can you really learn shaolin kung fu at the shaolin temple in the henan province?
Last March, 2009, Shi De Cheng went to Thailand to visit my wife and I, and our newborn little guy. I still have not gotten around to writing about that. But one thing was clear from his visit: Yongxin, the abbot of Shaolin, was making moves to increase his hold on foreigner training. He had realized that he was losing control of the teaching of foreigners to outside schools. Granted, he owned at least four of these schools in Dengfeng and other areas (which he used to draw "monks" loyal to him for temple activities, such as martial arts performances), but he never really concentrated on attracting non domestic students for gong fu. He's always a bit behind the ball, but he tends to catch up. Well, my impression of what Decheng had told me, is that Yongxin is trying to not only catch up, but overtake, and destroy the competition.
I have not been in China for two years, so I don't know what Yongxin is doing in his new Shaolin Disneyland. The last time I was there, there was little to no training in the temple grounds itself; it was a tourist attraction first, and an imitation of a home for Buddhist monks. Some martial monks were giving little performances (videos in russboTV) in a side area. The government run Wushu Guan still had the predominant arena for martial arts performances (the very first "new" show, in the newly renovated Wushu Guan, is in russboTV also; I was there, I had videotaped the entire thing).
I have no doubt that Yongxin has awoken with respect to all this lost revenue from foreigner training; expect to see more training opportunities "at the temple" arise in the future. And from the look on Decheng's face, expect more control, and diminished, let's say "ability", to provide gong fu education with respect to some of these outside schools. I would expect Yongxin to try to exert some sort of licensing, or some other commercialized way of getting hold of this lucrative avenue.
You might want to look at this thread also: http://forum.russbo.com/showthread.p...Shaolin-Temple
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