Heroic monks and villainous pirates: an inquiry into monastic Buddhist warfare in sixteenth-century China

ABSTRACT This article explores the involvement of Shaolin monks in military campaigns against the so-called ‘Japanese Pirates’ (wokou) in 1550s Jiangsu and Zhejiang provinces. While previous scholarship has only touched briefly on the course and scope of the campaigns, this contribution analyzes the military training, fighting tactics, and actual warfare of Shaolin (and other) monks in the course of these conflicts. Drawing on late Ming historical evidences from chronicles, pen notes, local gazetteers, and previously untouched material, I demonstrate that the monastics in question possessed both outstanding individual fighting skills and above-average military knowledge. Employing strategic formations, battle tactics, and professional modes of warfare, the ‘monk soldiers’ (sengbing) were able to immortalize themselves as brave and righteous patriots. The article thus digs deeper into the entanglements of military and religious circles in late imperial China, a topic that needs to be explored in future scholarship. Ending with a brief excursion to sixteenth-century Korea, the article concludes that comparative research yields important insights of how to better understand Buddhist involvement in military actions in premodern East Asia.