Longmen Caves and Shaolin Temple

Saturday, October 12, 2013
This morning we left Xian on the high speed train to Luoyang.

 The high speed train stations look like new airports.

 The train was very comfortable and very fast - as good or better than the best trains in Europe.

 At the Longmen Caves there are 97,000 Buddha images carved into the cliffs.

 Most of the images are very small but a few are very large.

We had walked along the cliffs to go right up to all the grottoes and images but boated back along the river for a long range view.
After lunch, we traveled for an hour or two by bus to Song Shan, the town near the famous Shaolin Buddhist Temple founded in the 5th century. The mountainous terrain and bamboo forest were dangerous due to wild animals and bandits, so the monks developed and trained in kung fu, a martial art  from which many other martial arts are derived. Because of the influence of the monks, there are now several large kung fu training schools. We attended a demonstration at one of the schools which has 10,000 boarding students ages 4 to 20.

 Pushing on the point of a spear with your throat requires great focus and control.

 Many of the students are very young and very flexible.

 The students are trained in unarmed defence as well as the use of a number of different weapons.

 I was a little old to sign up but at least I got my picture taken.

As we left the school, the huge yards were full of classes practising. Parents pay several thousand dollars per year to send their children to this school. It's very spartan and disciplined. Upon graduation, the students are kung fu masters. Most just get regular jobs but some open their own training schools while others work in security or even in the movies.

 After the kung fu demonstration, we traveled a few km to the Shaolin Temple, which is a fairly big complex of buildings in a bamboo forest, surrounded by mountains.

Although it's a major tourist attraction, it is still also a working monastery.
After the monastery tour, we went to a restaurant for a "monk's" vegetarian dinner and then traveled by bus to Zhengzhou to our hotel. Another full day.