Subject: 和尚 héshàng monk
Culture: Chinese Buddhist
Setting: Qing empire, China 18-19thc
Caveat
* Kennedy/Guo 2005 p69-70
"The stock Shaolin myth runs something like this: Bodhidharma was an Indian Buddhist monk who brought Chan Buddhism to China and, after a meeting with the Chinese emperor, settled in the Shaolin monastery. After residing there for a while Bodhidharma became concerned about the weak physical state of the monks and created a form of exercise and a form of marital art. He instituted a mandatory training program for all the monks, which included both his exercise plans, known as the Muscle Change Classic, and his martial arts system, which of course became known as kung fu.
"From these beginnings, the Shaolin temple became the central hub of martial arts development and excellence in China. The skill of the Shaolin monks was known throughout the empire. Their reputation became such that eventually the 'evil' Manchu emperor ordered the temple's destruction. The monks fought bravely, but the temple succumbed to flames and most of the monks were killed. Only a handful of monks escaped the conflagration and went on to spread the art of Shaolin kung fu to the good people of China.
"A solid ninety-five percent of that myth is clearly nonsense. It is easier to point to what is historically accurate: there was a Buddhist temple called Shaolin, and Bodhidharma did reside there for a period of time. Beyond that, the story is little more than hype, propaganda -- pulp journalism."
* Hunt 2003 p50-51
"The Shaolin cycle, like many large mythical narratives, is distinctly non-linear, sometimes moving backwards rather than forwards, frequently offering revisions and embellishments of recurring episodes.
"Two distinct temples appear in Shaolin texts. The northern monastery in the Songshan (Central Mountain) range in Henan still stands, in spite of at least two burnings and a long period of disrepair prior to its re-opening in the early 1980s. The Henan Temple figures in the Kung Fu television series and is used as an actual location in the Jet Li Shaolin Temple films that led indirectly to its new status as heritage site. The Jiulianshan Temple in the southern Fujian province appears to have been burned down more comprehensively (in 1738) leaving no physical trace, but its obliteration only seems to have aided its mythical power. Most of Zhang Che's and Lau Kar-leung's Shaolin films are about the Southern Temple and chronicle the exploits of 'Shaolin Tigers' like Hung Hei-kwun, Fong Sai-yuk, the San-de (Three Virtues) monk and Wu Wei-kin. It is the Jiulianshan Temple that figures in the southern family tree -- from Zhi Shan we follow the line to Lu Acai, Wong Kei-ying and Wong Fei-hung.
"Ng Ho identifies three central foundations for the 1970s Shaolin film -- the period 1723-1911 (the latter part of the Qing Dynasty), the events surrounding the burning of the temple and spread of Shaolin techniques to Southern China, and the exploits of the heroes of Guangdong. The villains are invariably either Manchu Emperors and their underlings or the wu dang martial artists who aided them in the burning of the monastery. The destruction of the Temple(s) is most popularly aligned with the presence there of anti-Qing rebels who are thought to have taken refuge at Shaolin from about 1662. The monastery had long been a refuge for rebels, criminals and other dissidents, and the word 'Shaolin' often refers to these secular activists more than their nominally Buddhist benefactors." [references omitted]
* Hunt 2003 p48
"The word 'Shaolin' has been attached to films about the temple, to films about Shaolin-derived fighting styles, and to films about anti-Qing rebels who deployed Shaolin fighting arts. Sometimes its presence in a title signifies none of the above but can be attached, indiscriminately, to English-language prints of kung fu films as a guarantee of shape-throwing mayhem. More recently, Shaolin was the title of a PlayStation game. While scholars are largely sceptical of the Chinese saying that 'all the martial arts known under heaven began at Shaolin', for generic purposes they might as well have done. Shaolin is central to the mythopoetic origins of Chinese Boxing -- fighting movements derived from nature, lethal abilities mediated by spiritual concerns, patriotic rebellion and underground movements, southern identity and heritage, the dynamics of learning and transmission. The Temple also marks the beginning of the kung fu film's 'family tree', stretching from the senior monk Zhi Shan to the films of Lau Kar-leung. However, while the Temple was a mainstay of wu xia novels like The Ten Tigers of Guangdong (c. 1950s), it did not figure prominently in the cinema prior to 1974." [references omitted]
