Aug 1997: training at the Shaolin temple

After several years of training in Chinese martial arts, my wife Elena and I decided it was time to go for the real thing and spent our summer vacation at the school of the Shaolin temple, Dengfeng County, Henan, China.

The school where we usually train begun organising this kind of trip since 1990, but this one was our first time in China; therefore even though everything was planned in advance we were quite excited.

The Shaolin temple is located at the feet of Mt. Songshan, and it is the place where Bodhidharma came to teach the Chan (Zen) Buddhism.

The events following the end of Qing dinasty in this century and the bonfire of 1928 destroyed almost all the buildings; fortunately the Chinese government decided to fund in the midst of the fifties the reconstruction of the temple which is nowadays back to the original shape and deserves the title of "Treasure of the Chinese Nation". The temple celebrated in 1995 the 1,500 jubilee.

The whole valley is permeated of martial art spirit. Along the road leading to the temple stand several wushu schools; the largest two have 5,000 and 1,500 students. These schools are by the way not related to the temple, and they accept only Chinese students sofar, but one of them was building a training center for foreign students.

On Every hour of any day, Sundays included, we met groups of students training in the outdoor or moving somewhere in ordered teams, carrying their weapons. They always cheered us, as we looked obviously foreigners...

Shaolin Si main gate

Elena standing on the steps of the main gate of the Shaolin Temple

The way these schools are managed is quite similar to an academy of music in Europe, i.e. the children attending the schools spend part of the day training in martial arts (modern wushu, shaolinquan and sanda) and part studying the normal lessons (Chinese grammar & literature, mathematics and so on).Their day starts at 6 AM and is over around 9 PM. From what I've seen the training is concentrated in the early morning hours and the late afternoon, though I don't know whether the schedule is going to be different during wintertime. All the students are roughly between 6 and 16 years old; the only adults at these schools are the teachers and the janitors.

The school where we trained is about 500 mt from the temple. Completed in 1986, the International Shaolin Wushu Guild has a surface of 4,472 square meter, the buildings are spreaded over 3 tiers of terraces. The main access to the center is from a staircase leaving on the right side of the road to the temple; from here the wall of the first tier is visible, with the script " Shaolin Si Wushu Guan ". The gyms are located at the second terrace, while the third terrace contains the hotel and the restaurant. The hotel is rated officially as a 3 stars class, because it's the only one in the valley offering rooms with bathroom, although we had (cold) water only a couple of hours per day and the room was probably cleaned for last time during the Boxer rebellion. The restaurant gets 90% of its customers from the Chinese tourists visiting the Shaolin Si on a one-day shot, thus the menu is the same day after day. After 10 days this is getting rather annoying...

Statue

One of the warrior statues beyond the gate

But we came here with a 9,000 Km trip to train, not for the food (though we fixed that point lately in Hong Kong!); we found at the school about 30 foreigners like us, mostly Europeans, which were staying here from 10 days to 6 months. Those who stayed for the longest time were training separately from us, some of them with the Chinese kids, some of them alone in the outdoor with a monk giving them individual lessons. The first day we were assigned to Shi De Cheng, a 31-generation monk who has been also teaching in Europe several times (and has an article about him on Black Belt Magazine). Then our group was split in two, one part learning Shaolinquan with Shi De Cheng and the second part training Sanda (free sparring) with another and younger monk, Shi De Kiang.

The day schedule was of 2 hours of training in the morning (from 9 to 11) and 2 hours in the afternoon (from 3 to 5); the temperature was around 35 Celsius. The first hour was dedicated to warm-up, stretching and fundamentals, while the second one was for new techniques, drills and sparring (I was in the sanda class) or learning the Luohanquan form (my wife).

Our class

Masters and students of our group (well, those who completed the training). Shi De Cheng is the second from left, Shi De Kiang the leftmost

What really impressed me was the speed at which the monks and the masters were moving, apparently without effort. Compared to them, I looked like one of the 8 year olds of the wushu schools; and I have been training for the last 16 years.
Also, the flexibility they obtain by training 12 hour per day, every day of the year is amazing; a stand up split (I mean to hold up one's leg over the head while standing on the other) requires no warm up at all. Finally, even though they are quite lean (most of them weigh probably no more than 60 Kg) they are able to deliver an amazing power while sparring.

The class was quite hard, expecially during the first week; we started the sanda class in four, and after a couple of days I was the only one left. The point is that in order to keep the attention of the monks you need to push as hard as you can, to show that you are doing your best to follow their teaching; after that they will bring you as far as you can go.
Unfortunately the two weeks were over way too quickly, and when I was almost beginning to get acquainted with the amount of training I was exposed to it was time to leave. Interesting enough, even if the monk I was training with didn't speak any English (I found 2 or 3 Chinese in Shaolin with this language skill) he was nevertheless quite able to make himself clear; and the only two English words he knew where " QUICK!" and " NO GOOD!" (therefore we nicknamed the " no-good monk ").

Rehearsal for the Shaolin Festival

Preparing for the Shaolin Festival

Then, even though Shaolin is lacking of glamourous bars or clubs (the closest thing is a Chinese karaoke, where Westerns are *not* welcomed) there are interesting things happening almost anytime. We watched the kids training in the schools (they practice takedowns and falls on concrete!), we spotted some monks training in the woods, and we watched almost every day the rehearsal of the Shaolin Festival.
This event takes place every second year in September and is a brilliant martial art show where the most important events in the history of the temple are shown (like the war against the Japanese in 1553).

Eventually we took our route back home, following not exactly the shortest path.

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