The Shaolin Temple

The bus was meant to leave at 8 am. That's why we'd got up so early. In fact, it didn't leave until nearly nine. This was because the driver spent our lost hour arguing, jostling, and scrapping with the other bus operators over customers. He was a big lad, and gave some of them a real slap.

When every seat on the bus was finally filled, we moved off, entertained by a bad-taste Chinese soft-porn slasher movie featuring a simpering psycho-killer who looked about as dangerous as Norman Wisdom but who, purely through the unbelievable stupidity of his female victims, had managed to kill three times before a little girl of no more than five years old started crying and her father forced the driver to turn it off. The killer's modus operandi, if you're interested, was to seduce the women, get their ample breasts out, start squeezing then strangle them with a silk scarf. If the little girl hadn't started crying, I think I might have.

Our guide, a big stocky man with the build of a heavyweight boxer, severe flattop haircut to match, spoke at, rather than to, us for the rest of the bus journey through a hissing microphone. He was fond of laughing at his own asides for much longer than any of the tourists, in a disconcerting chuckle resembling granite chips being thrown into a deep pit. We had no idea what he was talking about, and were quite happy with this arrangement, until some meddling Chinese guy behind us appointed himself our translator. We then spent the rest of the journey being unsparingly subjected to the boxer's dreary descriptions of the history and scenery of the Shaolin Temple. If there had been a referee present, he would have stopped the match to save us any more punishment. Unfortunately for us, this kind of thing is actually a holiday, fun, the done thing, for Chinese tour groups. The bus stopped at every available minor-temple, place of semi-interest and, especially, at every souvenir shop, so they could trundle off the bus like a herd of cattle, take photos (two fingers tackily held behind each others’ heads in the V-for-Victory sign) of every available rock, tree or building, barge into the shops, haggle and fight with the assistants, before spending obscene amounts of money, then back onto the bus ready for the next round. Ding ding!

The souvenir shops soon thankfully gave way to misty mountains. The ascent was tricky and dangerous. Hazy rays of sunlight punched through the mist as the bus inched up the mountain road. We reached the Shaolin Temple to find a gaudily painted edifice in colours of green, yellow and red. Like most 'ancient' buildings in China, it had burnt down on numerous occasions, the contemporary structure being erected in 1929, which, according to my now well-oriented idea of 'the old', made it old to an extent, although nonetheless gaudy. The size and design of the place, perched at varying levels atop mountain slopes, is superb, but I couldn't help but wonder if the very reason there is any kind of building on this spot, much less a spiritual one, is because of the supreme, breathtaking natural beauty of the mountains which surround it. Unfortunately, this beauty is horribly scarred by hundreds of stalls, selling anything from Shaolin Monk T-shirts, badges, wall-hangings, trinkets, pancakes, noodles, to cheap fake gong fu weaponry. I'm sure our bus companions had a field day, although I couldn't help but shudder at what The Master would make of it all.

The Everything of Nothingness

Before getting a chance to grab our bearings, we were shoved back onto the bus and whisked off to a large cold hall, with plastic seats and green-carpeted stage-floor. One-by-one, shaven-headed young men in bright orange garb came out to perform their specific forms, as we sat, the audience, as if awaiting clowns. The ancient monks invented gong fu to counteract the physical inertia of prolonged meditation. Each form is a description of animal movement, demanding flexibility, grace, power and concentration. Each young man enters the floor to act out his particular form of frog, monkey, tiger or preying mantis to careless, rapturous applause. Their ages range from six years old to perhaps twenty-five. Their physique and skill are impressive. They demonstrate their strength by punching through glass, bending lead bars over their heads and being lifted up into the air on sharp spears. One young monk held a porcelain bowl by his abdominal muscles and invited members of the audience, who formed a conga line in front of him, to pull it off. The men tried their damnedest to pull it away, as their loved ones in the audience tried their damnedest to capture it all on camera. Of course the men failed, and fell down in a comical clownish heap of bodies to general laughter, the bowl, not the young monk, breaking.

Around 527 AD the monk Boddhidarma sat in a cave above the Shaolin Temple for nine whole years. Some say it was because of his dismay at the poor physical condition of the monks, some that it was to express his lack of recognition for the external, materialist trappings of this tainted world, his belief that the inner was much more important, and much more real, than the outer. I wonder what brought him out of that spell. Why did he decide to end his exile, his absolute rejection of this world, after nine years? Was it the singing of a songbird? Was it the fall and smell of fresh rain on stone? Was it the innocent cry of a young woman's voice? Or had he decided that nine years, nine years, was just the right amount of time?

Whatever it was, he called it: 'The Nothingness of Everything'. I can't help but wonder what would happen if someone sat in a cave like this now. Would he or she be topic of choice on talk shows and political programmes? Would helicopters fly overhead with film crews hanging out of them? Would there be rows of gift shops up to the cave and tour guides selling tickets? Because now this place, once so holy, preaches 'The Everything of Nothingness'. Buy your tourist junk, take your photos, watch the clowns and acrobats, then go home and tell your friends all about it. Except, what is there really to tell?


