Shaolin Kung Fu and its practicing monks are legendary figures that have populated culture
all around the world, from music to film and even comic books.
Their legendary reputation is often preceded by tales of the incredible feats of mental
and physical endurance that these master monks have been doing for centuries.
Yet how much of this is real and how much of it is just legend?
Hello and welcome to another episode of The Infographics Show- today we're going to take
a look at one of these individuals and delve into the incredible world of superpowered
monks as we learn about the unbreakable monk who can't get hurt.
Zhao Rui is a twenty nine year old monk living in China who has become world famous after
Russia Today broadcast video of his incredible feats across the internet.
According to Rui, he ran away from home at the age of sixteen after becoming fascinated
with martial arts.
His goal was to join a Shaolin temple and dedicate his life to mastering his physical
and mental selves.
For two years Rui studied at his temple, being trained in Sanda- or Chinese kickboxing- and
'hard Qigong', or the practice of drawing great physical strength and endurance from
an inner energy known as qi.
After learning all he could from his temple, he left in search of masters who could further
his training, and spent his life moving from temple to temple, honing his mind and body.
According to Rui, he used to be a very self-conscious and nervous kid, and perhaps because of his
shortcomings he dedicated his life to making his mind and body incredibly tough.
Whatever his motivation, it's safe to say that Rui achieved his goal, as today the monk
is capable of incredible feats which would severely injure or even kill normal people.
One such stunt involves Rui laying on four sharpened metal spears, during which he uses
special breathing techniques and deep mental focus to toughen his flesh so that his skin
is able to actually prevent him from being impaled.
But is Rui's skin truly unbreakable?
In the famous bed of nails stunt where individuals lay happily and uninjured across a bed of
nails, the body's weight and the force of gravity pulling on the body are both dispersed
across the heads of hundreds of tiny nails.
While the head of a single nail may not seem like much surface area, add that up across
the hundreds that make up the traditional bed of nails and you come up with a pretty
large amount of surface area for the body's weight and gravity's force to be dispersed
across.
This prevents the nails from piercing the skin as you would normally expect them to.
So does Rui's spear trick do the same thing?
That's likely, given that Rui always provides his own spears, and if you've ever seen the
feat repeated by so-called Shaolin stage shows, you'll notice that the spears are in fact
not sharply tipped at all, but rather blunted.
While being able to lay your full body weight on even a blunted spear is still an impressive
feat, a further investigation into how the feat is done reveals Rui's secret- the spear
points are always placed on his thighs, his abdomen, and his collarbone.
The collarbone is very dense and can easily resist the force of the blunted spear, and
as with the body of any extremely well developed athlete, the abdominal and thigh muscles-
some of the strongest in the body- can be with effort hardened considerably.
The real trick here is the way that Rui is able to ignore what must be considerable pain
and flex his muscles so as to stiffen them for such a long time.
Rui's next trick is the bending of iron rebar using just his throat, which when you see
it admittedly looks like both an incredible feat and something incredibly uncomfortable
to consider doing yourself.
Rebar is after all used to reinforce concrete, so it must be pretty tough stuff.
Well, yes and no.
See rebar works by bundling large groups of rods together, yet the individual rods are
thin enough to be flexible.
This helps a building have just enough flexibility when needed to not shatter, yet the groups
of rods together are able to lend great strength.
It's a bit like taking a single matchstick and crushing it in your fingers, yet when
you take ten of them and try to repeat the feat they are able to share the stress equally
and resist being crushed.
There's also the fact that Rui always bends very long bars, and as most of us know the
longer an object the more prone it is to bending and the easier it is to do so.
If you need even more proof though simply google “normal people bending rebar with
their throats”.
You'll soon see that it's a favorite stunt of self-help and confidence-boosting seminars,
with everyday people like you and me called on stage and told that if they “believe
in themselves” they can bend rebar.
Then the individuals- who typically pay upwards of $1500 per seminar- magically rush towards
each other and bend the iron bar, typically hugging in joy at their newfound super-confidence.
Turns out they could've saved $1500 if they'd just believed in physics.
Then of course there's the infamous electric drill bit, where Rui takes a modern electric
drill, allows an assistant to press it against his head, and then fires it up.
Rui screams, focusing his body's qi at the point the drill is pressed against his skull
in order to resist the drilling.
At least, that's what it looks like he's doing.
A closer inspection however reveals that first of all, the drill is running counter-clockwise,
which is not the direction you would run a drill if you want to actually drill into an
object.
Drill bits have special grooves cut into them that when powered up 'bite' into material,
and as the drill bit spins the grooves mechanically force the drill bit deeper into the material.
