I slouch. Once, in a coffee shop, a man who claimed to be a chiropractor said that if I didn’t sit up and stop hunching my shoulders, I’d be paying him thousands of dollars a month by the time I was 40.
Sitting next to five Shaolin priests at the kitchen table of the Small Forest Temple on Middletown’s Highland Avenue, my slouch marked me as an outsider.
The kitchen is sparsely decorated. The plain wood furniture and the white walls are enlivened only by a few late-season tomatoes, plucked from the Temple’s garden, that sit ripening in the window. On the stove, a vegetarian stew is simmering.
The temple’s master, Ji Myong, sits directly across from me. He has the air of a monarch. To his right sits Sharisse Kanet, a Wesleyan graduate from the class of 2006 now living in the Temple, who once brought a philosophy professor to tears with the elegance of an in-class comment. The master takes her hand and shows it to me. “Look at Sharisse’s hand,” he says. “Very dainty, right? She can put that hand through an inch of wood without even a fear of injury. She has accomplished something beyond the physical.”
The temple’s priests move with great intention. Every gesture, every position, every slight movement, is deliberate. They sit squarely, their spines perfectly parallel to the backs of the chairs. Their hands, when not in use, are folded neatly in the center of their laps. Dressed in black v-neck t-shirts, the men’s heads shaven and the women’s hair tied straight back, their appearance is one of orderliness and simplicity. They talk quietly and breathe slowly.
Born Tony Scionti, Ji Myong began practicing in 1970 under the training of Seung Sahn, a Korean Zen Buddhist then living in Providence, RI. Seung Sahn licensed Scionti to open his own temple in 1985, giving him the name Ji Myong and thereby entering him into a lineage of masters that can be traced back 79 generations to the Shakyamuni Buddha. Ji Myong has been guiding priests along the road to becoming masters since 1990.
The defense of the Temple’s legitimacy is a serious concern of the priests, who hang the charter given by Ji Myong in the three-story brick building’s central room, and keep on hand a printout proving the master’s lineage. “This discipline comes from Asia,” says Joshua Wilson, a young Wesleyan graduate who has been living at the temple for seven years. “The truth of life is not Asian, not American. It has no color. Just because someone is Asian, does not mean they understand the Way better.”
The residents of the Temple are reluctant to classify their discipline. “As it is the Natural Way, how can you say it’s a certain this-ism?” asks Wilson. “Who’s to say that this table is wood? Reality has no -ism, it’s just the way it is.”
I ask Ji Myong what he believes. “The belief system is this,” he says. “What do you see?”
“Uhh, reality?” I stutter.
“What color is it?” he asks.
“It’s a lot of colors.”
“Right now.”
“I see blue and black and white.”
“What do you hear?”
“I hear your voice”
“Do you believe that?”
“Sure.”
“Then that’s your belief system.”
Shaolin is the result of a merging of Buddhist and Taoist traditions, and retains elements of both. “Our practice has been called Taoism in Buddhist robes, even though our robes are Taoist,” Ji Myong jokes.
In the Temple’s Dharma Room, where all of the formal practice takes place, a lighted candle sits in a stone bowl of water upon a wooden altar. The Dharma room shows evidence of all three elements of the priest’s practice: sitting meditation, chanting meditation, and martial arts meditation. Besides a floor cushion, there are free weights, a punching bag, and a small variety of weapons. The priests practice three martial arts – Chi Kung, which builds internal energy, Tai Chi, which channels that energy into fluid movement, and Kung Fu, which is faster and more aggressive.
The priests insist, however, that the formal practice is only one element of what they do. “The whole point of living here is to practice all the time, and to have this practice be not only in the temple but outside the temple as well,” says Jesse Allen, a Middletown native who has been living under Ji Myong’s tutelage for three years.
The priests come to live in the temple for different reasons. Allen, whose father was a commercial Karate teacher, describes it as a means of discovering himself. For Wilson, it was the answer to a frustration with the lack of satisfaction provided by academic pursuits. “The end of study just leads to more questions, but practice gives you answers,” he says.
“It’s not intellectual at all,” says Ji Myong. “It’s about opening an inner sense – the inner sense of who you are, what this world is, and what’s going on.”
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