Cinema as the 36th Chamber

“To preserve Shaolin we have to spread it to the people so that it can last through time.”
-The abbot, in Chang Cheh's Shaolin Temple (1976)

“I'm looking for a good method to package Shaolin kung-fu and then let people understand the true meaning of it.”
-Stephen Chow, in Shaolin Soccer (2001)

The word “Shaolin” conjures different things for different people. As an American-born Chinese, I first heard the term when taking kung-fu lessons at Saturday Chinese school, and later as I began to watch videotapes of Chinese-language films my parents would rent in hopes that I could pick up some Mandarin.

I originally hoped to do a mini-history of “Shaolin” as a cultural concept, from legendary martial arts style to pop-culture reference to new age philosophy. Unfortunately, there hasn't been much scholarly writing on the subject, at least in English, so telling that history turned out to be a much bigger task than I expected. So instead, I turned back to the place I, and most people (Eastern or Western), learned about Shaolin: the movies.

Because the Communist government for years prohibited films about “superstition,” the cinematic Shaolin only survived in films from other Chinese communities, namely Hong Kong. Without access to rare films, it'd be impossible to do a comprehensive search on the presence of Shaolin in Hong Kong cinema, so I turned to the official filmography put out by the Hong Kong Film Archive, and searched for films with the word “Shaolin” in either its English or Chinese title. The search turned up 66 results, from the 1939 Cantonese film Burning of the Shaolin Temple, to the numerous Shaw Brothers-presented Shaolin films of the '70s, to Stephen Chow's award-winning Shaolin Soccer in 2001.

The big martial arts directors at Shaw Brothers such as King Hu, Chang Cheh, Chor Yuen, and Lau Kar-leung, were exiles from China after the Communist Revolution. As a result, their films were imbued with a certain nostalgia and an urgent sense of survival. In some of the best martial arts films, “Chineseness” in all its forms becomes something that needs to be saved. Thus, stories of the Han Chinese resistance to being overthrown by the Manchu Qing Dynasty invaders provided the background for most martial arts period films made during this time. Typical examples are Chang Cheh's Five Shaolin Masters (1974) and its prequel Shaolin Temple (1976), which take the legendary burning of a Shaolin Temple by the Qing army and the subsequent Han resistance as its subject.

Implicit in these films is the idea that Shaolin as a spiritual concept must be “saved,” an idea that was perhaps even more critical to these exiled directors because of the Cultural Revolution in Communist China. These films latched on to the historical phenomenon of “opening” the Shaolin Temple to outsiders seeking to learn its ways. In both Shaolin Temple and Lau Kar-leung's The 36th Chamber of Shaolin (1978), the temple elders deliberate whether or not to open the school to secular students. The answer in both films is a resounding yes: since “Chineseness” is at a cultural impasse, traditional rules need to be bent to fit contemporary exigencies. In fact, the 36th chamber of Shaolin is created for this purpose: to teach Shaolin to everyday Chinese people so that they can protect themselves against outside powers. For these exiles, the occupation of China by the communists would be such an impasse.

The '70s were also the time of Hong Kong action cinema's internationalization. Martial arts films from Shaw Brothers and its rival Golden Harvest became a global phenomenon, topping the box office charts around the world. As a result, some in Chinese communities were suspicious of this phenomenon, and protested the spreading of Chinese “secrets” to outsiders. Recall that Bruce Lee, an American-born Chinese, was severely criticized for opening martial arts classes in the United States prior to his death in 1973. So in this way, these directors also celebrated the opening of Shaolin as a way to defend the global appeal of their films.

Therefore, the cinema became Shaolin's new 36th chamber. It became the way through which audiences in Chinese communities and elsewhere became introduced to the famous training rituals, the gravity-defying monks, and the philosophy of Shaolin. And since it's doubtful that, in its move from China to the rest of the world and from the temple to big screen, Shaolin will remain unchanged, what we're witnessing is its transformation to fit the changing times within the terms of the new global mediascape. In a video interview, classic actor and martial artist Gordon Lau (The 36 Chambers of Shaolin, Kill Bill) says, “We used to teach people in school, but now we have to present it in film. Therefore, we have to take extra care.” The question is then, what is being taught now that makes Shaolin above all a cinematic entity?

