WX: The Vanishing Shaolin Monasteries & the Monks

Today MM and I walked across XX area and found that a monk was performing martial arts to make a living. As a martial-arts-novel lover, I stopped to watch… and then, as a-romantic-love-novel lover, MM dragged me out of the crowd, saying that how boring the perform was.

Well, the vanishing monks, the vanishing Shaolin Monasteries, and the vanishing martial arts.

Can’t explain Martial Arts in a western way. It is the essence of many great founders, put down from generation to generation, but later, it vanished in a large scale, for some reasons.

To see it as a way to keep healthy and to protect ourselves and help those in need is much better than to see it as a way to fight, though in ancient times, some people used it to fight, but the monks in the Shaolin monasteries used it to keep healthy, to keep the world in peace and help the poor.

Whenever somebody went to Shaolin monasteries to learn martial arts, the monks would tell them, before you learnt martial arts, you needed to learn how to be human. That is, to love, to care, to help, to give; but not to fight or fetch. That is, to be good, but not to be evil.

Those respectable monks must see through the world and life, so they could resist fame and gain and keep a peaceful mind. Perhaps they have known the essence of life and death, knowing that everything will turn to nothing. For happiness, it will turn to nothing, so cherish it when you are happy. For sadness, it will turn to nothing, so don’t be trapped and nagged by it when you are sad . For fame and gain, you can’t bring them when you die. You have nothing when you were born and you have nothing when you die. It is just a circle.

But as times fly by, martial arts become legends, monks are forgotten and make their living by performing, and monasteries turn out to be the scenic spots.

Yes, guns are more effective than martial arts, business men are more glorious then monks, skyscrapers are more modern than monasteries… People will say it is the Darwinian Theory. However, it is always a little sad to see that those good things, which used to shine upon our land as warm and beneficial as the sunshine, turn to nothing.

However, as the monks say, everything will turn to nothing. Perhaps hundreds of years ago, those great monks have already known---one day they would vanish.