DRUNK MONK.(The Talk of the Town)(Kung-Fu)

There are only so many birthday-party venues where you wait around for the guest of honor in your socks. One of them is a Buddhist kung-fu temple. One night not long ago, about two hundred people left their shoes outside the door of the U.S.A. Shaolin Temple, on lower Broadway, and shuffled inside to await the arrival of Sifu Shi Yan Ming, a thirty-fourth-generation Shaolin fighting monk, whose forty-first birthday they intended to celebrate by drinking vast quantities of beer--or "special water," as Yan Ming likes to say.

The celebrants spanned an easy range of age, race, profession, and style: deli clerk, baby, Wesley Snipes, sociology professor, Masta Killa. The RZA, of the Wu-Tang Clan, who spent much of his childhood skipping school to watch kung-fu movies in Times Square, was there, wearing a Staten Island baseball jacket and cap. In a room where hair was fairly unpopular, you could spot Jim Jarmusch's tall, fluffy white head.

The students, dozens of whom were planning to stage a performance for their master (or sifu), were wearing orange or navy monk's robes. As they waited, they blithely performed amazing feats.Two women rolled over each other's back; another cartwheeled, no hands; a young man with long dreadlocks doodled in the air with a broadsword; another, head shaved, did a standing flip. The d.j., whose booth was in front of the sword rack, was wearing a yellow T-shirt bearing the temple's slogan in red: "More Chi! Train Harder!"

This is something Yan Ming yells all the time--along with "Merry Christmas!" and "Happy New Year!" In his view, every day is a cause for celebration, and everybody is "handsome." Before he was born, two brothers and one sister died of starvation. When Yan Ming fell extremely ill as a young child, his parents took him to the Shaolin Temple, in Henan Province, the birthplace of Ch'an Buddhism, and left him there, in the hope that Buddha might save his life. Under the monks' tutelage, the boy became a master of Shaolin kung fu. By the time he was seventeen, he had been trained to withstand a full-force strike to the groin. He can lick red-hot iron shovels, break bricks with his skull, fly aboveground upside down in full splits, and sleep standing on one leg. In 1992, in San Francisco, while on the first Shaolin Temple monks' tour of the United States, he defected and made his way to New York.

By 1995, Yan Ming had opened a temple on the Bowery, a cramped space without heat or electricity. That same year, he met Sophia Chang, a Korean-Canadian who was the manager of Ol' Dirty Bastard, a member of the Wu-Tang Clan. (Yan Ming and Chang have ...