The release of the Shaw Brothers catalog on 35mm prints and DVD has enabled much of the world to see the classics for the first time, or revisit them with remastered video and grammatically legible subtitles. I first saw The 36 Chamber of Shaolin at the Pacific Film Archive several years ago, when the UCLA Film and Television Archive's “Heroic Grace” series toured the world. It was like the stories I'd heard as a child -- in cartoons, comics, TV shows, films like The Karate Kid -- combined into a two hour epic: a Han Chinese seeks revenge on invading armies and goes to the Shaolin Temple to learn martial arts. There, he slaves as a cleaner for a year before persuading the elders to let a secular man enter the rigorous training program. He's arrogant at first, thinking he can start from the highest chamber, but soon realizes that he must start from the bottom: walking on floating logs. Everyday he falls and is ridiculed by his peers. But he perseveres, coming to the chamber secretly at night to practice, and before long he's flying (literally) past his peers, going from chamber to chamber, training his eyes, arms, legs, wrists, and mind, until he is indeed a Shaolin master. When it's finally time to fight the enemies, we see how each of his training exercises becomes lethal (think “wax on, wax off”).

It's hard for me to explain how the film moved me. Sure there're a lot of spiritual and didactic clichés: work hard and you'll succeed; fighting starts from the mind; you must begin with the fundamentals. But to tell you the truth, I don't think I've ever seen a more inspirational movie, and it's not surprising to me why so many viewers in the states have actually gone on to learn martial arts or name rap albums after the film. Partly it's Lau Kar-leung's direction -- the pacing of the training scenes has that Rocky-style momentum -- partly it's Gordon Lau's memorable performance as a determined but naïve freedom fighter who's in way over his head. But mostly, it's the allure of the Shaolin Temple as a place where heroes are built, one chamber at a time, and where suffering pays off into a kind of muscle/mind harmony outsiders can't even begin to comprehend. I can't think of a better advertisement for keeping Shaolin alive than this film.

However, 20 years after these Shaw Brothers films, Chinese cinemas need to evolve to change with new cultural tides and film tastes. Further, places like Hong Kong and Taipei are entering a hyper-speed post-modernity where films are references to other films, and local identity is expressed through in-jokes and pop culture. These older Shaolin films are thus co-opted into new articulations of the modern experience. These new films ask, what is the meaning of Shaolin as we enter the 21st century?

Chu Yin-ping's Taiwanese/Hong Kong co-production Shaolin Popey (1994) has a typical, and somewhat idiotic, answer. The film takes place in contemporary Hong Kong, where a high school loser (Jimmy Lin) falls in love with the campus babe (Vivian Hsu), only to have his ass kicked by her evil boyfriend (Chang Chen-yueh) in a scene where they're dressed up as characters from Street Fighter. On a trip to the mainland with his precocious little brother, he finds himself at a Shaolin Temple where he, after several days of training, gains the skills to return to Hong Kong, win the girl, and save their high school from corruption. In such films, Shaolin enters the modern world via video games and the movies in order to satisfy fairy-tale dreams of chivalry and romance.

Stephen Chow's brilliant Shaolin Soccer (2001) considers what would happen if Shaolin were applied to sports, pitting Chinese martial arts versus Western steroids, and proving that the modern world still has a place for Shaolin. The result is so insane that it's genius.

As an American-born Chinese, I identified with Shaolin Soccer because it seemed to say things about being Chinese while living in a world that's not at all like the China of myths and martial arts films. While it didn't have me scrambling to the Shaolin Temple to beg a sifu for lessons, it did unexpectedly explore the tensions I felt as a child, watching warriors flying from roof to roof, wondering what this all had to do with me.

So I'm not shocked that Shaolin is the weapon of choice for many disgruntled white youth or black urban rappers. It's often said that African Americans identify with Chinese martial arts films, because many of those classics show Chinese standing up against and whooping their white oppressors, but I think the appeal of Shaolin is that it provides a secret underground path, complete with covert hand-signals, jargon, and customs, where one can obtain skills so powerful dominant society can't possibly fathom what's really going on. While the 17th century abbots may no longer recognize it, well beyond the flames set by the Qing armies, Shaolin survives.

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