Staff Legends 83
with a staff, pounced on him and started hitting him from all sides.
Guzhou was completely unarmed and he employed the sleeves of his
monastic robe to evade the blows. One of the staffs got caught in his
sleeve. Guzhou effortlessly snatched it, and started hitting back his
assailants. Employing his staff, he instantly threw all eight of them to
the ground. The three provincial officers burst into applause.^2Vajrapâÿi’s Legend
Religious lore, no less than military and historical writings, attests to the staff’s
importance in the monastery’s regimen. During the Ming period, Shaolin
monks changed the image of their tutelary deity Vajrapâÿi, arming him with a
staff. Visual representations of Vajrapâÿi, also known as Nârâyaÿa, show that all
through the twelfth century Shaolin monks envisioned him holding the vajra
(see figure 8 in chapter 2). However, a Ming period legend replaced his iconic
weapon with Shaolin’s quintessential one. According to the legend, Vajrapâÿi
was incarnated at Shaolin as a lowly scullion. When the monastery was attacked
by bandits, he emerged from the kitchen and, wielding a divine staff, repelled
the aggressors. The Indian vajra-holder, Vajrapâÿi, was thus transformed into a
staff expert, progenitor of the monastery’s renowned staff techniques.
Shaolin’s legend of Vajrapâÿi the staff wielder survives in several versions:
Cheng Zongyou’s Shaolin Staff Method, Fu Mei’s Song Mountain Book (preface
1612), and two seventeenth-century gazetteers.^3 However, the earliest evidence
is epigraphic. A 1517 stele contains a version of the legend authored by the
Shaolin abbot Wenzai (1454–1524). Titled “The Deity Nârâyaÿa Protects the
Law and Displays His Divinity” (“Naluoyan shen hufa shiji”), the stele is en-
graved with the divine warrior’s image, replacing his short vajra with a long
staff (figure 11):
On the twenty-sixth day of the third month of the Zhizheng period’s
eleventh, xinmao, year (April 22, 1351), at the si hour (between 9 a.m.
and 11 a.m.), when the Red Turbans (Hong jin) uprising in Yingzhou [in
modern western Anhui] had just begun, a crowd of bandits arrived at
the monastery. There was a saint (shengxian) at Shaolin, who up until
then had been working in the monastery’s kitchen. Several years he
diligently carried firewood and tended the stove. His hair was dishev-
eled, and he went barefoot. Wearing only thin trousers, his upper body
was exposed. From morning till night he hardly uttered a word, arous-
ing no interest among his fellow monks. His surname, native place, and
first name, were unknown. He constantly cultivated all the deeds of
enlightenment (wan xing).
That day, when the Red Turbans approached the monastery, the
Bodhisattva wielded a stove poker (huogun), and he stood mightily alone