Word: yan
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...Yan 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...
...Decked out in his ceremonial orange robe, Yan Ming is standing impossibly erect on a dusty road outside the city of Dengfeng in China's central Henan province, preparing to usher 40 of his students into the stadium that's hosting the nation's most important martial arts festival. Behind a bright red banner, they're attired in matching uniforms like other delegations?but they don't blend in. The group is as eclectic a collection of kung fu students as New York City's five boroughs could produce: a freckled Miramax exec, a black Hollywood action star, a bodybuilder...
...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...
...abbot and Yan Ming embody the complex struggle 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...
...Yan 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...