by Dan Hardy
I was now competing more than ever, and trying out different skills and techniques whenever I could. Where before I’d looked to martial arts to help me deal with the trouble that came my way, it now actually gave me space from conflict and fighting, a way to temper my rage. I became fascinated by kung fu and the animal styles of fighting that discipline adopts. The legend says that Shaolin monks, dislocated from the outside world in their Henan province temple, developed stylised versions of fighting by watching animals engage with one another beyond the temple walls. I fell in love with the romanticism of it all and began studying the fighting styles of the tiger, monkey, crane and praying mantis as I imagined the monks did in their isolation. Shaolin kung fu became like the final stronghold of the magical side of martial arts for me. Something inside told me I needed to go and see it and experience it for myself. I’d been to the shows and watched videos of the training. I’d seen the breaking of iron bars over shaven heads, the balancing on top of spears. I’d marvelled at the flexibility and gymnastic ability of these monks in their orange robes. But I yearned to go there, to travel to China and do nothing but focus on training and fighting. I wanted to spend years matching their dedication and learning everything I could from these mystical martial artists. And when I saw a Discovery Channel documentary about a Chinese businessman and a young Chinese boy spending three years in a Shaolin temple, I swore I would do the same.
From that moment on, whenever a tutor got on my case and criticised my lack of academic effort or warned me about an approaching deadline, my response was always the same. ‘I don’t care about any of this,’ I would snap back. ‘I’m going to China to learn kung fu.’ Naturally enough, everyone laughed. ‘Wise up and stop messing around with your life,’ they invariably said as they walked away shaking their head. But I knew what I felt inside. This was my next step in martial arts. I had to go and see the monks.
2
THE PATH TO MMA
I had it all worked out. To save money, I lived with my parents throughout the first year of a Contemporary Arts degree at Nottingham Trent University and then applied for the maximum amount allowed as a student loan for my second year. From the outside it looked like I was simply continuing with my studies, but all I was really waiting for was the £3,500 credit to hit my bank account and I’d be on the next flight to the Far East.
Internet and email communication was by now pretty standard, if very slow, but the language difference ensured that three years in a Shaolin temple was not so easy to arrange. I was disappointed to learn that I could not go to the Monastery in Dengfeng County, Henan, the main temple of the Shaolin school of Buddhism. It was the temple I had seen in the documentary but it was explained to me that non-Chinese were not allowed to stay and study within its walls, and so the monks there recommended another option, the Northern China Shaolin Martial Arts Academy near Si Ping City. Only having a few grainy photographs of this new destination from a basic website was rather unsettling, and for the first time some sense of caution made its voice heard in my head. I decided I would head out on a two-month scouting mission to make sure the place was legitimate and met my expectations. If everything was okay, I would then fly back to England, pack my things, tie up a few loose ends and then return to China for the full three-year stay.
I was nervous setting out that morning from Heathrow airport in London. I felt like a man but I was in reality still a teenager and I had never even taken a flight on my own before. But something about the chaos of Heathrow settled me and by the time the plane took off I was looking forward to my adventure. The journey was fine as well, pit-stops in the clean, modern airports of Vienna and Beijing helping put my mind further at ease. But this air of contentment evaporated the instant my third flight of the day touched down in Changchun Dafangshen Airport. The region has a new airport now, opened a couple of years after my visit, but the terminal I landed in felt condemned. Built by the Japanese during the Second World War, Changchun Dafangshen was a grim place for a jet-lagged teenage kid to find himself, 5,000 miles from home. There were no doors on the terminal building and as many goats and chickens as people wandering around. I had been the only Westerner on the flight from Beijing and as I tried to figure out where to wait for my bags, all the other passengers dispersed in various directions and never returned. I found a luggage carousel, but it never moved. Instead, a couple of guys simply wheeled in my bag and dumped it on the stationary conveyer belt. I slung it over my shoulder and walked towards what looked like a main exit. Outside was just dusty waste ground and a large crowd of people standing and staring. In my naivety I had expected to emerge into a luscious, pine forest setting and have a trio of orange-robed Buddhist monks meet me with a solemn bow at the door. Instead, a crazy-looking man at the rear of the crowd, well over six foot tall with a wild shock of hair and a half-smoked cigarette hanging limp from his unsmiling mouth, gestured for me to follow him and then walked away. I fought my way through the crowd barely in time to see him climb into the passenger seat of a battered Nissan car. Running, I just about managed to clamber into the backseat as the motor rattled into life and propelled us forward uncertainly. For the next five hours I sat in exhausted silence as my greeter and the driver, another unkempt chain-smoker, talked uninterrupted without once acknowledging my presence. I couldn’t even fall asleep as there was a hole in the floor at my feet through which I could see the asphalt we were racing over. I had visions of nodding off, letting my foot slip through the gap, and being dragged to my grisly death in a burning mess of skin and bone. I was also pretty preoccupied with the fact I had just climbed into a car with complete unknowns, who had not once identified themselves, apart from the jutting motion of the tall one’s chin. But as the drive continued, I began to relax, particularly when the scenery turned green and misty and I suspected we must be on the right path. We gained altitude fast as the forest thickened and then I saw it on a hill, the picturesque castle-like temple in which I was going to learn Shaolin kung fu.