Context (Event Photos, Primary Sources, Secondary Sources, Field Notes)
* Kuhn 1990 p111-112
"In a society fearful of strangers, several aspects of monks' lives seem to have placed them in harm's way. One is the long, sometimes permanent condition of being a novice: the period between taking the tonsure ('leaving the family' -- ch'u chia) and receiving ordination. Although being ordained required a long period of study under a master (a senior monk) and generally had to be completed in one of the elite 'public monasteries,' becoming a novice was relatively easy and informal. The subject pronounced his intention of renouncing lay life, had his head shaved by his tonsure-master (the 'master' or shih-fu who would now be responsible for his training), and began to observe the 'ten prohibitions' (chastity, vegetarianism, and so on). Having left his own family, he now acquired a monastic 'family,' in which his master served as a surrogate parent and his fellow novices as brothers. A very large proportion of monks were brought up in the monastic life from adolescence. Their training generally took place in small 'hereditary' temples: those run by monastic 'families' and passed down from one generation to the next. Only years later, if at all, was a monk ordained at one of the large 'public' monasteries.
"In the meantime the novice was part of a large intermediate stratum of the unordained, a stratum easily entered and indeed easily exited. Although classified by the state (and by society at large) as a 'monk' (seng), he was forbidden to reside in any of the large, elite monasteries. Such 'monks' probably constituted the majority of the Buddhist clergy, and most soulstealing suspects (including two of the Hsiao-shan monks ....) were in fact of this group. The government's suspicions centered on such men, and it would not be surprising to find that popular fears ran along the same channels: these men were in limbo, neither of the orthodox family system nor of the certified clerical elite. This fact should lead us to question the usefulness of the designation 'monk,' which was used in government documents to describe virtually anyone with a robe and a shaved head, whatever his state of religious commitment or education. Many of these men, or perhaps even most of them, were not unambiguously in any of the approved categories that gave bureaucrats the reassuring idea that they had society under control."
"Buddhist and Taoist monasteries dotted the landscape of Qing-era China like the pustules of an especially vigorous case of chicken pox. A few were rich; most were poor; but, together, they acted not only as religious centres (ones that were, in Hungli’s eyes, infuriatingly beyond the close control of the Manchu state) but also as a sort of social safety-net. At a time when the rapid increases in China’s population were beginning to bear down heavily on many impoverished people, it was common for those who found themselves surplus to requirements on a family’s land, and those elderly who had no children to support them, to throw themselves on the mercy of the local monastery or nunnery. The surest way of doing so was to become a monk or nun. Those capable of pursuing a religious vocation all the way through to ordination had claim upon their monastery’s resources; even for the great majority who did not (and by the 1760s only 20 percent of China’s clergy possessed ordination certificates), begging became considerably more lucrative if one was a monk.
"The result was that China’s roads were thick with religious novices, almost all of them poorly educated and most at best sketchily aware of the chief tenets of their own religions. These monks were a perpetual thorn in the side of the administration; it was hard to distinguish between them and bandits or petty criminals on the run. The poorest ostentatiously displayed running sores and abscesses, not so much in an appeal for sympathy as in the expectation that they would be paid to move on before they could infect anyone else; the better-educated were if anything an even bigger threat. Lumped together, in the common phrase, as 'sorcerous Taoists and licentious Buddhists,' the latter were commonly associated with every sort of magic, from alchemy and exorcism to the search for immortality – making them logical suspects in any search for the perpetrators of “evil acts.” Either way, as Kuhn points out, 'to the bureaucratic mind, wandering beggars of any sort threatened public security. People without homes and families were out of control.'"
