The Shaolin Way: 10 Modern Secrets of Survival from Shaolin Grandmaster

THE SHAOLIN WAY

TEN MODERN SECRETS

OF SURVIVAL FROM

A SHAOLIN GRANDMASTER

Steve DeMasco

with Alli Joseph

DEDICATION

To the people who have majorly influenced my life, in the order in which they came into my life.

My Mom, Carol G. DeMasco, the true Shaolin Disciple.

Vinny Vecchionne, my boxing trainer, mentor, and the person who kept me in school.

Paul Newman, the most generous, kind, and inspirational person I have ever met.

President William J. Clinton, for all your faith and encouragement, and for making me feel that I was important to you and our country.

Barry Mawn, one of the true heroes of 9/11. Thank you for your friendship and allowing me to be part of the greatest law enforcement agency in the world, the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

My wife, Kelly; and my boys, Michael, Nicco, and Gianni—my inspiration for the rest of my life!

EPIGRAPH

It will all be okay in the end.

If it’s not okay,

it’s not the end.

—ANONYMOUS

CONTENTS

Dedication

Epigraph

Foreword by Abbott Shi Yongxin,

China Songshang Shaolin Temple

Introduction: The Myth of the Mountain

1. SURVIVAL IS NOT ENOUGH

Are You Living to Live or Living to Die?

The 80/20 Technique

The Joyous Life

Growing out of Surviving and into Living

2. FOCUS + DISCIPLINE = ACCOMPLISHMENT

Distractions on the Road

Thirty Years of Focus, One Day to Prove It

The Art of Discipline

Monk for a Minute

Activity versus Accomplishment

Discipline at Any Age

3. SELF-WORTH COMES FROM

SELF-EXAMINATION

Making Up for What You Think You Lack, and Knowing What You Have

Sara and the Training of a Shaolin Disciple

Stop Trying to Fit In

The Age of Low Self-Esteem

The Bully and the Master

Gaining Perspective

The Problem of Ego

The Ego Germ

Your Fluctuating Self-Worth

Failing, Again

The Monk in the Mirror

Wrapped Up in Ourselves

4. EVEN IN WEAKNESS, THERE IS STRENGTH

Yin and Yang

Fear, Weakness, and Control

Strong Steps on the Road

Big but Weak

5. VICTIMS AREN’T BORN, THEY’RE BRED

Taking Responsibility

Ultimate Victimization

I Feel Like a Victim, but Am I Being Victimized?

The Conscious Car-Deal Victim

What You Give Out, You Get Back

Setting Myself Up to Nosedive

Victims Aren’t Born, They’re Bred

Making Mistakes Until You Get It Right

Changing the Pattern

6. ANGER IS WASTED ENERGY

The Choice of Anger

Anger Is a Warning Sign

Anger’s Best Friend, Conflict

Do Monks Get Angry?

Diffusing Anger

7. DO UNTO OTHERS

Leaving Three Sides of the Net Open

Practicing Compassion

Compassion Without Attachment

The Beaten Dog

Compassion for the Long Haul

My Friend Vinnie

Learning How to Love

Stop Bullshitting Yourself

Looking at the Roots to Save the Branches

The Compassionate Parent

Relationships Are Hard Work

8. HOPE IS AN ACTION

Willing Nothing into Something by Doing

Hope versus Expectation

My Mom, the Shaolin Warrior

Where There’s a Will, There’s a Way

9. TRUE POWER COMES FROM WITHIN

Power in the Streets

Changing Your Perspective on Power

Finding Your True Power

10. YOU CAN’T MOVE ON IF YOU CAN’T LET GO

Loving Yourself and Letting It All Go

The Mountain and the Way

No Time Like the Present

Gaining Closure on Abuse

The Asshole Theory

The Fine Line Between Hate and Forgiveness

The Dynamic Cycle of Life and Death

Anyone Can Change the World

Afterword

Appendix A: Shaolin Stances

Appendix B: What Are the Shaolin Five Animal Forms?

Appendix C: A Disciplined Mind Requires a Healthy Body

Appendix D: Chinese Traditional Tea Ceremony for Longevity, Happiness, and Good Fortune

About the Author

Credits

Copyright

About the Publisher

FOREWORD

The Shaolin Temple is one of the most popular and far-spreading manifestations of China’s traditional Buddhist culture. It has become an integral part of human spiritual civilization, to be accepted and respected by people of different cultures around the world. Shaolin kung fu has had the same influence on people of different cultures. It is a bridge of mutual understanding, contributing to the advancement of human peace and friendship.

