The Fourfold Assembly

In Buddhism, the term “Fourfold Assembly” refers to the complete community of the Buddha’s followers. It is called the Fourfold Assembly because it consists of four groups: monks, nuns, laymen, and laywomen.
In traditional terminology, these are the bhikkhus, bhikkhunīs, upāsakas, and upāsikās.

A bhikkhu is a male monastic who has left worldly life in order to dedicate himself entirely to discipline, meditation, and the pursuit of liberation. A bhikkhunī is a female monastic who follows the same path of renunciation and practice. The existence of the bhikkhunī order itself was revolutionary in ancient India, because the Buddha openly acknowledged that women were equally capable of attaining awakening.

The upāsakas and upāsikās are lay followers who remain within ordinary society while sincerely practicing the Dharma. They may have families, occupations, and responsibilities, yet they still cultivate ethical conduct, awareness, wisdom, and compassion in daily life. Buddhism never regarded lay practitioners as spiritually inferior merely because they did not renounce society outwardly.

This is an extremely important point.

The Buddha did not define a true disciple by appearance, clothing, social status, or institutional position. Wearing robes does not automatically mean freedom from greed, anger, or delusion. Likewise, remaining in ordinary life does not prevent someone from deeply realizing truth.

Again and again, Buddhist teachings emphasize that awakening depends on direct understanding, not external identity.

The Buddhist scriptures themselves demonstrate this clearly. Some of the Buddha’s most profound disciples were monastics, while others were lay practitioners. In the Vimalakīrti Sūtra, the layman Vimalakīrti is portrayed as possessing such deep insight that even advanced disciples and bodhisattvas struggle to match his understanding. The symbolism is unmistakable, truth is not confined to monasteries, titles, or religious appearances.

Zen Buddhism especially preserved this spirit. Enlightening insight may appear through an anonymous woodcutter, an old woman selling tea, a merchant in the marketplace, or a wandering monk. In Zen, genuine realization is often shown to arise precisely where people least expect it. What matters is not the outer form, but whether attachment, ego, and illusion are truly being seen through.

Over time, however, religious institutions naturally became more formalized. Structure and organization can preserve teachings, but they can also create confusion between form and essence. People begin mistaking robes for wisdom, titles for realization, and reputation for truth. Yet the foundation of Buddhism was never meant to rest upon external authority alone.

The Buddha repeatedly directed people back toward direct seeing. He encouraged individuals not merely to believe, imitate, or worship externally, but to examine suffering, attachment, and the nature of the self within their own experience.

For this reason, a genuine disciple of the Buddha can exist anywhere within the Fourfold Assembly.

A true Buddhist may be a monk, a nun, a layman, or a laywoman. The determining factor is not social role, but sincerity of practice and depth of understanding.

From the Buddhist perspective, the essential question is ultimately very simple.

Is the person truly moving beyond greed, hatred, delusion, and attachment, or merely wearing the appearance of spirituality?

Buddhism in context of the Shaolin Tradition

After the mid 1990s, as the Shaolin Monastery became increasingly commercialized, significant internal changes gradually emerged within its monastic culture and structure. Although many individuals formally underwent tonsure and outwardly entered the monastic order, it became increasingly common for some to live in ways that differed substantially from traditional Buddhist renunciation.

Inside the broader Shaolin environment, it was often tacitly accepted for monks to wear ordinary clothing outside the temple, operate martial arts schools, engage extensively in secular society, and maintain long term external lifestyles. In some cases, when reaching marriageable age, individuals reportedly entered relationships, married privately, and formed families while still maintaining an outward association with Shaolin monastic identity. In practice, this created a situation that resembled something closer to a lay Buddhist existence than a fully renunciant monastic life.

At the same time, as Shaolin culture expanded internationally, many representatives sent abroad were not necessarily trained primarily as traditional Buddhist practitioners, but rather as highly skilled martial arts students selected from Shaolin affiliated schools. Because of their martial arts ability, appearance, discipline, and familiarity with Shaolin culture, some naturally came to function publicly as “Shaolin monks” overseas, even when their actual lifestyle and relationship to monastic discipline differed from the classical Buddhist ideal.

This phenomenon became especially visible in Europe. For example, among individuals associated with Shaolin communities in countries such as Germany, it is increasingly difficult to find representatives who have remained fully committed to lifelong celibate monasticism in the traditional sense. Many eventually entered ordinary family life while still carrying a Shaolin identity publicly.