We drove through the massive gates and I had barely stepped out of the car when I heard someone repeatedly shouting my name with a distinct Mandarin inflection. A monk approached and in very good English told me I had a phone call waiting upstairs. It was my dad, somehow timing the call to perfection. ‘Son, is that you?’ he said, but the conversation ended there. As soon as he heard my voice he passed the phone to Mum and I could hear him crying in the background. It made for an emotional start to the stay.
The first week in the temple was without doubt the most difficult of my life to date. It was the closest I had ever been to being broken, both physically and mentally, by training sessions. There was a group of about fifteen of us, all Westerners and all with different backgrounds and varying aptitude for the exercises we were being put through. But as in any group of fifteen young, fit men, competitiveness inevitably kicked in and we drove each other on, everyone desperately seeking validation from the monks who oversaw everything. We woke each morning at 5am and lined up for roll call outside the training hall. Anyone missing was soon roused from their slumber with a stinging whip on the back of the legs with a bamboo cane. We then set off on a forty-five-minute run out the temple’s main gates, down the hill to the lake to complete a lap of the water, and then back into the temple grounds via the 360 stone steps that led to a side entrance. Two or three times per week, our shifu, or master, was waiting at the gate and keen to prolong the agony. Sometimes he’d simply send us back down and tell us to run up again. Sometimes we were told to ascend the steps two or three at a time or to scamper down hands-first like fleeing chimps. I can think of more pleasant ways to start the day.
We then completed a series of chi gong breathing exercises, involving drawing in energy from the air around us with deep, expansive breaths and storing it in our dan tien, an area three inches below the navel in the pit of the stomach. After that we practised the first two tai chi forms. My chi gong shifu was Master Long, a former personal bodyguard of
Chairman Mao in the sixties and early seventies. He was an intense character to say the least, always the first up every morning despite the pile of empty beer bottles that amassed outside his bedroom door. He had a small, select group of three or four students that he trained in a clearing within the forest that the rest of us could never clearly see, but we knew his focus was the more mystical internal martial arts. His expertise was in building Chi, the life-force inside each of us, and then using that as a protective shield or in strikes during combat. You needed to be there for years to be accepted into his inner circle and the one guy I spoke to who was part of it, a Londoner named Darren, who had spent over three years with Master Long, was always evasive about what he learnt.
It is not a term I like to use very often, but Master Long had some supernatural qualities about him. I remember one day I was practising several forms inside the training hall because a storm had whipped up the sands of the Mongolian Desert and outside was just a haze of stinging dust. I was training with a couple of guys from Hawaii inside this rustic space, just a box with concrete floors really. In the middle of the hall sat a homemade weight-lifting bench, crudely welded together from chunks of extremely heavy metal with a strip of old carpet nailed on where the padding should be. It was rather in our way, obstructing our movements if the three of us were to practise the forms together, and so we all grabbed the metal beast and attempted to move it to the side. After a couple of minutes of blood-vessel-bursting effort, I think we’d shifted it about four inches and decided it wasn’t worth it, that we’d work around it. About fifteen minutes later, Master Long strolled in, five foot seven and about sixty-five years old. He looked at us like we were idiotic children for training with this metal monstrosity impeding us and then slipped one hand under the bench, effortlessly slid it to the side wall, turned and laughed his distinctive wheezing laugh in our direction, and walked out. To this day, it gives me the shivers to think about it. I can’t explain it. And if it weren’t for the fact there were two other witnesses beside me to see it, I wouldn’t even repeat the story for fear of ridicule.
After tai chi, we were served breakfast around 7:30. The three meals per day were basically identical. We sat at large, round, wooden tables with a massive bowl of rice in the centre surrounded by five smaller bowls containing various vegetables and scrambled egg. There was very occasionally meat and we knew we were getting it by the screeching sound of the chicken or pig being slaughtered somewhere within the castle walls. Powdered milk was on offer as a beverage. It was all basic sustenance and nothing more.
When breakfast had been devoured, morning training began with light warm-ups which consisted of jogging and a range of standard kicks and stances. After that it was time for an hour of absolutely brutal stretching. I remember frequently being certain I would snap every one of my muscle fibres. It was a case of finding the point of agony, and then pushing us past it. One involving standing with my back to a tree while a partner raised my straight leg and forced it back until my toes touched the trunk above my head was particularly harrowing. My nervous habit of laughing when in extreme pain did me no favours whatsoever. Then there were the prolonged periods in stressed positions. Ma Bu down! became a feared cry from a monk, as it was used as a punishment for any perceived misdemeanour or disappointment. Known as the horse-riding stance, it involves crouching with parallel feet, knees bent at 90 degrees, the base of the spine curved, and hands in the prayer position. Poles were wedged between thigh and stomach and on arms in the crook of the elbow to ensure the stance was being executed correctly and to allow the monks to quickly spot any movements we made.