* Brownell/Wasserstrom eds. 2002 p71 (Matthew H Sommer, "Dangerous males, vulnerable males, and polluted males: The regulation of masculinity in Qing dynastic law" p67-88)
"Male clergy, both Buddhist and Taoist, were singled out for special scrutiny in the Qing code. By taking vows of celibacy, abstaining from marriage, and living apart from their natal families, these men stood outside the mainstream family order in the most basic ways. Late imperial officials were chronically suspicious of such men, seeing in them the very personification of the rootless rascal and all the dangers he represented; both Ming and Qing dynasties made repeated efforts to subject clergy to social and political control by registering them at particular institutions, by making novices the responsibility of their superiors, by banning the wandering of mendicant clergy, and by prohibiting men from joining clerical orders without registering and receiving permission from the local magistrate.
"The judiciary seems to have been particularly predisposed to suspect clergy of sexual aggression. According to Yasuhiko Karasawa, 'A standard narrative found in [legal] cases involving Buddhist monks was that of the monk who attempts or commits illicit sex (jian) with women.' This bias was reflected in legislation as well. For example, a Ming law adopted by the Qing code punished Buddhist or Daoist clergy at temples who seduced or abducted women, or who 'swindle[d] them out of money.' Another statute increased by two degrees the severity of penalties for any sexual offense committed by clergy. A further measure cited the 'substatute on rootless rascals' to impose the sentence of immediate beheading on 'lamas, Buddhist monks, and other clergy who commit[ed] [heterosexual or homosexual] rape and cause[d] the rape victim's death.' Clergy who committed sex offenses (and were spared execution) would be forced to resume secular life."
* Brownell/Wasserstrom eds. 2002 p69-70 (Matthew H Sommer, "Dangerous males, vulnerable males, and polluted males: The regulation of masculinity in Qing dynastic law" p67-88)
"This sexual predator was a subset of a more general stereotype of the dangerous outside male mentioned repeatedly in the Qing code; he appears in some of the earliest laws of the dynasty, but with increasing frequency and urgency in the new ones that accumulated over the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Qing lawmakers used a number of terms in various combinations to characterize him. He was 'violent' (xiong) and 'wicked' (e) and was described as one who 'habitually fights' (hao dou); he was a 'worthless, wicked reprobate' (bu xiao e tu), a 'depraved rogue' (diao tu). But most important, he was a 'guang gun': literally, a 'bare stick.'
"The Qing code's chapter on 'extortion' (kongxia qu cai) is the section most explicitly devoted to the rootless rascal. The original Ming dynasty statute that heads that chapter simply extends the robbery statutes to cover extortion; it says nothing specific about guang gun. But the substatutes appended over the course of the Qing dynasty did not elaborate on the theme of extortion and instead sought to punish habitual troublemaking by incorrigible individuals or groups. Many of these later substatutes have no direct link to extortion; indeed, over time, as new laws accumulated, the emphasis of the chapter shifted away from that specific crime to dangerous, antisocial behavior in general and to different groups of marginal men thought to threaten the social order.
"Running through the judicial discourse of the rootless rascal is a consistent conflation of certain kinds of crime (extortion, kidnapping, rape, seduction, sodomy, intimidation, robbery, banditry, heterodoxy, and so on) with certain kinds of men (Buddhist and Taoist clergy, local toughs, rootless migrants in frontier areas and cities, yamen clerks and runners, dislocated Miao tribesmen, eunuchs who had escaped palace supervision, and the like). One way or another, all of these men were seen as existing outside the mainstream pattern of settled households, the network of family and community relationships on which the Confucian order depended to enmesh and socialize individuals. Their victims were portrayed as 'the good people' (liang min) -- that is, law-abiding commoners: 'humble peasants,' chaste wives and daughters, and so on. These laws mandated harsh penalties of exile and death no to punish individual crimes so much as to remove the incorrigible troublemakers from society altogether."
