Dept. 7 Adv. Class Update: Hollowpoint Monk

Blame the Boxer Rebellion.

The rebels were strong and furious young China men, righteous and assured of the correctness of their cause, who had dedicated their lives to the study of martial arts. Their bodies were as hard as jade, and as supple as a bamboo reed; their fists were in harmony with their goals.

On the other side of the battlefield: scared, bigoted white men with guns.

The white men won the war.

Easily.

It was a lesson repeated when the well armed Chinese army rolled into Tibet and ended the world. At Hiroshima and Nagasaki, another lesson, delivered by the white man’s weapons. The lesson hammered home again in Vietnam: the Viet Cong fought the white men to a standstill, purely through skill and savagery, but at the cost of a country scorched to bare earth, and a generation mutilated.

The lesson was as simple as it was brutal: purity of spirit, enlightenment, mastery of the mind and body meant less than nothing against 60 rounds a minute on full auto fire.

Over the decades, in hidden monasteries and back alley dojos, in terrorist training camps and military police academies across the East, a radically new martial arts style took shape. The new style crossed barriers of country, race and technique. The asterism of Tibetan monks was combined with the feats of iron will practiced by Pakistani yogis, blended in a stew of Japanese weapon-styles, Chinese hand to hand and firearms training similar to that used by Western SWAT experts.

When John Woo and the Wachowski brothers started making movies about samurai gunslingers, graceful and lethal with twin SMGs, that influence went in the pot, too.

The Hollowpoint Monk style is as fast moving and deadly as a bullet, and like a round striking a target, the swiftly changing style is constantly deformed and ricocheted by its practice.

The mockingly named “Hollowpoint Monk” is a modern martial artist who draws equally from the old and the new: Zen koans first uttered by the Buddha, meditations handed down from one seeker to another for centuries, Mossad combat shooting techniques, action movie cool and quotes are all equally valuable sources of inspiration for these unconventional, adaptable martial artists.

A Hollowpoint Monk is not a recognized martial artist; they are official members of no dojo, usually forbidden from fighting on any recognized circuit. Few seek the spiritual side of the martial arts, and most learn just enough to be deadly. Hollowpoint Monks are practical and lethal, and most have been fighters their entire lives. Most of these new-school warriors are gangsters, cops and former soldiers. Prospective Hollowpoint Monks have lived with violence their entire lives, and have learned a secret technique that only improves their ability to survive. Some are traditional monks who abandoned the traditional path for a chance to extend their lethal capabilities beyond the reach of their arms. Others are killers and sociopaths, made even deadlier by a sprinkling of theology and discipline.

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