How many temples?

[David Jamieson]

There are a few temples that have a martial tradition in their offerings. This does not make them ipso facto Shaolin.

There is only one Shaolin Temple and that is the temple at mount song in henan province.

The others are martial temples and they have their traditions in their own right. While they may all have influenced each other, this is not uncommon in religious edifices and thinking. After all, Buddhism and Taoism, while not "the same" do share many precepts. Particulalry Ch'an Buddhism in relation to Taoism. Not so much other sects. However, Song Shan is one of the 5 sacred Taoist Mountains.

Shaolin is the seat of Ch'an and the birthplace of it. The Shaolin brand of Zen was very well attuned to adopt and be adopted by Taosit thought. THere were many exchanges.

But, it would be akin to saying that the catholic church on the street corner is the vatican and vice versa. It is simply not that way. They were and are very different communities and they did not all bear the name Shaolin.

cheers

[TenTigers]

from what I've been told, the other temples, wah-san,ngor-mei san,mo-dong san, etc were considered part of Siu-Lum (Shaolin) because they were all strongholds for Ming Loyalists, but they did not bear the same name.

[Fred Sanford]

judge pen,
how many temples did Sin The' tell you there were? I'd just go with that because he is the true holder of all shaolin knowledge. ( I think his astral spies are after me)

[NorthernShaolin]

Well, here is food for thought:

According to Wan Li Sheng's book, Wu Shu Nei Wai Kung, which was written in 1927, he wrote what was the most popular thought of how many Shaolin temples there were.

By the end of the Yuan Dynasty, there were, in addition to Honan Shaolin, four other large Shaolin Temples. They were:

1. Fukien
2. Shansi Wu Tai
3. Kwangtung An Hui
4. Yang T'ung Fu.

Yang T'ung Fu Shaoiln temple the location where Chuen Yuen invited Pai Yu Fung and Li Chieng to re-introducce their knowledge back into that particular Shaolin temple.
(It appears that not all the Shaolin Temples lost their knowledge due to fat and lazy monks. This story of Chuen Yuen, if it is true, appeared to occurred at a different Shaolin Temple and not at Honan Shaolin Temple.)

By the end of the Ming Dynasty, three of the five large Shaolin temples mention above were destroyed.

He also writes that by the end of the Ming Dynasty, there were already five different branches of Shaolin with each branch being taught in five different temples during this time. They were:

1. Wu Tang Shaolin
2. Omei Shaolin
3. Fukein Shaolin
4. Kwangtung Shaolin
5. Honan Shaolin

Out of the five shaolin, only Honan was the original Shaolin or otherwise called Shung Shaolin.

[GeneChing]

But I just had to post this somewhere....

Taiwan's temple factory
Pingtung, Taiwan Tyrone Siu Tyrone Siu
Added Thursday

Some companies in Taiwan spend months building temples with bricks and cement, but Lin Fu-Chun's firm simply pours concrete into a giant mould and waits for it to dry.

The 78-year-old Lin said his temple factory, Chuanso, needed just over six weeks to finish a building that normally took six months with conventional methods - and moulding was 40 percent cheaper.



Lin oversees up to 20 builds at a single time at his vast indoor facility in Taiwan's southern county of Pingtung, employing around 100 people to fill the demand for prefabricated temples of different sizes, as well as statues of deities.



The items are also exported, mainly to overseas Taiwanese who want to bring a piece of their culture to new homes in China, Singapore and elsewhere in Asia.



"It's more convenient for some people, who need a smaller temple where they can worship," said Lin, who has worked in temple construction for almost 50 years.



Lin started his temple business in 1993, prior to which he sculpted and painted the dragons and phoenixes that feature atop Taiwanese temples. But now he employs others to do that work.



Many of Liu's staff are farmers, who work part-time to help during different phases of the concrete construction method that he says rival firms have copied.

The builds are painted in bright colours and decorated with ornaments before being dispatched around the country on trucks by delivery staff, who add any finishing touches requested by buyers.



Prices range from $1,250 to $62,500, depending on the size of the temple and the detail work required, with the 'God of Earth' and the 'God of Wealth', which are among Taiwan's most widely worshipped deities, proving popular.