Personal Insights into Buddhism Through Kungfu

No. 24 Years is a LOT of Experiences. Only 2 brief unpleasant moments in all those years. And mostly uplifting moments.

My experience with Buddhism has been learning a great deal of it via osmosis when I studied Wah Lum Kungfu. My school was very old-fashioned, so we learned the martial art within its cultural context a great deal, which is being an offshoot of Shaolin is Buddhist. Our philosophical and ethical take on how to live Wah Lum was dripping in the applied Chan Buddhism of Shaolin.

Applying Chan Buddhism

One lesson I will never forget had my Sifu teach a class without saying a word to us beyond just semi-articulate grunting noises. He would just redirect us to be quiet and perform our exercises, and when we needed redirection, he would physically come over and silently move us to redirect us to do what we were supposed to do. We naturally fell into an interiorly focused, mentally still, one-pointed sort of mind state, which was rather profound.

Sifu later said, with his classic wise and sly wink, “If I had tried to tell you what we were doing, you would have thought too much about it.” We also learned how to formally meditate and even learned how to fight and otherwise handle pain and adversity in that state, which taught us all about the importance of self-control and responding vs reacting to even scary and very unpleasant stimuli like someone hitting you and trying to kill you.

The Importance of Self-Control and Responding

My Sifu would say, “You cannot control what happens to you, but you can always control how you choose to respond to it.” Usually followed by “Keep breathing!” He would also always encourage us by the old Kungfu maxim when faced with challenge and adversity, “Bend, do not break!”

“Fall down 5 times, get up 6!” was a quote from Bodhidharma, the founding patriarch of Shaolin Kungfu, still worshiped in Japan as Bodamo, the “patron saint” of stubborn resilience.

Compassion and Nonviolence

We learned about compassion and living your life in a compassionate way even when you need to use force. My Sifu would always say, “The guy swinging at you has forgotten where he put his Buddha nature. When you respond to him, don't forget where you put yours.” You can do anything with humanity and compassion, even putting someone swinging at you on the ground.”

Nonviolence in Shaolin thought is very very nuanced. For example, if your militant pacifism causes others to be harmed by your inaction, are you really being non-violent? Is your personal karmic purity more important than not allowing innocents to be harmed? Shaolin evolved in a very ethically complicated situation, where bandits were raiding the monastery and killing the local peasants. Shaolin evolved as a way to live Ahimsa with skillful means in that sort of violent imperfect world which requires nuanced responses.

Challenges and Healing

We learned that harming was always on a gradient scale, and we were to always roll back our use of force to the least amount possible to end the situation. "If you can kill, maim if you can maim, injure if you can injure, force them to stop fighting. If you can force them to stop fighting, use your words, or walk away to avoid conflict."

We learned about chi and the meridians via deeper meditative and “inner arts” practice, Nei Gong, and learned about how to use this knowledge in healing in general as a way of morally addressing the harm we may cause. “If you break them, it's your responsibility to make sure they get better because if this poor, angry fool you had to hurt, never heals that broken arm, etc., you caused to stop them, the community will have another person in it who they will have to take care of or who will have no ability to work an honest living, who will likely stay a criminal who hurts people.

Healing was more importantly seen as an applied way to live compassion with the skillful means to really help others in need.

I later learned that the Traditional Asian bodywork I studied also had its start on Shaolin mountain. When I began formally learning about Buddhism, I realized that Sifu had grounded us in many of the basics without ever telling us, “This is Buddhism.” To us, it was just part of Wah Lum.

In many ways, I think I learned it vastly better and in a much more integrated way through that sort of pragmatic 'street application' than I would have if I had learned it as if I was learning a religion.