Defending the Nation 71
standard histories to works of fiction. If Shaolin’s assistance to Li Shimin was
the source of its Tang period fame, then the piracy campaign secured its Ming
period renown.
The Shaolin’s piracy war was to inspire Chinese monks for centuries to
come. Faced with Japanese aggression in the 1930s, Chinese Buddhists recalled
the monastery’s victory over the so-called “Japanese bandits” (wokou). In 1933,
the enthusiastically patriotic monk Zhenhua authored a History of Monastic Na-
tional Defense (Sengjia huguo shi), rallying his fellow Buddhists to fight the Japa-
nese invaders. Arguing that in times of national crisis it was permissible for
monks to fight, Zhenhua cited Shaolin’s heroic contribution to the sixteenth-
century piracy campaign.^55 By the twentieth century, the monastery’s military
legacy provided a precedent for Buddhist warfare.
Patronage
Even though the piracy war was their most famous, it was not the only cam-
paign in which Shaolin monks took part. Beginning in the first decade of the
sixteenth century, Shaolin warriors were regularly drafted to quell local unrest
in north China. In 1511, seventy monks lost their lives fighting Liu the Sixth
and Liu the Seventh, whose bandit armies swept through Hebei and Henan. In
1522–1523, Shaolin fighters battled the miner turned bandit Wang Tang, who
pillaged Shandong and Henan, and in 1552 they participated in the govern-
ment offensive against the Henan outlaw Shi Shangzhao.^56
The monastery’s military support of the Ming continued into the dynasty’s
turbulent last years. During the 1630s, Shaolin monks were repeatedly enlisted
to the doomed campaigns against the swelling rebel armies that by 1644 were to
topple the dynasty. We will see in chapter 7 that the monks’ loyalty to the regime
led to their monastery’s destruction by its adversaries. In 1641 the bandit leader
Li Zicheng (1605?–1645) marched his rebel army into Henan, where together
with the local warlords he annihilated the Shaolin fighting force. Shaolin’s for-
tunes were intimately related to those of the dynasty it had steadfastly served.
Epitaphs of Shaolin fighting monks provide us with important information
on their military service to the Ming. Shaolin’s Stupa Forest contains at least four
stupa inscriptions dedicated to fighting monks. The memorials of two monks,
Wan’an Shungong (1545–1619) and Benda (1542–1625), note that they “gained
merit in battle,” without specifying in which. Another inscription reveals that
monk Zhufang Cangong (1516–1574) commanded the fifty Shaolin warriors
that participated in the government offensive against Shi Shangzhao. A fourth
attests that monk Sanqi Yougong (?–1548) was sent as far as Yunnan in the re-
mote southwest to quell tribal unrest. His martial exploits had earned this Shao-
lin warrior the military position of chief supervising regional commander.^57
Shaolin’s military assistance to the state won praise from its highest-
ranking officials. During the 1620s, the vice censor in chief, grand coordina-