9
Chapter 1
The Monastery
Sh aolin’s history spans fifteen hundred years. The monastery was founded
during the last decade of the fifth century by an Indian-born monk, who is re-
ferred to in the Chinese sources as Batuo, or Fotuo. It is situated in mountain-
ous Dengfeng County, Central Henan, some thirty miles southeast of Luoyang,
the former capital of the Northern Wei dynasty (386–534), and forty-five miles
southwest of Zhengzhou, the modern capital of Henan Province (map 1). The
peaks of the lofty Mt. Song rise above the temple. Today they are largely bar-
ren, but during the period when the monastery was established the entire
county was covered with forests.^1
In terms of its population, which approaches a hundred million, Henan
is today the largest Chinese province. Removed from China’s prosperous
coast, it is also one of the poorest.^2 Dusty villages line the road from the
Zhengzhou airport to the Shaolin Monastery. The air is heavily polluted by
coal that is carried in open trucks from nearby mines. The poverty of its sur-
roundings highlights the Shaolin Monastery’s significance for the region’s
economy. By the late 1990s the temple attracted more than a million tourists
a year. The lodging, food, and transportation these modern pilgrims require
spurred the emergence of a tourist industry, which plays a major role in
Dengfeng County’s economy; the sale of entry tickets to the temple alone brings
in US $5 million annually.^3
From the county’s perspective, students are even more valuable than tour-
ists. Dengfeng is home to some seventy thousand aspiring martial artists, who
study in dozens of fighting schools that mushroomed around the monastery
beginning in the 1980s. Admitting boarding students aged six and up, the
schools offer a comprehensive martial training coupled with such required
scholastic skills as math, language, and the like.^4 Only a fraction of their pro-
spective graduates are ordained as Shaolin monks. Most become professional
martial artists, earning a living as instructors of physical education, as soldiers