Just Hollywood lore?

By Chen Nan (China Daily)
Updated: 2008-09-25 09:10

Zhu is 19 years old and comes from a Chinese farming family. He is a student at the largest martial arts school in the world named Tagou. He trains in the modern kungfu sport called Sanda, which is a brutal competitive sport resembling kickboxing.

Eric is 29 years old and journeys from France determined to be the first non-Chinese Shaolin monk. Under the famous Shaolin grandmaster Shi Deyang, Eric is accepted on the condition that he remains exclusively at Shi's school for a minimum of three years.

"The idea behind The Real Shaolin is that the modern day Shaolin Temple differs greatly from what we imagine in the movies," Lee explains.

Many people watch martial arts movies and dream of becoming a grand kungfu master. But the reality, as portrayed in The Real Shaolin, which debuted at the Toronto International Film Festival last week, has little to do with flying fists and more with hard work and training.

There is a Shaolin saying, "In order to learn the martial arts, one must eat bitter". It resembles the American expression "No pain, no gain". Even though one can study Shaolin kungfu in America, it cannot measure up to real Shaolin training, which goes for eight hours per day, six days per week, for years on end.

The movie The Shaolin Temple shows Jet Li carrying pails of water up a mountain. Lee, after spending over a year with kungfu teachers and students at Shaolin Temple, thinks Jet Li's bitter training has been "romanticized".

"But when you train in Shaolin and attempt to do full splits, there is nothing romantic about excruciating groin pain," Lee says.

With all the pain and hardship, what purpose does kungfu serve anyway? Kungfu can be used for self-defense, to boost one's health, and for spiritual fulfillment.

Lee got his answer after experiencing the real Shaolin Temple. It helps to eliminate fear, he says. "If you are confident in yourself and not afraid of others, then you can put aside your ego and open your heart to others. That is one of the precepts in Buddhism, and a method to establish a universal brotherhood among men," he says.

However, the modern day Shaolin Temple at first glance is a tourism site and many Western visitors wonder, "Where are the old masters who practice endlessly in search of enlightenment, not wealth?"

Lee says he hopes the film can inspire viewers to explore the real Shaolin themselves. "As I spent more time living at Shaolin, I understood that the spirit of Shaolin lives on," he says.

(China Daily 09/24/2008 page18)

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