When run backwards though, the mechanical action actually forces the drill bit backwards,
as it pushes against the material it is inside of.
By running the drill backwards, the tip of the drill bit is actually trying to push itself
away from Rui's head, not bore inside of it.
Then there's also the fact that nobody has ever been allowed to inspect the drill bit
itself, yet from what can be seen in his video and from other similar videos, the drill bits
seem suspiciously blunted at the tip.
Even running the drill backwards while pushing the drill into the skull would do some serious
damage to the skin and bit of flesh between it and the bone, but a dulled bit would have
no way of 'biting' into the skin, and would simply spin in place doing exactly what we
see as the end result in every one of these videos: reddening the area severely and possibly
drawing a bit of blood.
Lastly, there's the fact that a bystander is never allowed to assist with the drilling,
and instead Rui or any of his copycats always have their own assistant, or do the drilling
themselves.
While drilling themselves it's obviously easy to keep the drill pressed close enough to
look real, without actually putting enough force that the dulled drill bit would actually
do some damage.
In Rui's video though perhaps the most damning bit of evidence against this trick is the
fact that he routinely puts his own hand on the drill, likely to provide enough push back
so that the assistant knows not to push any harder.
Next is another staple of Rui and other alleged Shaolin practitioners pseudo-magic shows.
This is when Rui takes a long metal bar and repeatedly bashes it against his own head
until the bar bends.
This is supposedly showing off Rui's incredible toughness and durability, as surely it's only
his mystical mastery of qi energy that keeps him from concussing himself into unconsciousness.
Well, you've probably guessed it, but we're going to ruin this one for you too.
Careful observation of the bar that is always used in this stunt reveals that it is very
long, and almost always has a weighted tip on one end.
Typically the weighted tip is adorned with metal rings as a sort of rattler, to make
a dramatic sound as Rui smashes the bar into his head.
Yet the weighted tip also adds more weight to one end of the bar than another, which
becomes important as we carefully observe Rui's technique.
As can be easily seen in his videos, Rui smashes the bar into his head repeatedly at the mid
point of the bar, which forces the lower half of the bar to rapidly decelerate.
The upper half however is still moving very quickly, and the stress of sudden deceleration
is channeled to the point of contact between Rui's skull and the bar- the middle.
Think back to the example of squeezing upright matches between your fingers- where do they
break?
The middle, because that is where they are structurally weakest.
The longer an object the weaker it becomes at its midsection, which is why modern ships
are built in sections that are then joined together.
In Rui's case, the weighted tip which dramatically rattles with each impact helps lend more weight
to one end of the bar than another- the end which is still traveling at high speed as
the middle of the bar is suddenly decelerated by Rui's skull.
This adds additional force to the top of the bar, helping it bend.
But wait, because we've saved the best for last- although admittedly that drill to the
head thing was pretty jawdropping, until we debunked it anyways.
In Rui's final example of super-human-dom, he shows off a large knife which he quickly
chops some fruit up with, displaying its sharpness.
Then he loops a bit of metal between the handle and about midway up the large blade, and slides
his head inside the loop that's created.
He places the sharp edge of the blade against his throat, and then has the loop attached
to another rope which is itself tied to a parked van.
The van is put into neutral and Rui incredibly pulls the van along while avoiding slicing
his own jugular open.
Absolutely incredible!
Or at least it would be, if the stunt were real.
You guessed it, it's not.
First, when Rui demonstrates the sharpness of the blade he is always seen using the front
half of the very large knife to slice the fruit or vegetable.
He is always very careful not to show the knife edge-on to the camera, which would give
away the fact that the bottom half of the large blade is actually dulled.
At this point the stunt is no different than his laying on spears, the force on the blunted
edge of the knife is dispersed sufficiently to cause nothing more than a very red mark.
Sadly Zhao Rui is not a master of the mystical energy field that permeates all life known
as qi, and is instead a master of what many modern martial arts practitioners have termed
'Bullshido'.
While Rui is in fact an extremely talented athlete, and does display incredible mental
fortitude to be able to bear large amounts of pain, his feats don't prove that he is
an unbreakable Shaolin monk, but rather that he is a very clever stage magician and that
physics is a thing.
Sadly with everything Shaolin being popularized around the world by mass media, performers
everywhere have popped up putting on very profitable, and very fake, displays of their
superpowers achieved by mastering ancient techniques.
Of course the actual Shaolin temple in China has not been of any help in reclaiming China's
real cultural treasures, as they have been too busy happily licensing their name on everything
from instant-noodles to cigarettes.