Shaolin Temple?

I live in Orlando, Florida. With all modesty, I'm aspiring and intelligent, and the mental techniques used by Buddhist monks, such as in the Shaolin Temple, appeal to me more than almost any others. I want to know, if I were to go to the Shaolin Temple, would they let me train with them, in mental, spiritual, and martial arts? My spiritual ideas are Taoist, leaning towards Buddhists, but I don't want to dedicate my entire life to Buddhism, as does a monk. Will they allow me to train there or not? Thanks! I appreciate it.

Shaolin Temple?
I believe it's nearly impossible to train at Shaolin Temple unless you are a Buddhist monk, and it's nearly impossible to become a monk at Shaolin unless you are Chinese.





That said, there are a number of training academies for lay people in the valley below Shaolin. I visited some of these academies in the early 1990s and there were no westerners training there at that time. This may have changed, but if you don't speak Chinese, you may have a hard time finding a school that would accept you.





Wikipedia has an article that might be useful to you (see link below). There is also a training center in Oregon that carries forward the Shaolin tradition (see link below). Good luck!
Reply:well, you'd probably have to wash their clothes, dishes, scrub the walls and build huts before they'd let you train with them and learn their techniques, and you wont like it at all until you find yourself one of the best trained from doing all that work. Then you'd turn out to be one of the best students there, but i doubt you have the discipline to accomplish that.