counts in which the monks’ martial abilities are noted,
sometimes in defending their own monasteries, some-
times in serving the interests of their royal patrons in
other than ritual practices. Some early sources also sug-
gest that monasteries sometimes admitted applicants
more for their martial skills than for their devotion to
meditation or a life of renunciation. It seems to have
been common at this time for warriors who were de-
mobilized at the end of a war or marked for vengeance
among the defeated to seek cover and anonymity in
the monastic system. Martially trained monks would
have been of value in times of instability, and in such
cases the maintenance of monastic vows would often
have been a lesser priority. According to a fifth-
century history of the Wei dynasty (Wei shu), several
monasteries in the capital of Chang’an came under
scrutiny in 438 for having developed large arsenals of
weapons and posing a threat to public order.
As monasteries in China became more sinicized,
they evolved bureaucratic modes of organization that
closely paralleled those of Chinese civil administration.
Hierarchical in structure, they were composed of var-
ious departments of monks with designated functions,
such as lecturers, ritualists, and meditators. It is not
surprising then that we find monks whose primary
functions were to manage the fields and the wealth of
their monastic establishments. Among their duties
would be the protection of that wealth, and implicit in
this was an incentive perhaps to cultivate martial skills.
In fact, there is little evidence to suggest that more than
a few monasteries developed such defense forces. How-
ever, one monastery that did respond to these incen-
tives was the Shaolin Monastery, located at the foot of
Mount Song, considered the central peak of China’s
five sacred mountains (wu yue), in Henan province. It
is this monastery that has informed most later histo-
ries associating Chinese Buddhism with martial arts.
According to the biography of the monastery’s fifth-
century founder, Fotuo, two of his first disciples were
selected based not on their aptitude for traditional
Buddhist cultivation practices, but for their acrobatic
talents. While not explicitly martial, the ability of one
of these disciples to balance precariously on a narrow
well ledge while playing a sort of hacky-sack game withMARTIALARTSChild monks perform kung fu (gongfu) exercises at Lingyanshan Monastery, Puli, Taiwan. © Don Farber 2003. All rights reserved. Re-
produced by permission.