Steve DeMasco has respected Buddhism and loved Shaolin kung fu since childhood. He established his United Studios of Self-Defense to gather new Shaolin followers, as well as teach Shaolin kung fu. He has been very generous and ready to help the poor and homeless children to receive schooling education for free with his limited savings. This is a mercy and benevolence which is advocated by Buddhism.

Since he was accepted as a disciple of the Shaolin Temple, Steve DeMasco has led hundreds of USSD students to visit the Ancestral court for pilgrimage tours, and donated his time to help the ongoing Renovation Project of the Shaolin Temple.

I believe that with the publication of this book, more American friends will have a better understanding of traditional Chinese culture, and further understanding of the Shaolin spirit. For sure it will purify people’s souls.

ABBOTT SHI YONGXIN

China Songshang Shaolin Temple

Buddhist year of 2548

INTRODUCTION

THE MYTH OF THE MOUNTAIN

You could say I didn’t have the best start in life. I was born in 1953 to Concetta and Al DeMasco in Spanish Harlem, where I lived until I was nine. My mother, who for some reason was always called Carol, had two wooden legs and four fingers on one hand, both resulting from birth defects and abuse by her unhappy mother. Carol was my inspiration and my reason for living until she died several years ago. My father, Al, was a psychotic, abusive man who beat and sexually abused me repeatedly as a child, until my mother remarried in 1962 and moved us away to Brockton, Massachusetts. Al disappeared from my life when I was sixteen.

Coming from a really bad beginning like this—where I was lucky not to become a poverty statistic in the ghetto—there were a lot of changes I needed to make on my journey over the years. About thirty-five years ago, when I first learned about Shaolin philosophy and the kung fu martial arts that go with it, I had no idea how it would profoundly change my life, but it did. It was Shaolin—a mysterious practice created by a special group of men fifteen hundred years ago in China—that saved me.

These men believed that to have total balance in life, one must be fulfilled spiritually and physically, and find a balance between aggression and peace. This balance came by practicing equal parts kung fu martial arts, natural healing, compassionate actions in the world outside their temple walls, and intense study of Buddhism. They spent their lives unraveling the roots of life challenges that all humans still struggle with today, regardless of race or socioeconomic background. These men were the fighting Shaolin monks, and their tradition still lives.

WHAT IS SHAOLIN?

Many people believe that most modern martial arts are descended from Shaolin (which means small forest in Chinese). The original Shaolin temple was built in northern China (Hunan Province) by the emperor just for religious study around the fourth century CE (common era), and was burned down by warring emperors in the eighteenth century. After it was burned down, rebuilt, and then trashed again, a remaining piece of the last temple was turned into the current temple near Deng Feng, China.

Scholars write that the kung fu element of Shaolin began about a thousand years after the original Buddha lived, when Bodhidharma (known as Ta Mo in Chinese and Daruma in Japanese—bodhi means enlightened mind, dharma is Sanskrit for law or teaching), a Buddhist monk and prince from India, came to teach the Shaolin monks a nonlethal form of self-defense in the sixth century CE. As monks, they had taken vows of peace, and so could not kill when attacked, which happened a lot during those challenging and violent times of ruling-class upheaval. Shaolin kung fu became a sort of meditation in motion, which protected them from invaders while still allowing them to stay true to their vows. With these new skills, they became the fighting Shaolin monks.

Shaolin revolves around the Chan Buddhist religion, a particular blend of Buddhism with Confucianism and Taoism (also known as Daoism), and relies on an understanding of what it means to be a fighter and a warrior. The fighting Shaolin monks were thought to have the most famous and most advanced kung fu methods in all of Asia, even though a lot of the time they weren’t fighting. Shaolin works backward: You study to be able to kill, but you can’t be effective unless you learn that violence should never be used unless you’re protecting someone else’s life.

Today there are thousands of Buddhist monks all over China. They all look very similar to each other, with their simple robes and shaved heads. But while they may all dress the same and look the same, there is only one remaining Shaolin temple near Deng Feng, and its inhabitants are a small group of men—there are about fifty of them, out of about a billion people in China. These men have special skills that I spent thirty-five years trying to learn, and then sharing with my students: juvenile offenders, convicted murderers, abused women, stay-at-home moms, frustrated teenagers, and successful businesspeople alike.

Now I want to share them with you.

