Word: shaolin
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Ming, his students like to say, is "half man, half amazing." But when he's breaking boulders with his skull or flying above ground upside down in a full split, that hardly does him justice. Even when he holds still (which isn't often), the 37-year-old Shaolin Temple fighting monk manages to look more mythical than mortal. He's got the face of a Xian terra-cotta warrior?acrobatically piked eyebrows, rampart-like cheekbones?and the kind of body that helps explain why kung fu is called...
...star, a bodybuilder with dreadlocks, a hulking ex-Marine, not to mention the extravagantly tattooed road manager of the Beastie Boys' "Licensed to Ill" tour. Satisfied his posse looks sharp, Yan Ming commands: "Alright, everyone. Get ready to represent!" That's when the group's standard, which reads U.S.A. SHAOLIN TEMPLE, causes a commotion. "What an outrage!" exclaims a heavyset cop at the gates of the stadium. "There is absolutely no such thing!" He lurches toward Yan Ming as if ready to pounce, but then thinks better of it, and settles for confiscating the banner instead...
...Shaolin temple in America? Outrageous, perhaps, but if anyone can judge the group's authenticity, it ought to be Yan Ming himself. He's a legitimate scion of the original Shaolin Temple, the 1,500-year-old monastery a few kilometers away whose monks' melding of the gentle tenets of Buddhism with ancient combat techniques has earned it renown as the symbolic birthplace of Chinese martial arts. Just ask the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service: it thought Yan Ming should register his hands as lethal weapons when he applied for a green card. Just ask the Henan Tourist Bureau...
...under way for control of the legacy of a Chinese cultural landmark almost as celebrated as the Forbidden City or the Great Wall. It's a clash that pits monk against monk, disciple against master and, at least in one case, cop against banner. And the stakes are high. Shaolin monks' heroism on battlefields, both real and imagined, has been legendary for generations. But like so many institutions of China's imperial past, the temple was violently severed from its historical roots by the political upheavals of the 20th century. Its red-walled halls and library were reduced to rubble...
...Ming was five when he arrived at Shaolin in 1969. He had suffered a near-fatal illness and his parents, believing he owed his recovery to Buddha, sent him to become a monk. It was a perilous time to join a monastic order. Mao Zedong's Cultural Revolution was in full swing and the temple's remaining handful of monks were so busy fending off gangs of marauding Red Guards and writing self-criticisms that they had little time for new disciples...