There were kids stretching alongside us as well, local strays brought in from the surrounding villages. It made a bit more sense for them because their bodies were still developing and if they could tolerate the pain their limbs would adapt and lock in that flexibility for later life. We adults on the other hand were simply snapping or damaging muscles. But the kids would be crying in pain and it was hard to watch. Buddhist monks may have a gentle reputation but there is a lot less tolerance towards complaining in that culture compared to the Western world. Just like us, the children received neither sympathy nor help when they broke down and began sobbing.
The afternoon training following lunch was the most advanced and challenging in a technical sense and was by far my favourite part of the day. We began practising the spectacular moves, the jumping, spinning and flying techniques. Then there were sessions of sansao, a much more realistic, combative form of kung fu. With its hand-strikes, kick-catching, throws, trips and sweeps, I saw similarities with Muay Thai and immediately embraced it as a transferable skill I could utilise in a genuine fight. There was also weapons training, something I was fascinated by and wanted to absorb as much knowledge on as possible. For me, weapons forms were synonymous with the Shaolin monks and I was determined to learn how to use their range of swords and the staff during my time there. All beginners start with the bo staff and students that are only booked in for a short stay tend to go no further than wielding that long rattan pole. But all over the castle grounds you could find old bits and pieces of weapons that had been broken in training and in the first few of days I managed to collect enough fragments of a straight sword to fashion my own. I would then stand to the side and watch a group of straight-sword students being put through their paces before trying to replicate what they were taught in my own time. My enthusiasm and dedication was soon noticed and I was invited to join the group. Before it was time for me to leave, I also managed to learn a broadsword form and purchased a variety of weapons to bring home and continue my education.
We finished up at around 19:00 for a rice and vegetable dinner, and then had a couple of hours free to do as we pleased. Groups organically formed according to particular interests. Some practised tai chi and chi gong, others continued their weapons training. I fell into a gang of like-minded souls interested in striking and we would spar in the training hall and hit rudimentary punchbags filled with sand. By 21:30, we all fell exhausted into our beds and prayed our bodies would recover sufficiently to do it all over again at the crack of the following dawn.
A lot of guys broke and left, unable to keep up with the constant physical and psychological pressure. I remember one of the group, a rich kid from London living in Dubai, who must have thought he was booked into a Shaolin-themed holiday camp. He was clearly just there to have a cool story to tell his mates back home and, after a few days sitting around smoking or barricading himself in his room by pushing his bunk against the door, he packed his bags and trudged out of the gate, never to be seen again. I still remember him fondly and, although our love for the martial arts was on vastly different levels, he brought some much-needed comic relief when he did emerge from his quarters.
There were various points in this first week when I was sure my body was going to fail me too. I wasn’t going to allow myself to be broken mentally and quit, but I could feel my muscles and joints slowly bowing under the onslaught. After two days, I couldn’t move properly and struggled to drag myself out of bed each morning. After seven days I had already lost 4kg and would eventually lose another six to return home weighing in at just 63kg. But on that seventh day I woke up and realised, I’m still here and I’m still going strong. It was a realisation that my body could take this torture after all. It was a psychological breakthrough, a release from perceived limitations, and I embraced and enjoyed the remainder of my stay as much as I had toiled and laboured through the initial stage.
Some of that weight I shed also came off the top of my head. Having let it grow for almost six years, my straight, black locks reached halfway down my back. In many ways that hair had defined me through my teenage years after I emerged from my pudgy, early-adolescent self. I was ready to shear it, to leave that part of my life behind and stride forward, but I couldn’t just go to my local barber’s in Nottingham and ask for a short back and sides. I wanted a grander gesture befitting the importan
ce I attached to the moment, I wanted something ceremonial. I actually expected the monks to insist my head was shaven before they began instructing me, but they seemed unmoved by the ponytail on the first day of training. Instead, I was informed by a few of my new, shaven-headed training partners that I would be getting the ‘monk treatment’ later that evening. I sat in front of a group of eight or so and they all cheered as big chunks of hair were shorn. In minutes, six years of me was on the floor.
All in all, I left China pretty content with how the two months had gone. Back home in the village hall, Mick and the others gathered round, anxious to see the results of my expedition. There was a sense of, you’ve been to the source, what did you bring back? Everyone was eager to see what I had learnt and so in an hour I went through all the forms the monks had taught me. In total, there were three kung fu forms, two tai chi, one bagua, one straight sword, one broadsword and one bow staff form. Everyone was suitably impressed when I concluded the demonstration and it felt good to show off new skills.
