History, Religion, and Chinese Martial Arts 199
of Buddhist thinkers who had explained that killing was in certain circum-
stances merciful. Rather, they found in Vajrapâÿi’s muscular physique a self-
evident and tangible proof that the religion of compassion required military
protection. The iconography of the military gods left no doubt that the Bud-
dha himself had sanctioned the armed defense of his faith.
Soliciting the military might of the Vajrapâÿi, Shaolin monks employed
spells (mantras) and hand symbolisms (mudrâs). This leads us to an aspect of
Buddhist warfare that we have not touched upon: the role of Tantric ritual in
the protection of the state. Medieval Chinese rulers—like their counterparts
throughout Asia—commissioned Buddhist monks with the performance of
elaborate rites that were meant to assure their victory in battle. Tantric mas-
ters such as Amoghavajra (705–774) conjured an entire panoply of warrior
deities, who accompanied the Tang armies on their military campaigns. The
Heavenly King Vaišravaÿa (Pishamen), for example, was repeatedly said to
have revealed his divine powers, subduing the dynasty’s foes.^2
In their fifteen-hundred-year evolution, the Shaolin martial arts gradually
absorbed other aspects of the Buddhist religion. By Ming times, Shaolin monks
had chosen as their quintessential weapon a Buddhist emblem: the staff. Their
choice of the instrument was probably related to its role in monastic life. Bud-
dhist regulations instructed monks to carry the staff, which by metonymy came
to signify its clerical owner. The same weapon had also been wielded by fic-
tional fighting monks such as the heroic simian Sun Wukong, protagonist of
Journey to the West. The legend of the divine monkey resembled that of the Shao-
lin tutelary god Vajrapâÿi. The two Buddhist warriors had been equipped with
the same magic staff that changes its dimensions at will.
Those who trained within a monastic environment came to regard their
martial practice as a religious discipline. By the sixteenth century, Shaolin dis-
ciples—lay and clerical alike—hardly distinguished the mastery of their fight-
ing technique from the mastery of mind that led to liberation. Martial artists
such as Cheng Zongyou expressed both the exertion of physical practice and
the exhilaration that followed it in Buddhist terms. Significantly, the associa-
tion of martial practice with spiritual liberation extended beyond the monas-
tery’s walls. Late Ming poetry suggests that practitioners of styles other than
Shaolin sometimes invested their techniques with a Buddhist meaning. At least
some martial artists employed the vocabulary of enlightenment to describe the
mastery of their art.
Religion and Martial Arts History
The martial arts historian is confronted by a methodological problem. To
the degree that the fighting techniques of individual warriors—as distin-
guished from the training methods of regular armies—had evolved among
the unlettered masses, their evolution might have escaped the writings of