It can tell you which generation of shaolin monk he belongs to , also you may know some Information about his character through his name , If you are very bright and well-understand
chinese culture. Let me say :
Generally every shaolin monk has two names, one is their local name, the other is their monk name. As chinese name are always some rules and meaningful, their name show something about his generation and somehow their parents’hope or no-no, So does the monks name.
It was said that there were five big shaolin groups before the Yuan Dynasty. In the early of the Yuan Dynasty there was a monk named Fu yu who unified the five shaolin groups. He made the rule of nameing his next generation. It’s a poem, every generation must name their disciples by the rule of the poem. Their family name is shi, and their second name is the characters in the poem.
Their third name are various from different monks. Your shi fu might give you the third name as your character or your shortcoming. For example, there’s a monk named “jie se” in the shaolin History. His name means : abstain from debauchery, that’s because he’s a letch before he became a monk, so his shifu give him this name to warn him in his monk life.
Another example about the rule of the poem for the second name. One of the sentence of the poem is :
“De Xing Yong Yang Heng”, so the monks “De yang”, “De chan” are the same shaolin generation from the poem, so De chan named his disciples as “xing”, like “xing fang”,“xing xiang”, and “yong” generation is the grandson generation of “De ”eneration.
“Yong Xin”, the present abbot of the shaolin temple. He’s the 33th generation of shaolin monk. the 1st generation is “Fu”, like “Fu Yu” who’s the author of the poem. From his poem,
we can know “DE Yang” & “De Chan” are the 31th generation of shaolin monk.
The present generation of the shaolin monks’name comes to “miao” generation, that’s the Younger monks’ middle/second name in the shaolin temple.
Also there’s some secret about the poem, I only can understand a few sentences cause of my limited knowledge, one of the sentence i understand is "De Xing Yong Yang Heng", that means keep the goodness
forever or we can say good moral last forever. but I guess it should be a clue for some great wisdom in the poem. Let’s study and try to get it!
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Originally Posted by GeneChing
