Hong’s Stories: Shaolin Math
“One thousand days of lessons for discipline. Ten thousand days of lessons for mastery.”
Amituofu friends! I’ve been training at USA Shaolin temple under Sifu Yan Ming Shi since June 2016. In September of that year, I became his disciple. Since the start, I have trained on average twice a week if I account for breaks required by life, about 250 lessons in all.
On that basis, I am one-quarter of the way to discipline, or more humbly 2.5% of the way to mastery. At my current pace, I will need six more years to gain “discipline”, and sixty to become a master. I am fifty-two years old, so I better pick up my pace.
I have no excuse. Lessons are offered at temple 365 days a year.
I leave my Brooklyn home office about an hour before class to get there early and have at least 15 minutes to warm up. I take the B, D to Grand or the Q, F, or M to Essex and walk over to 102 Allen Street.
On the side of an otherwise normal red-brick building, our street-level wooden door with a golden dragon handle sticks out like the entrance to another world, our red and yellow USA Shaolin sign above and to the side a small schedule in a glass frame.
I pull open the door, walk into a tiny alcove, take off my shoes and put them on the shelf. At the top of a steep flight of red painted stairs, a demure female deity draped in beaded necklaces greets all entrants from underneath tall flourishing ficus trees.
At the statue, I turn left and shout out “Amituofu Sifu!” while making a slight bow, my left hand across my stomach and my right up in half a prayer. “Amituofu” means Buddha and is an expression of respect.
Sifu greets me similarly from his orange legless rocking chair at the opposite end of the temple. I walk across the temple, repeat my greeting and head into the changing room to get dressed in my robes and kung-fu sneakers.
At the temple, we train as a group, yet each travels our own path. Sifu has an incredible ability no matter how many students are in the class to make it a very individual experience. Somehow all through class, I feel him sitting on my shoulder speaking directly in my ear telling me exactly what I need to fix.
Once Sifu calls for the class to begin, we line up in front of him for a brief greeting. Then it is off to the races, as we jump into two lines and for half an hour criss-cross the temple at a fast pace, cycling through a routine of basic kung-fu kicks, punches, and jumps, about twenty in all.
We take six passes across the temple for each move as Sifu implores us to raise more chi, lunge more deeply, kick higher and move faster across the room. “Find yourself!” he shouts. “Keep your head up! See the dolphins swimming in the south, the polar bears in the north.” Every once and a while to raise our chi, he will cross the room cracking the air with snapping kicks and punches.
By the end of this intense routine, whatever was in my head when I walked into the temple, whatever was my mood, is long gone. That is why we call this moving meditation.
For the next half-hour, we do a similarly fixed series of stretches. This simple-seeming routine has actually evolved over thousands of years and turns the body into a system of pulleys and levers. As I learn to go deeper into each stretch, I feel new sets of muscles get activated somewhere unexpected in my body. Maybe I am stretching my upper body, and realize that with full extension, my calves are getting activated.
“Oh, so that muscle is a part of this too! Very deep!”
We usually stretch by ourselves unless there is a new student at class, in which case Sifu takes them through the entire stretch routine. I always make a point of joining in these “beginner lessons”. I know from experience that the stretches are as deep as the kung fu itself.
The last part of the class is spent practicing kung fu forms. We do not spar at our temple, but instead, learn elaborate forms constructed from the basic moves. On one side of the temple, students line up and take turns doing their forms for Sifu. He observes and corrects, and if you are ready adds more of the form until you have learned it completely. On the other side, students line up and take turns practicing their forms by themselves.
The time spent in line watching others is as important as the practice itself. I take mental notes as Sifu corrects a student’s detail, watching extra close when he does the move himself. Even beginner lessons include details I have missed and need to work on. Of course, I watch the advanced students because they are awesome, and again, to check myself on the details of their movements.
We don’t have belts at our temple. Or we only have one, our temple yellow belt. We simply have Level 1 and Level 2 classes. In level one we wear a blue robe. At level two you get issued an orange robe and can wear either.
In order to complete Level 1, we must learn the first three forms and pass testing for each form. Over two weekends twice per year, the entire temple gets tested. Sifu sits at a table in his formal yellow robe, takes out his large red binder and flips through each students page reading out the order of testing. We line up in that order and make a single pass of each basic move in front of Sifu.
Then we take turns being tested in each form, including the ones we have already passed and whichever one we new one we have completed learning. As we perform, Sifu takes notes on our page in his book. His expectations for each of us are personal yet tough. Obviously, Sifu cannot expect the same physical prowess from me as from our twenty-odd-year-old jocks, but he knows exactly what I am capable of, and will not let me slide through.
I have been learning the third form for over a year now, and have not gotten to test it yet because Sifu has not given me the last part of the form to learn. I am still not ready.
At the end of testing, we stand in front of Sifu and he goes around the room quizzing us on Buddhist philosophy and history. We are 35th generation practitioners of an art that goes back officially 2500 years, and unofficially who knows. We learn to respect the lineage embedded in each move and form we learn.
One week after testing is complete, Sifu hosts a ceremony at the temple where we find out if we passed our test. If so we receive an official document signed by Sifu. If not, well, better luck next time.
It’s summer now, and the temple is a sweat lodge. By the end of every hour-and-a-half class, drenched and deeply dehydrated, I feel amazing! After class, I take an ice-cold shower and get dressed.
If it’s a mid-day class, I sit with Sifu and we order Vietnamese Pho or Chinese pulled noodles. As we eat the hot soup and talk, more sweat pours from my body. In fact, I recently had the brilliant realization that I should move my shower to after soup.
Our night-time Level 1 class start at 7 pm. We train for an extra half-hour. Afterward, our feisty community of warriors likes to hang out and play hard, sometimes until the light of the next day.
But that’s another story. Actually quite a few.
