have resided around
the monastery in traditional subsidiary shrines or in modern martial arts
schools, and their religious transgressions have taken place outside the temple
proper. Admittedly, there were also times—such as after the Cultural Revolu-
tion—when discipline was lax and meat was eaten inside the monastery. How-
ever, for the most part it was enjoyed by wandering fighting monks who had left
the monastery to pursue independent martial careers. In this respect the fic-
tional figure of Lu Zhishen is particularly illuminating of historical conditions.
The carnivorous “Tattooed Monk” of the early Ming novel Water Margin is or-