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Real Shaolin gong fu masters: What's in a name....

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  • Real Shaolin gong fu masters: What's in a name....

    I found your web page interesting because a martial arts instructor I have talked to mention Shi De Yang. I am wodering how can you tell if a person has had dealings with the Shaolin Temple.

    I live in xxxxxx in xxxxx and I have spoken to a instructor in xxxxx and over the phone who says that he has been to the temple and is a lay priest and can teach you genuine shaolin.

    Getting back to the original question how can I tell, he gave his name Shi De xxxxxxxx yyyyyy (think that is how you spell it) (where xxxxx is a Chinese name, and yyyyy is a western last name - doc).

    Anyway any help would be good because I am looking for an instructor to train with but I don't want to ripped off.

    Thankyou,
    all the best,
    xxxx


    One thing that I've learned from the time I spent working with the Las Vegas police and district attorney group, is that people who are looking to decieve you, always, always, make some sort of mistake. Hell, we all make mistakes. But, when it comes to being untruthful, or, living some sort of lie, it's really, really hard to keep the entire story straight, or, not make some sort of small boo boo which unravels the whole sham.

    This all reminds me of an old Chinese story, entitled "Ci Di Wu Yin San Bai Liang", a story about a man, who received 300 taels of silver, which, to him, was an extremely large amount of money. He didn't know what to do with it; he thought about hiding it in his mattress, or in his pillow, but finally decided to hide it from his friends and family by digging a hole in the backyard, and burying the silver in it. He then put up a sign outside his house which said "Ci Di Wu Yin San Bai Liang", which means, "There is not 300 taels of silver here".

    A neighor had been awakened by the man's digging, and sometime thereafter, curious about what was going on, he noticed the sign, and decided to start digging around the man's backyard. He found the 300 taels of silver in a freshly dug hole, and confiscated it. Before going home, he added a line to the sign that said that he didn't take the silver.

    The commentary, "Ci Di Wu Yin San Bai Liang", has therefore come to be used in a mocking way, used to describe someone who thinks he is clever and tries to hide something, only to reveal through his ignorance what he wants to hide.

    Back to your lay priest. I certainly can't tell you if someone has spent time at Shaolin, and, if he has, I certainly can't tell you if he really knows Shaolin. There are some martial arts schools in the US who bring their students to Shaolin to train for one afternoon, after which, they advertise that their instructors are "trained in the Shaolin arts". That's almost as good as the friend I had many years ago, who worked stocking supplies in the Operating Room in one of the hospitals that I had worked at, who used to go out with me chasing women, claiming that he was a physician. (I would tell people I "worked in the hospital"; he would always get women, I would always go home alone. Hey, unfortunately, bullshit works, at least, for a while. He's now in jail for rape, kidnapping, and misuse of pharmaceuticals. It gets you in the end. And I still go home alone, lol). So, when it comes to what people say, I always, always tell you guys, to QUESTION. Question everything. It's a common theme in this site, you've all seen it before. Question, question, question. Research, figure it out for yourself.

    Let's talk about your individual, the "lay priest" of Shaolin. First, if you become a disciple, which in itself is a long drawn out process (see the relevant parts of the site), you learn not to refer to yourself as a "monk", and you certainly don't call yourself a "lay priest". You're a disciple. I'm one, and I certainly don't go around with the moniker of Richard Russell, MD, Lay Priest of the Shaolin Temple. No, I tend to go by "doc". I also respond to other names, but we won't get into that. The "lay priest" thing just doesn't fit with Shaolin. Sorry.

    Shi De Yang is a real monk; I know him well. I haven't seen him lately, as he's been busy in Fukien, and with his school having just moved to Dengfeng. Haven't seen him in a year. But, I do know one thing. He doesn't take a lot of disciples, which means, he doesn't go through the formal ceremony and grant a formal name much. The guy is too busy to really deal with foreigners. But, if he had, and let's just assume that he took your lay priest as a disciple, he would not grant him a name of "Shi DE xxxx". When a master grants a disciple name to a new disciple, the disciple gets a generation name one lower; in De Yang's case, the disciple's name would be Shi Xing xxxx, "Xing" being the generation name below the "De" generation.

    In fact, there are few "De" generation monks left in Shaolin; most left the temple with the recent political changes there. Most of the monks that you'll find, the "older" monks now, are of the "Xing" generation; the newer bunch are of the "Yong" and "Yan" generations. If your lay priest is of the "De" generation, that means his master was of the "Su" generation. The only "Su"' generation monks of recent are Shi Su Xi, who hasn't taught gong fu in many, many years, and, my grandmaster, Shi Su Yuan, who died in 1998. I guess what I'm saying is, if your lay priest were legitimate, he probably wouldn't have a "De" generation name, unless he trained in Shaolin over ten years ago, something which was a very rare occurrence for foreigners. He may have been to Shaolin, he may know some stuff, he may know a hell of a lot of stuff, but, more than likely, he really screwed up picking the name that he was going to use.

    His biggest mistake, and most humorous one at that, is the fact that a disciple, or the any of the monks for that matter, would not append their real last name to the end of their monk name. "Shi De XXXXX YYYYYYYY" doesn't work. Monks and disciples don't mix their monk and real names; in fact, appending your real last name to your monk / disciple name is a gross fallacy, as the moniker "Shi" is the disciple's / monk's last name. My name is Richard Russell, my disciple name is Shi Xing Heng, Shi being the disciple group last name, that all disciple's / monks use; Xing being the generation name (my master being Shi DE Cheng; his master being Shi SU Yuan, his master being Shi CHENG Xu); Heng being the name my master gave me based upon my qualities (Heng meaning "mountain", signifiying "eternal", "persistant", and "powerful"). I never use the term Shi Xing Heng for one, as, quite frankly, I feel funny referring to it; secondly, referring to myself as Shi Xing Heng Russell, would be absolute nonsense. The use of a last name with a Shaolin monk name makes me think of an individual who is more used to using Japanese terminology (titles with real last names, such as one of my Okinawan masters, Senseii Schumacher), than someone who knew anything about Shaolin names. The monks have real names that they were born with, and they use those names on their passports and other official documents; for example, Shi Yong Qiang's real name is Lu Yong. Using the name of "Shi Yong Qiang Yong", would be absolute nonsense.

    There's enough information on this site that demonstrates real Shaolin gong fu. And I've got more coming. Unfortunately, this last trip was grossly abbreviated due to illness, so I didn't get to shoot all the video and photos that I had planned for you guys. But, I'll figure something out. You can pretty much see from what an individual teaches, as to whether it's "real" or not. Check out the videos in this forum (we're adding more compressed versions so those of you with slower modems can view them, once I get back...), and see if your lay priest teaches stuff like that.

    But, personally, from what I've seen so far, I'd be careful. There's lots of bullshit in the world, and people (and, for some reason, most young women), tend to be attracted to it. Eventually, the bullshit unravels, and people retreat to their holes in life, usually having suffered because of it, to some degree. Always question, don't believe everything that people tell you, and beware the bullshit. You'll figure it out.

    Oh, and remember this. Ci Di Wu Yin San Bai Liang. It fits.

    doc
    Experienced Community organizer. Yeah, let's choose him to run the free world. It will be historic. What could possibly go wrong...

    "You're just a jaded cynical mother****er...." Jeffpeg

    (more comments in my User Profile)
    russbo.com


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