EVERYDAY FIGHTS

In more than thirty years of working with men, women, children, and families as a behaviorist, I have seen and done a lot of fighting. We are all fighting in one way or another: we’re fighting to survive every day of our lives. We fight to wake up some mornings when the day looks like crap outside, and we fight to feel good when we’re miserable and depressed. I call this kind of fighting mental warfare because we’re using our heads to fight the intangibles in life: depression, egotism, hatred, anger, greed, selfishness, and just about every negative tendency, emotion, or action that makes us dissatisfied with our lives and hurts us deeply, sometimes in ways we don’t even recognize.

I spent many years as a kid fighting in the streets to protect myself from bullies without knowing how, then fighting with skill as a boxer, then learning a whole different way of fighting through Shaolin kung fu—and that’s a lot of fighting. But the monks did more than just fight for a purse or for fun: they fought with the goal of ridding the world of misery, learning to protect themselves so they could then protect and help other people. All Buddhist religions preach that same goal, but the Shaolin monks were different because they were warriors. And so are we.

When I talk to kids or adults who are struggling with personal problems or situations, and we hit a roadblock because they don’t believe the lessons I’m trying to teach them about how Shaolin can help them change their lives, I always say the same thing: How do you feel?

I feel like shit, most respond.

Think about this, I say. "What you have been doing up to this point obviously hasn’t worked for you, or you would not be where you are. Unless you have an alternative plan, then you have nothing to lose and everything to gain. I know how you feel: I have been in the same place many times in my life, and each and every time these lessons have worked for me. If you follow the path and don’t go off of it, I guarantee it will work for you."

THE THREE TREASURES OF SHAOLIN

The Shaolin monks live by three main principles, called the Three Treasures.

CHAN is the heart of kung fu. It means constantly being cued in to the present, or the here and now. Chan suggests practicality by living life in the present, and the need to look at issues or situations from all angles, rather than your own personal frame of reference.

HEALTH, meaning both internal and external health, deals with keeping the body in good working order and living in harmony with its needs. Medicinal and qigong (internal energy) practice are used to heal the body and maintain proper internal organ function alongside the muscles and bones. Forms (dancelike movements that imitate animal movements and behavior), from the movements themselves, to the external strengthening of the body, to internal conditioning of the organs, combine with medicine and energy work to create health.

SELF-DEFENSE. The monks believe that the body must be kept in balance at all times, and so they use self-defense training as well as fighting scenarios to delve into their personal demons and attachments, and to root out what they believe are the sources of all ignorance: fear and greed.

A SURVIVAL GUIDE

This book offers a kind of blueprint for survival: a guide for life based on Shaolin philosophy that can help you change your own. The Shaolin monks have a whole different set of rules for living than anybody else, and these were created for a reason. Before they became fighting monks, they had many of the same problems as the rest of us. Their health was bad, they were out of shape, they couldn’t focus on their religion, they were depressed, and they wanted to be loved. In short, sometimes their lives sucked too.

In order to stop feeling bad, the monks decided to do a few things differently. They began to follow a course of action every day that would create change within them so they could effect change in the world outside their temple walls, ridding it of misery. This reflects one of the central ideas in Buddhism, which suggests that the only way to improve your own life is to help someone else, because we are all essentially the same.

When Bodhidharma came down off that mountain and said he’d teach them to fight, they thought they would learn how to fight their enemies and get in better shape right away, but they didn’t. First they had to learn more about Buddhist law from their masters at the temple, as well as many survival skills like healing using wild herbs and how to eat off the land. Later they learned to practice the elite fighting Shaolin kung fu forms that made them famous. Finally, well prepared for whatever came into their paths mentally or physically, the monks were sent on spiritual journeys out into the world, where they had to apply what they had learned in their small setting.

TRAVELING THROUGH OURSELVES

So how can Shaolin provide the tools to help you change your life? Why is it different from any other method? Right off the bat, you may think that fighting is a big part of the lessons contained in this book, since Shaolin is tied to the martial arts. This is not true. Where the fighting Shaolin monks used fighting techniques to keep themselves fit and focused, we are going to use our own everyday situations, because unlike the monks, we have a lot more to deal with in everyday life than waking up, eating, praying, and practicing. We have to deal with reality on its most manic scale—like heading off to work, being in a relationship, overcoming issues from the past, and much, much more.

The skills we need to function today may be different from those the monks practiced so many years ago in the temple and on their journeys, but the principles Shaolin taught them are still the same: to really live your life every day and not just get by means dealing with change and breaking some of your personal rules, two of the most difficult things for a person to do. Personal rules are behaviors you have been conditioned to have that keep you in negative patterns and create unhappiness. They are addictions, just like drinking and drugs, and they need to be broken.

