Shaolin Temple abbot clueless about Wu Tang Clan

Perhaps the biggest promoters of China's Shaolin Temple in the U.S. — hip-hop luminaries Wu Tang Clan — are baffling to the temple's current abbot.

"I don't get it," said abbot Shi Yongxin, asked to sample Wu Tang through the headphones of the Financial Times' Beijing bureau chief. The journalist elicited the abbot's reaction for a profile on the temple and its rampant pop culture appeal.

If you don't get it either, here's a primer.

Wu Tang is a hip-hop group that came out of New York's Staten Island in the early 1990s. Without Wu Tang, millions of Americans would have never heard the word "Shaolin." As the Financial Times notes, Shaolin "has become part of modern global culture like almost nothing else from modern Chinese society."

The temple first snuck into popular culture via old Kung Fu flicks as its monks have trained in martial arts for centuries.

From these grainy, 1970s films, the myth of Shaolin snuck into American hip-hop via the Wu Tang Clan. Their lyrics are marked by impenetrable slang, drug-dealing street tales and ideology from an all-black Islamic sect called the Five Percent Nation. All of this is filtered through their obsession with Kung Fu flicks and littered with references to Shaolin.

It's hardly surprising that Shi Yongxin, a 46-year-old abbot who has lived at a temple since his teens, doesn't "get it."

But the Wu-Tang Clan, having released multiple platinum-selling albums, are largely responsible for American awareness of Shaolin. Or at least a mythologized, distorted version of Shaolin filtered through Hong Kong cinema.

Perhaps the abbot has more in common with his hip-hop progeny than it appears.

Since Shi Yongxin started commercializing the temple through performance troupes, and licensing its name out to cartoons and movies, he has faced repeated accusations that cash rules everything around him.