For Rebuilding the Northern Shaolin Temple: Part 15, click here.

努力

Nuli - great effort / to strive / to try hard

NEWS FLASH 1: Expanded plans for North Shaolin Monastery surfaces in China

NEWS FLASH 2: KungFuMagazine.com’s intrepid Kung Fu Reporter – at loose in Asia - has collected and republished two series of articles, Rebuilding the North Shaolin Monastery and Silk Road Kung Fu Friendship Tour Volume 1 in book format on Amazon.com.

July 4, 2020

Though the mainstream media news these days is disturbing, for most people in most places, life is going on in an ordinary way. People fall in love, and out of love, and in love again sometimes, babies are born, people go to work, farmers raise their crops, most students try to avoid homework,and so on.Most people I know in Beijing are very sad about events in the US these days. Most Chinese have really admired the USA since Richard Nixon’s visit to China in 1972 and are really astonished at and even depressed about the turmoil there.

In Beijing in June, there was a small resurgence of COVID-19, with seven new cases in Beijing in one day (June 30th) which had the government quite upset so they locked down the entire city – sort of – not “in-home” of course, that has never happened, but residents were not allowed to leave the city on public transportation at least. Fortunately, on July 5th residents are free to come and go from the city again, except for people in a couple of districts. Luckily, I don’t live in one of them. On the other hand, some other cities won’t let Beijing residents in.

As for me, I keep running, biking, and swimming a few times a week, plus my usual daily yoga and Kung Fu training. Just to stay out of trouble during the past month I collected and edited the “Rebuilding North Shaolin Temple” series of articles published here on KungFuMagazine.com and in the now out-of-print Kung Fu Tai Chi Magazine over the past 10 years into a book.

For a variety of reasons I haven’t been able to get to Panshan’s North Shaolin in more than six months and thought I really need a new “update story” to give KungFuMagazine.com readers fresh newson events here in China and finish this first book on Rebuilding the North Shaolin Monastery.

Not able to leave the city, I sent a WeChat (China’s biggest social media platform) message Shi Yan Wan at North Shaolin asking for any new photos of the construction there. He sent half a dozen photos or so but the last one he sent really amazed me.

Wow! This is a plan for much larger monastery than I have seen before. It’s still just a model, but this is the latest plan. It is significantly larger than previous plans. Though this model dates to 2017, it only became official recently. One of the older plans looked like this:

I asked about the new completion date and he replied, “Five years.”

OMG(!), which can be translated into Chinese as lao tian ye [老天爷!] also meaning “My Goodness(!),” “Good Gracious(!)” and/or “Good heavens(!)”

Before the conversation with Shi Yan Wan earlier today, I thought the construction of the major buildings at North Shaolin was nearly complete.

This reminds me of the meaning of King Wen’s Later Heaven Bagua symbol, that is, achieving balance and acquiring energies by accepting changes flowing through the passage of time. The one constant in nature is change.

I checked baidu.com, China’s number one browser for: 北少林寺扩建规划 (“expansion plan” and “North Shaolin Temple”) and found nothing.That isn’t surprising as there are so many big projects going on in China.

I asked Shi Yan Wan,“Who created this new design?” He said it was designed by the Tianjin Housing Appraisal Design Institute. Though I recall hearing of them before, I looked them up and found (in Chinese of course):

"Tianjin Housing Appraisal Architectural Design Institute is a large state-owned comprehensive architectural design unit. The business scope covers the entire design process, including architectural design, engineering appraisal, survey, urban planning design, environmental landscape design, electromechanical equipment design, cultural relics protection appraisal design, architectural industrialization design, green building consultation, construction drawing review, etc."

This is all great news for Shaolin enthusiasts worldwide. Five years to completion? Ha! Only the blink of an eye on the time scale of China and the Shaolin. In the meantime, people can certainly visit and train at the existing North Shaolin Monastery.There is no hotel at the North Shaolin monastery, though there are guest houses nearby. Anyone who wishes to visit probably should have a Chinese-speaking friend as there are not many people in Panshan town that speak English. In addition to all that, it may be some time before the COVID-19 epidemic abates enough for safe international travel. Though this disease didn’t spread massively in China the way it did in the US, it’s unlikely Americans will be allowed to enter China soon without a two-week quarantine first, emphasizing appreciation for the quality of patience.

