When holidaying in South Africa last year, I bought tickets to see the world renowned Shaolin Monk show. The three hour show showed men with amazing feats of strength, flexibility, and pain-endurance, the Shaolin Monks creating themselves a world-wide reputation as the ultimate Buddhist warriors. Buddhism is considered to be the epitome of a peaceful religion, with emphasis on principles such as non-violence, vegetarianism and even self-sacrifice to avoid harming others.
The show illustrated to the audience the progression from a novice to a master Shaolin Warrior Monk and detailed the years of hard work and complex study that are to be endured. The young are required to attend a series of two hour training sessions each and every day and after that they will carry out their assigned chores in the temple. Junior Monks would attend three sessions and senior students, a fourth class at midnight. Therefore it requires vast amounts of hard work and discipline to become a Shaolin Monk. If a monk wished to leave the temple as a Shaolin master he was required to pass a test. Only after he was successful would he truly become a Shaolin Monk.
In Tibet it is considered an honor to be trained as a Shaolin Monk. Tibet’s superiority and uniqueness as a nation was not individual Monks intellectual, spiritual virtuosity, or one Monk meditating in mountains, but rather the quantity whereby tens of thousands of young boys were constantly being taken from ‘the mundane world of inevitable suffering and thrust into a purer alternative culture- the organized community of celibate Monks’ (1). Mothers willingly donate their children to Monk tribes for their cultural ethics, in full knowledge that their children will there forth be vigorously training as a Shaolin warrior and travel the world in order to perform to others. Monks are placed in monasteries by their parents when they are just children, usually between the ages of seven and eleven without regard for their personality or wishes.
Young Monks undergo spiritual teachings of the earth, self and the soul allows the Monks to tune their bodies to the energies around them, performing through the energies within their senses, resulting in natural expertise that are next to none. ‘They can observe themselves from a distance; they can look at their energies as though they are separate from themselves, and then either suppress them or transform them.’ (2) Spectators of the show will agree that the spiritual awareness within the acts is clearly evident throughout, Monks being able to confidently swipe swords against one another blind folded and accurately miss each other with millimeters to spare. The social interactions of respect and trust between the Monks and the masters is clearly apparent throughout the performances and shows the sheer reliance on inner strengths to safely perform with one another.
One of the performers within the show was a young boy of four years old who posed incredible strength, agility and confidence with the aid of the Shaolin masters. When contrasting this young Monk to western children of a similar age, it is evident why Monks are critical of the lack of spirituality in the west. Our worlds are apart and we have ethics that sit at opposite spectrums, as we sit there to watch a show of entertainment, they flood knowledge of their culture to us as we analyze whether the younger members of the show are used as a circus show tool. It is these differences that make us leave feeling confused between feelings of awe, inspiration and critically analyzing their ethics against our own cultural beleifs.
Although this is considered a cultural honor for the people of Tibet, the west could criticize that there is little consideration for the children born into a life of Shaolin Monks, the lifestyle is imposed on them with little consideration of how the child wants to mature through its developmental years. As a consequence of intense training as a Shaolin Monk, the children are not schooled mainstream, but instead taught by their masters. Although western cultures would consider this to be depriving the child of the western ideology of the basic human right to education, Shaolin Monks highlight their cultural importance of educating the young masters through the temple of the earth and spirituality leading them stray from a corrupt world.
My western cultural upbringing has given me the inherited morals that every child should have the freedom of choice about how they wish to lead their lives. However after researching the Shaolin Monks, I can’t help but think that western societies could learn from the Monk’s morals, focusing less on materialistic and technological values of the western world, and encourage teachings of the self, the earth and the energies that as humans we should value and recognize as the components that made us who we are.
Although the Monks way of life could be considered desirable to some western cultures, the western world could never function through the Shaolin Monk’s beliefs. The western world has developed through external factors with the need to use equipment and tools to better ourselves and progress through work, leisure and relationships. In contrast the introvert life of Shaolin Monk’s allows them to ovoid globalisation and instead continue to develop through their religious practices, always maintaining a degree of physical separation from those not sharing the same purpose.
1. A history of modern Tibet, the calm before the storm, Volume 2, Melvyn C. Golstein, 2009, Calafornia