"Rebellion, the Manchus thought, was likely to be sparked by popular religion. Both China’s Taoists and its Buddhists spawned sects over which the state had no control; these often splintered into semi-political secret societies, and spread word of their activities via networks of wandering monks – the very people who would soon become chief suspects in the [1768] soulstealing affair."
Spade
* Yang 1999 p33-34
"After Buddhism migrated to China from India during the Han Dynasty (206 B.C.-25 A.D., 漢朝), the shovel became the weapon of priests. They used it to dig holes to bury the dead following the wars and famines that ravaged ancient China. They also used the shovels as defensive weapons when they traveled. In fact, the crescent moon shovel remained exclusively a monk's weapon until the end of the Qing Dynasty (1644-1911 A.D., 清朝).
"The head of a shovel can be used to attack the opponent's head, or to chop the foot. The crescent moon shape of the blade can be used to hook the enemy's weapon. When its user's back was against the wind, the shovel could also be used to scoop up dirt and throw it into the opponent's eyes, blinding him for the fight."
* Yang 1999 p30-31
"Shovel or Spade (Chan, 鏟). The general structure of the shovel is a flat metal head on the end of a metal rod, or a rod made from strong wood. A small metal piece covers the opposite end of the rod. Three different shovels or spades are commonly known. The 'Crescent Moon Shovel' (Yue Ya Chan, 月牙鏟) has a moon-shaped head, sometimes adorned with metal rings. The 'Convenient Shovel' (Fang Bian Chan, 方便鏟) was mainly constructed from a piece of flat metal sharpened at the edge. Often, the other end was given a convex, moon-shaped blade of metal, which was adorned with rings. The 'Golden Coin Shovel' (Jin Qian Chan, 金錢鏟) has a coin-shaped metal head. There are also other shapes for the shovel, the design of which depended on their purposes during the different periods of Chinese history. For example, 'Heaven Tangled Shovel' (Tian Peng Chan, 天蓬鏟) was designed during the Ming Dynasty (1638-1644 A.D., 明代) for use by foot soldiers. Another kind of shovel, called 'Lotus Flower Shovel' (Lian Hua Chan, 蓮花鏟), had one end crowned with a moon-shaped metal blade, while the other end had a lotus flower-shaped metal cap, which was used to balance the weight on both ends."
* Gwong Zau Kung Fu 廣州功夫 2019-09-16 online
"Yuèyá chǎn 月牙铲 (Yuet Ngah Chahn, in Cantonese, Crescent Moon Shovel) or "Monk's Spade" is one of the classic Shǎolín 少林 weapons which was later inherited by our style. It has its origin in the Fāngbiàn chǎn 方便铲, the shovel as a tool, which has a metal sheet only at one end.
"... In ancient China, funeral ceremonies were carried out by religious, Buddhist or Taoist orders, as a service provided at a price. However, humble people could not always afford all the costs of the death of a relative, or had a nearby temple in the locality, so the task was left to errant monks, with whom the families came to some kind of agreement through which the funeral service was provided in exchange for food, water, shelter or, if they could afford it, some money.
"Added to this was the fact that, sometimes, the monks found dead travelers or abandoned bodies on the roads. In that case they were obliged to give them burial. Therefore, the monks traveled throughout the Chinese territory with a shovel, which in addition to serving the essential purpose of digging the graves, could be used as a cane and even as a useful weapon to defend themselves against bandits.
"This tool is the Fāngbiàn chǎn, a shovel with a long shaft whose ending at the rear end was a T or D-shaped handle. The length of the shovel could reach 2 meters, which allowed to dig a hole without needing to get inside it. The end in T or in D served to push the shovel hard into the ground and, martially, to hit and hook with it.
Later on, a sheet of metal in the shape of a crescent moon was added at the end where the handle was; the result is the Yuèyá chǎn, a full-fledged weapon, since by adding the crescent in favour of martial effectiveness, the utility of the T-shaped handle was sacrificed to drive the blade when digging holes. This crescent moon was used as a fork to defend itself against wild animals, placing it against its neck."
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