Gee-whiz! I’m so happy to know this. It really does explain my whole life. On one hand, I feel my patience and endurance have greatly improved recently. On the other hand, I’m not so sure I’ve really overcome my weaknesses yet (though I have cut down a bit on drinking coffee and increased my intake of green tea.)

Other photos Shi Yan Wan sent include:

While I was chatting with Shi Yan Wan, he mentioned that Beijing people are not allowed to enter Panshan at this time. He also reported there are five monks living there now, and unfortunately construction has stopped temporarily.

Following up on that conversation I chatted with Shi Yan Pei, the North Shaolin head monk, who is in Henan Shaolin at this writing.He was pleased with my new book: Rebuilding the North Shaolin Monastery – 2010-2020 which I recently published on Amazon.com (incidentally the e-version is free with Kindle Unlimited membership).

Never one to sit around “twiddling my thumbs” I also put together all my “Silk Road Kung Fu Friendship Tour” articles published in Kung Fu Tai Chi Magazine and published them in a two-volume set: Silk Road Kung Fu Friendship Tour Volume 1 and Silk Road Kung Fu Friendship Tour Volume 2 – also on Amazon.com.

Readers might wonder if I’m going to make money from all this and the answer is “no.” Why not? Several reasons, one being that Amazon won’t send money to a Chinese bank account, so whatever little I might get is locked up in the USA. Ha, ha so funny! I guess I should have opened a bank account in one of those Silk Road countries.

What I really want however to get back on the Silk Roads again, at least here in China for now. International travel has become really complicated at this time as nobody with a brain wants to cross international borders and accidentally contribute to a worldwide pandemic.

COVID-19 is clearly not something to fool around with.

In sum, work at North Shaolin is temporarily halted, though the overall design plan for the venerable monastery is greatly expanded.

At the same time, we humans must exercise compassion for all sentient life, mourn our losses, exercise that wonderful virtue of patience, promote human dignity and equality, work to restore and protect the ecological systems that nurtures all life on earth, eat more fresh fruits and vegetables, meditate and/or pray, keep a positive mental attitude, stay away from troublemakers, practice our Kung Fu, watch comedies when possible and otherwise live a good and wholesome life.

With thy perfect intelligence and compassion which are beyond all limit, thou comprehends the egolessness of things and persons, and are free and clear from the hindrances of passion, learning and egoism.

Thou dost not vanish into Nirvana, nor does Nirvana abide in thee, for Nirvana transcends all duality of knowing and known, of being and non-being.

Those who see thee thus, serene and beyond conception will be emancipated from attachment, will be cleansed of all defilements, both in this world and in the spiritual world beyond.

http://zen-ua.org/wp-content/uploads/lankavatara_sutra_english.pdf

Incidentally informed sources report that the Lankavatara Sutra was the only sutra studied by Bodhidharma, A.K.A. Damo and a half dozen other names, including the affectionate moniker “red haired barbarian” at least here in China.

"From a Buddhist perspective, it is the modern ‘this worldly’ orientation to life that is a form of unrealistic escapism and unwarranted pessimism about human possibilities. It is unrealistic because it seeks the meaning of life in gratifications that can only be temporary and partial: it seeks escape from mortality in transient pleasures. It is unnecessarily pessimistic because it ignores or denies the transcendental capacity inherent in humankind: ‘turning one’s back on enlightenment to join with the dusts."

https://archive.org/stream/PureLandPureMind/PureLandPureMind_djvu.txt

Also see other works translated by J.C. Cleary: https://terebess.hu/zen/mesterek/J.C.Cleary.html

And yes, Damo may have been a rather suspicious looking fellow (or not; it’s hard to say really), but in any case, we should always remember to not judge a book by its cover.

Note: The word Nuli (努力), (great effort / to strive / to try hard) at the top of this article is not the same as the word Nuli (奴隶) which means “slave.” As you can see, the characters are totally different.

For Rebuilding the Northern Shaolin Temple: Part 17, click here.