Wushu Tournament and Shaolin Monks.

[arnisador]

A front-page article in the WSJ today:

Kung Fu Monks
Don't Get a Kick
Out of Fighting (http://online.wsj.com/public/article_print/SB119758024054227513.html)

Famous Temple Spurns
Beijing Games, Sparking
Trash Talk From Rivals (http://online.wsj.com/public/article_print/SB119758024054227513.html)



Kung fu master Shi Dechao can swing his 22-pound "monk's spade," an ancient Chinese shovel, like a majorette twirling a baton. His lightning punches, in a style the ancients called Iron Fist, generate a thunk! straight out of kung fu movie sound effects. A powerful grunt punctuates his routine.

But Dechao, and most of the other martial monks at the 1,500-year-old Shaolin Temple in China's central Henan province, decline to join in one of the biggest kung fu battles of modern times -- a competition to be staged in tandem with next year's Olympic Games in Beijing.

Clad in saffron Buddhist robes, Dechao insists that real kung fu monks don't fight. They meditate and practice kung fu to reach enlightenment. "Every fist contains my love," says the 39-year-old Dechao, also known as Big Beard.


The Shaolin Temple's decision to stay out of the competition, to be held at the same time as the Olympics and passing out medals of its own, made headlines in China. And it has rekindled a disagreement familiar from the movies: Is kung fu a form of devotion, a style of fighting or both?


Zen Buddhism and kung fu have long made an unlikely pair.

[arnisador]

A Very Old Zen Master and His Art of Tough Love (http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/09/us/09zen.html)




Every spring and fall, enlightenment-seekers from all over come here to find out, converging for arduous weeklong retreats at the Bodhi Manda Zen Center in a red rock canyon among the thermal springs and Indian pueblos west of Santa Fe.


Dressed in black robes, they strive to live in the moment and awaken to the oneness of everything by rising at 3 a.m. for 18-hour sessions sitting lotus-style in the zendo, or meditation hall, eating communal vegan meals in silence, chanting and taking restorative dips in the hot pools.


But mostly they come to practice with an impish, smooth-faced Japanese monk, Kyozan Joshu Sasaki Roshi, a 100-year-old Rinzai Zen master, one of the oldest in the world, who tells followers, “Excuse me for not dying.”
[...]
“Enlightenment? I don’t like this subject at all,” Joshu Roshi said, speaking in Japanese through his interpreter and chuckling softly in a rare interview. “I bet you can find all sorts of different descriptions of it in the bookstore.”
He scolded Americans as too attached to their way of life, attachments in Buddhism being seen as a cause of suffering.


“That’s why I am always angrily yelling at my students,” he said, “‘If you’re attached to American democracy, you’ll never become the leaders of the free world again.’”


His followers grapple with his complexities. “He can’t give you anything,” said Seiju Bob Mammoser, a longtime student who is now abbot of the Albuquerque Zen Center. “You have to find it for yourself.”
[...]
As a 14-year-old novice, he was asked by his abbot, “How old is the Buddha?” His ready answer stunned his master and put him on the path to early priesthood: “Buddha’s age and my age are the same.”
[...]Joshu Roshi assigns each student a koan, a baffling question pointing at some ultimate truth — “How do you experience God when you hear the sound of my stick?” was one — meets privately with each student four times a day and offers a daily lecture, or teisho, from a high seat in the Center of Gravity Hall.
[...]
But he said, “If someone would turn up who can totally abandon their ego and manifest that zero state that is neither subject nor object and that is a complete unification of plus and minus, then I think I would make them a successor.”



(Emphasis added for a FMA connection!)