Shaolin will give you all the tools to fight for a better version of your current life, but what it really teaches you is the way to true inner power. It shows you how to fight for your life and deal with your opponents without doing damage to others—whether they are your parents, enemies, or bullies, or even yourself. But the first and greatest battle is with ourselves.

With Shaolin, looking at the different kinds of fights you have each and every day can end up teaching you a lot about yourself. The catch is that you have to be ready to learn it—or it won’t make a difference at all. Shaolin, like any other philosophy, can’t help you if you don’t engage: but it will always point the way.

THE MONKS AND US

What is the way? The monks’ approach to finding a path toward happiness is quite different from ours in the West. They live by a set of rules set out by Buddhist law, a sort of Ten Commandments, much as you find in Judaism and Christianity.

The monks choose to live a life of asceticism—one that has no use for material things. The things they consider on a daily basis may seem limited to us because they are generally concerned only with whether they have had enough to eat, are sick, and how they pray to Buddha and understand his teachings.

We believe we have a lot more to deal with every day. After all my years of attempting to understand the meaning of life, I feel great compassion for us. We have it really tough: we think we need to be perfect, and the ways in which we choose to pursue perfection are varied and complex.

You may think it’s a lot easier to walk around in a temple all day with a shaved head, praying and doing kung fu, and that the monks focus on being perfect in a way that we cannot, because they are in a controlled environment. Our environment is much different: we live between freeways and free will, so we have to make some choices and some changes in our lives and acknowledge the myth of perfection; otherwise we’ll always be unhappy and unfulfilled.

The desire to achieve perfection comes from a basic set of principles or rules that were laid out for us early in our lives. But, they don’t work, no matter what our religion—Buddhism, Christianity, Islam, Judaism, or any other. I believe that we start out depressed in life because what most religions, and then our parents, teach us is that we have to live up to all of these commandments and expectations of perfection.

Point-blank, that’s impossible.

By trying to be perfect, you could say that we’re starting at the bottom of the barrel automatically. So it’s no wonder that we live in guilt about how we live, and what we do each day for our entire lives, not knowing whether we are taking the right steps toward happiness. As humans trying to function in the world today, we are totally conflicted from the beginning, so naturally we’re confused and we can’t see a good path for ourselves.

Internal conflict manifests itself differently for everyone. Where you are in your life dictates what you feel. For a woman who got married very young and now has children and responsibility, inner conflict might mean feeling anxious about having missed out on much of her young life. While her friends were out drinking at bars and meeting guys, she was home with a newborn. The feeling that something has been missed out on brings sadness and conflict. Or if you’re stuck in a job that you hate, but feel you need to be there because of your financial responsibilities, you are in conflict. If you’re in your last year of high school and you want to drive an eighteen-wheeler for a living but your parents are both college professors and you know they will be devastated if you don’t go to college, you’re tormented inside.

Now, depending on your conscious and personal feelings of commitment to the things that are causing the conflict, you may be haunted each day, because these things represent the missing pieces of the perfect person you feel you will never become, or don’t want to become.

Most religions have some things in common when it comes to the notion of achieving perfection, taking the wrong path, and being punished for it. The Bible, for one, teaches us that we were born from original sin—the Adam and Eve story, of course. What the hell was that all about? I’ve often asked, because following a philosophy that teaches us that we are essentially bad has always made me wonder—even as an observant Catholic (who has learned many things from Buddhism)—Where can you go from there?

As with the biblical commandments, the strict Buddhist law is impossible to follow exactly in everyday life, so over the centuries Buddhists developed a road map. These are a set of principles, or other rules, called the Ten Perfections, like having courage, pursuing truth, having a sense of duty and serenity, and being a giving person—all of which were designed to help them be happier, in spite of the impossibility of reaching perfection in their lives.

It is ironic that the very set of guidelines intended to help Buddhist monks get through their lives without being frustrated by the need to be perfect is called the Perfections. Unlike the monks, we don’t have our own Perfections; we simply strive to be perfect in our world, and because of this, we sometimes feel as if we’re looking at a series of mountains we have to climb in order to get to the top of our form—to be the best at our jobs, the smartest, the richest, or the wisest people around.

But what Shaolin teaches, and what has evaded most of us, is that the mountain—whatever it means to you or me on any given day (a fight with your spouse, having to discipline your kids, losing money, feeling too tired to work out, writing a book, dealing with old demons)—is simply what you make it. In our haste to live our lives and get ahead, or be perfect, we miss the point