From a strictly traditional Buddhist perspective, this raises serious questions regarding the distinction between external appearance and authentic renunciation. In Buddhism, shaving one’s head alone does not constitute true monasticism. The essence of monastic life has historically rested upon renunciation, celibacy, discipline, and detachment from worldly identity and possession. Once those foundations weaken, the form may remain externally recognizable while the substance gradually changes into something fundamentally different.

For this reason, many critics argue that parts of modern Shaolin culture have evolved into a hybrid structure combining performance, commerce, martial branding, and selective religious symbolism, rather than preserving the full depth and rigor of classical Chan Buddhist monastic practice.

For this reason, lay practitioners such as myself are supporting and helping to rebuild a new foundation for modern Shaolin. Not by merely preserving its outer image, but by restoring its original essence and direction.

Chan Wu Gui Yi” (禪武歸一)

The true spirit of Shaolin was never meant to be reduced to performance, branding, commercialized martial arts, or religious appearance alone. At its root, Shaolin emerged from Chan Buddhism, where martial discipline and meditative awareness were originally meant to converge into one path. This is the deeper meaning behind the phrase “Chan Wu Gui Yi” (禪武歸一) — the unity of Zen and martial practice.

Originally, martial arts within Shaolin were not simply methods of fighting or physical achievement. They were intended to become instruments for disciplining the ego, refining awareness, strengthening inner stability, and ultimately transcending attachment to victory, fear, and self identity. Once this inner core is lost, martial arts easily become mere performance, competition, commerce, or personal ambition.

Because of this, a new form of Shaolin may no longer emerge primarily through institutional authority alone, but through individuals who sincerely embody the original spirit beneath the outer form. Even if they live outwardly as lay practitioners rather than traditional monastics, they may still preserve the deeper essence of Chan more authentically than those who maintain only the appearance of monasticism.

Historically, Zen itself has often been revitalized not through rigid institutions, but through individuals who returned directly to essence over form. What is needed now may be the emergence of a new lay centered Zen spirit — not a rejection of tradition, but a restoration of its living core.

In that sense, the task is not simply to protect the name of Shaolin, but to re-establish its original axis:

Not martial arts for fame,
Not religion for authority,
but the unification of awareness, discipline, direct realization, and everyday life.

Only then can “Chan Wu Gui Yi” cease being a slogan and once again become an authentic path.

This is also said to reflect the intention of my Seu Seung Nim as well — that Shaolin should not merely survive as an external institution, but return to its original living essence.

The deeper wish was not simply to preserve robes, rituals, or the image of tradition, but to restore the authentic spirit behind them. In this view, “Chan Wu Gui Yi” was never meant to describe martial skill alone, but the reunification of Zen awareness and human life itself.

If martial arts lose awareness, they become violence, performance, or ego.

If Buddhism loses direct realization, it becomes ritual, hierarchy, and empty symbolism.

Therefore, the real task is neither blind preservation nor rebellion against tradition, but recovering the original center from which both Zen and martial discipline once arose.

From this perspective, conscious lay practitioners who sincerely embody discipline, humility, awareness, and inner transformation may become essential bridges for the future of Shaolin. Not because they perfectly imitate the past, but because they attempt to revive the original spirit beneath the collapsing form.

In that sense, the emergence of a new lay centered Shaolin Temple Europe is not necessarily a betrayal of Shaolin tradition. It may instead become one of the few remaining ways for its deeper essence to survive into the modern world.

Beneath monk and layman,
beneath success and failure,
beneath Shaolin, Zen, title, history, and role, there remains only the undivided source.

“One” does not mean individuality elevated into ego.
Nor does it mean becoming some special spiritual figure.
It points instead to what remains when fragmentation disappears.

The ancient Zen question was always directed toward this:

What are you before the name?
Before the robe?
Before the story of yourself?

In that sense, “One” is not something acquired. It is something remembered.

Not received from another,
but uncovered beneath everything artificial.

What Zen calls the “original face” was never hidden somewhere far away.
It was only obscured by layers of identification, imitation, ambition, fear, and attachment.

So after wandering through forms, doctrines, institutions, conflict, and identity, one eventually returns to the simplest point:

not two,
not divided,
not separate.

One.