Long Yinying, the Shadow Dragon, was an orphan girl who appeared on the steps of the Southern Shaolin temple in the early years of the Tang Dynasty (around 700 AD).

This is the story of how she became the high elder of the temple from her twentieth year until her death.

No woman had ever lived and trained in the temple before, but the elders would not turn away the tiny, thin girl with her torn and dirt-smeared dress, bruised limbs, and bloodied lip. From where she came, no one knew. She came only with a name, Li Yin, and an age, 6. She wrote both down after the monks had fed and washed her and tended her wounds.

No more would she write — and nothing would she say for her first 14 years at the temple. Every night, she slept by the giant hearth in the main hall, on a soft blanket of goat skin said to have been brought to the temple by Bodhidharma himself. Every day, she practiced the Chan and Quan of Shaolin alongside first the boys and young men her age. Whenever she was free, she could be found not playing or talking among her cohort but staring into the hearth, telling it all her stories in silence.

14 years after Li Yin arrived, raiders who hated the Shaolin for their beliefs and wanted the temple riches for themselves attacked. They surrounded the temple in the middle of the night, rousing the monks with screams of anger and thirst for blood. Fierce duels broke out throughout the temple and its grounds; many bodies and swords collided, slicing and bruising skin. The raiders outnumbered the monks, but the monks were stronger. The raiders eventually realized that the temple’s destruction was a necessary consequence if they wanted to bring death — and death was what they most wanted. Torches were lit and placed against the wooden frame.

As the temple began to blaze from the ground upward, the monks stopped their combat to water the flames from the sacred pool in the middle of the great hall; their lives meant nothing compared to the survival of the temple and its teachings, inscribed on its walls and preserved in its scrolls. The raiders filled the vacuum left as the monks abandoned the fighting and rushed in to slaughter the monks as they tried to save their temple.

All this while, Li Yin had fought bravely alongside her male companions; her thigh had been sliced with a deep sword cut and her forearm burned where her sword hand had fallen into the fire. Unable to walk, she dragged herself towards the sacred pool, brushstrokes of her blood painting the stone floor.

It was as she reached the pool that the hearth spoke to her, though its own blazing fire was nothing but stiff smoke tendrils and glowing embers. Her voice hoarse after 14 years of silence, Li Yin whispered back, and the fire told her what she needed to say. Blood as well as words poured from her lip as she whispered commands.

The fire in the hearth suddenly blazed, and cries echoed throughout the temple: the tongues of fires devouring the temple walls had leapt into the hearth. Those raiders who did not flee in terror at seeing the fire vanish were soon killed. Only after the surviving monks had driven the last raider out did they notice Li Yin. She had lost not just blood as she fought but life force as she wove the words of power; she was too weak even to lift her head when they found her.

To save her required a painstaking and painful ritual from the oldest days: a ritual forged in fire and paid for with blood, whose name had long been lost. Slowly, the elders carved the story of how Li Yin commanded the fire into her back. Then, whispering the words painted on the fire-damaged scrolls, they warmed the bleeding cuts. The scars slowly bubbled upwards and sank downwards to form the characters that began: “This is the story of Long Yinying, the Shadow Dragon.”

*

When Long Yinying awoke after the ordeal, the elders knew she would live. With her first words to her fellow humans, she asked the elders to read her the story they had written.

They read the words above.

Story originally posted on June 1, 2016.

Browse by Tag: