pirates. Once thosefighting monks shifted from local self-defense to dynas-
tic defense, the monasteries they came from were transformed into military
training grounds. This gained them government support and patronage, but
also strongly identified them with the Ming Dynasty.
Some efforts were made to justify these military training activities, along
with other forbidden Buddhist practices like eating meat and drinking wine,
but there was really no credible way to reconcile such contradictory posi-
tions. The reason such disparate activities could co-exist and also why they
were hard to control was that they were followed by two separate groups.
The resident monks at Shaolin were religious professionals who followed
Buddhist precepts; the transient or peripheral population of martial artists
concentrated on martial arts and were only marginally involved in Buddhist
religious practice. Famous martial artists associated with Shaolin, like
Hongji, who was killedfighting against bandits in the late 1630 sorearly
1640 s, simply could not spend their daysfighting and killing and act as
Buddhist monks. Some might return or truly enter the monastic order after
theirfighting days were done, something we will see in current practice. Qing
efforts to demilitarize Shaolin focused on keeping the resident Buddhist
monks and preventing the martial artists from collecting in the monastery.
Shaolin forces suffered multiple military defeats at the end of the Ming
Dynasty, and little, if anything, of its martial practice was left by the Qing.
When Gu Yanwu ( 1613 – 82 ) visited in 1679 , looking for Shaolin’s martial
arts, he was bitterly disappointed.^10 For Gu, in sharp contrast to Huang
Zongxi, Shaolin was a symbol of Ming loyalism, not foreign invaders. In
a famous poem, Gu speaks of a deserted place with no martial arts and
only a few starving monks left. Having read the Li Shimin stele, Gu
assumed a continuous martial tradition from the Sui Dynasty and wished
for a new Li Shimin to overthrow the Qing.
Gu Yanwu was not the only visitor to Shaolin tofind it deserted and its
martial arts gone. Ye Feng ( 1623 – 87 ), Zhang Siming (ca. seventeenth cen-
tury), and Shen Quan ( 1624 – 84 ) who all visited it independently found the
temple destroyed and lamented the loss of a place of Buddhist worship. None
of these three visitors was concerned about the martial arts. It was Shaolin
as a famous Buddhist temple that was important to them, a point that is
frequently overlooked when we concentrate only on its importance to the
martial arts. Zhang Siming arrived in 1684 , demonstrating that forty years
after the Ming fall the temple had still not recovered. Wang Jie (ca. 1620 – ca.
1700 ), the Qing governor of Henan, rousted a few monks living in the ruins
to demonstrate their martial arts and declared what he saw“no better
than street beggars.”^11 Of course, we should not put too much weight on
204 The Qing Dynasty