Tomasz Gudzowaty at the Shaolin Temple

Tomasz Gudzowaty (born 1971) is a Polish photographer whose interests include out-of-the-mainstream sports, things like Mexican wrestling and small arena car racing. His most popular pictures seem to be these images of monks at the Shaolin Temple in China. Shaolin monks study martial arts-like exercises to prepare themselves for a rigorous approach to Buddhist meditation practiced in the high mountains. Well, that's the theory, anyway; quite likely many of these monks were drawn to the temple for its folkloric reputation of creating invincible warriors. That myth is old and popular in China, and the actual story of the monastery is so overgrown with fantastic elements as to be all but unrecoverable. But there certainly are Shaolin monks, and they believe that their practice is an ancient one.