The Forest of the Dagobas


If Qin Shi Huang in Xi'an was turning in his grave, then the Shaolin Monks were having theirs trampled over in the Forest of the Dagobas. Every monk of significance who had died throughout the history of the temple had been buried here, on his grave erected a decorative sandstone pillar, some of up to thirty feet high. Tam and I sat on a low wall and watched the obelisk-like gravestones glow a sad golden-brown in the sun, surrounded by a multicoloured throng of tourists taking photographs. However, the people did walk along the tree-lined gravel paths less hurriedly, with less pushing and shoving, and less noise than usual, as if imbued by an air of semi-reverence in this peaceful place.

Later, Rebecca and I ate at an out-of-the-way noodle shack, deep forests on the slopes below us, mountain peaks appearing from behind mist above. As the sun burned through, it was like a pair of curtains had been pulled open, and suddenly we could see the magisterial beauty of the place. You could see why it had been the chosen retreat of the monks: tranquil, contemplative, glorious and inaccessible. And you could almost imagine, squinting your eyes a bit so that the souvenir stalls, crowds of people, huge tour busses and dirty roadside restaurants disappeared for a few seconds, what it must have been like hundreds of years ago as a shaven-headed, orange-garbed novice, the Masters wizened, gnarled old men who still packed a punch, the old wooden temples quietly spectacular, cow-bells and chanting the only noise, the forests and mountains hiding you and your austere ways away from the rest of the world until, after a life of study, contemplation, meditation and kung-fu, you were laid to rest with a proud golden-brown pillar over your head which caught the sun and glowed every late-afternoon into eternity.

Breakfast in the Dirtiest Restaurant in the World

After a restless sleep, trains honking and shunting, shouts from the card school repeatedly waking us up, we got up and got ready to make our pilgrimage to the Shaolin Temple. However, you can't make a pilgrimage on an empty stomach.

At the unholy hour of 6.45 am, there was only one little restaurant open near the train and bus stations: a filthy hut with two pock-marked plastic tables, which looked like they'd suffered terrible acne in their adolescence, thick black dirt on the, well, dirt floor, and a grubby blue-eyed cat, chained to the wall, which perhaps once was white but had become an indefinable shade of brown. The cooking was done out on the street, which happened to be the bus depot parking lot, so the food was given an extra-smoky carbon monoxide flavouring. The veg prep was carried out on a rough wooden trestle alongside the two tables by an old man with a bad cold who sneezed continuously over the food then wiped his nose with his sleeve. Our tea was poured into glasses so chipped, that the chips were actually holding the glass together, aided by a thick brown scum around the inside which had long since rendered them non-transparent.

I reached over to pet the manky cat, feeling sorry for it, after watching it being booted around by one of the serving staff. I thought better of it when I saw the desperate hunger in its eyes. Skin and fur hung loose from its long bony body. It looked at my hand and licked its lips in anticipation of its first square meal in ages: my fingers. Rebecca prodded her boiled tea-egg with a chopstick. Trying to play the hardened China expert, I told her not to worry, that sometimes these places with lots of character served the best food.

'Does the dirt come on top of the character, or the character on top of the dirt?' she inquired.

Luoyang

We're now in a city called Luoyang, western Henan province, the capital of China during the Northern Wei dynasty (AD 493), now a middle-sized city of change, building sites, torn-up pavements and KFC's. It's our stop-off point to get to the Shaolin Temple, home of gong fu, where we're headed tomorrow. Hua Fei didn't turn up at Xi'an station, and I wasn't sure if I felt relieved or disappointed. Perhaps both. The six-hour train journey proved to be similarly uneventful, apart from a hilarious conversation with an inquisitive old woman, conducted purely from badly pronounced sentences torn from our Lonely Planet Mandarin phrasebook and extreporous sign language.

We'd planned to stay at what our guidebook had described as a tall, white, clean hotel opposite the train station, but had found this place covered in green-canvassed scaffolding. We were persuaded to stay next door by a tall, scruffy, untrustworthy-looking guy in long green army jacket, eventually agreeing, just to get away from the crowd of people who had clustered around us, gawking as if at some kind of circus sideshow.

The hotel consisted of two dingy corridors with a wooden table at the entrance, which was both the reception desk and, later on, home to a noisy and degenerate card school that kept us awake until the early hours of the morning. It was but one annex of a rambunctious building also home to a hospital and post office. In our room, a layer of brown dust had settled onto a layer of grease, which had itself settled onto every available tabletop, skirting board and chair. If you touched anything your hand stuck to it, leaving a layer of skin as you ripped it off. The carpets were threadbare, the seventies-style pagoda wallpaper damp and rotten. But we did have hot water, and a big television, with remote control still encased in its polythene wrapping.

At one point during the evening, the tall scruffy guy knocked on our door and entered without waiting for an answer. His long green coat was now mysteriously emblazoned with shiny golden buttons. He produced a bunch of red paper tickets from a pocket and asked us if we wanted to go to the Shaolin Temple tomorrow. We eyed him suspiciously. Don' wahrree he reassured us in broken English, I is policeman. We declined politely. He stood there for about five minutes, a hurt expression on his face, fingering his shiny buttons, then left.

We walked into the city, looking for restaurants and Internet bars, and found a place where we were served what they claimed to be gong bao ji ding (spicy Sichuan chicken and peanuts), but looked more like white offal. As we ate, a young boy outside of maybe six years old stared at us, nose against the glass. We made faces at him and he looked at us with a mixture of wonder and incredulity. He then ran off, to return with a gang of urchins, holding a tiny girl up so she could get a better look at the weird foreign clowns performing tricks.