Songshan is the central peak, and it carries Buddhist, Taoist and Confucian institutions within a few kilometres of each other. It is the standing refutation of the idea that the Five Great Mountains are a Taoist set.
Three establishments
- Shaolin Monastery: Chan Buddhist, founded in 495, and the most famous martial institution in the world.
- Zhongyue Temple, a large Taoist complex, going back in some form to the fifth century, and one of the oldest Taoist sites in China.
- Songyang Academy, one of the four great Confucian academies of the Song, where Neo-Confucian philosophers taught.
Three traditions, three functioning institutions, one mountain. No sequence, no displacement, no syncretic merger, simply coexistence, sustained for well over a thousand years.
Being the centre
In a directional scheme, the centre is where the other four are reconciled. That gave Songshan a particular role in imperial cosmology and a particular attractiveness to institutions wanting to claim centrality for themselves.
Its position also had a practical cause: it sits near Luoyang and Zhengzhou, in the heartland of early Chinese states, so it was close to power in a way the peripheral peaks were not.
Shaolin and what is actually documented
Shaolin's martial reputation is old but not as old as usually claimed.
Bodhidharma is traditionally said to have come to Shaolin and originated both Chan and its martial practice. The Chan lineage claim is traditional; the martial claim is later still, and the association of Bodhidharma with the fighting arts appears to be a seventeenth-century attribution.
What is documented is that Shaolin monks fought, a stele records thirteen monks assisting the future Tang emperor Taizong in 621, and that the monastery maintained an armed force over long periods, which was not unusual for a large landholding institution.
The monastery has been burned and rebuilt repeatedly, most recently in 1928.
The observatory
The eight sites inscribed by UNESCO in 2010, under the title Historic Monuments of Dengfeng in the Centre of Heaven and Earth, include the Gaocheng Astronomical Observatory, a thirteenth-century gnomon and measuring platform built under Guo Shoujing.
Its inclusion makes the point the title is reaching for. This was a place for measuring the sky as well as for sacrificing to it, and in the Chinese scheme those were not separate activities: determining the calendar correctly was a religious and political obligation of the state.
Also on the mountain: the Songyue Pagoda of 523, the oldest surviving brick pagoda in China.