Monk History

Origins
"As Moses and the Jews stopped at Mount Sinai, and Moses spoke with the Lord up on the mountain, one of the things the Lord told Moses was to make for the Jewish people servants."

"And he made emet. Golems. The first monks. To survive in the desert, he made them hard and hardy. His golems were long-lived, needed little food and water, withstood the harsh environment of the desert more easily, and withstood disease and injury. They were used as... beasts of burdens of a sort by the Jews in the desert. Not slaves, not idiot beasts, but as servants able to withstand what they could withstand. These monks are called Moshil. They are not outwardly remarkable, but they are amazingly sturdy workers with great endurance and health."

"Things continued similarly for many years, long after the Jews returned to Israel. The next step in monk history came during the time of Judges. I don't know how familiar you are with the Book of Judges, but at that time the Jews had no king. They had.. community leaders known as judges, or in the Hebrew, shoftim. They heard disputes and gave advice and generally guided their communities. There were many at a time, and the best known judges from the Bible were just that - the wisest and best known. One among many. And it was during this time that the Lord revealed to the powerful druids among them the secrets of creating life as he had given to Moses. But they were different people with different needs for their community and different magic. Rather than the hardy servants of Moses, the judges created golems to help guide the mental, emotional, and spiritual well-being of the people. Min Shoftim monks are blessed with great intuition, emotional empathy, wisdom, faith, and intelligence. When you hear about genius monks in the fields of science or great leaders leading crowds of followers, they are min Shoftim."

"The third and last set of monks came during the time of King David. He was our warrior king, yes? His duty was to reclaim the holy lands in the name of the Lord. But- ah, there is no need to go into that. Not relevant to this discussion. Anyhow, David was the last great druid given the secret of life by the Lord. And he gifted the Jewish people with... the Midavid. The warriors. The superhuman. The ones people think of when they think monk." "Yes. David was a... phenomenally powerful druid, unbelievably so. The Midavid had elements of both the Moshil and the min Shoftim, but more than anything they were the warriors meant to strike fear into the enemies of God and His Chosen People."

"However... it worked too well. When they Assyrians invaded, they had with them an equally powerful druid, one known as Accalu the Devourer. 'And he was as a blight upon the earth. Where Accalu walked, the crops withered, the beasts of the field sickened, and the birds of the sky cried out and fell to the earth.' He... pulled in life from the environment around him, even killing diseases and pests, to fuel his magics. And he invented the Ruach'Alukah, the Spirit Leech. They were parasitic things that latched onto monks at the slightest provocation, the slightest touch, and dug in. They devoured and locked away our magic, our abilities. We were useless, even dying, and the Assyrians conquered Israel. The elite among the Jews were exiled to Babylon, and we were thrown into the desert of present-day Iraq. It was a truly cruel punishment. We were built to serve the Jewish people, and without them, our life had no meaning. Many wandered, aimless and lost, suffering and dying in the grip of the Ruach'Alukah."

"Some of the monks wandered to the east, to the mountains of the Iran/Iraq border. Now... one thing you need to know about monks, which people so rarely know, is that mountains are sacred to us. We were first conceived on Mount Sinai, and mountain tops were often where judges created us. The mountains are in our bones, and they give us strength. Just as they did then. In the mountains, they felt the strength flow into them, and in time... they grew strong enough to throw off their parasites. By then, however, they'd lost all bearings, and had no hope of regaining Israel. They were completely, utterly exiled. The continued to wander to the east, and found India."

"They found themselves in a vastly strange land filled with vastly strange people and clothes and customs and tongues. It was a very long time before they dared approach civilization, approach a druid. But shortly after they did, they became a part of the community. Now, you may be expecting that they settled down, began to make a home for themselves. After all, some of them had found spouses, started families, they worked jobs and served the community..."

"No. They knew that this was not home, and while these were good people and some druids, and they were happy to serve, they were not their people. They wanted to go back over the mountains. If east was not the way, west must be. But then the leaders among them, the min Shoftim... No monk has ever spoken with the Lord or his angels, but sometimes the min Shoftim have nevertheless become... vessels. Compasses. And they felt the Lord pointing them further into the east. So they knew they must leave."

"And they spread across the world?" "Not quite. They spread across northern India, into the Himalayas. Nepal was... a renaissance for the monks. All along there'd been a cultural struggle among the monks. Those that wanted to keep to the old traditions and the word of God and the Jewish faith struggled constantly with those who wished to assimilate. They'd spent generations in India! Half of them were as much Indian as Middle Eastern. They spoke Hindi and Urdu, they grew up with tales of Hinduism and the gods and... every bit of Indian culture. Why cling to a past they'd never recover? Conservatism versus progress. But with the power of the Himalayas flowing into them, they found their identity. They found their past and embraced their present. They took the first cultural shift, merging their Jewish faith with the wisdom and philosophy of Hinduism without worshiping the gods. Some viewed them as akin to the Lord's angels, under him but still powerful and divine, but God was first, always. In the mountains, they soothed their troubled community and cemented their identity, spending several generations melding and smithing their own unique culture." "That was those wishing progress? Or was that a middle ground that was found?" "The middle ground. The mountains seemed to awaken something in the spirits of the monks on both sides. The traditionalists just seemed to suddenly realize the value and wisdom of the culture they'd grown up among, and the progressives felt a... reconnection to their past and the old ways. With all sides realizing the value of both cultures, they spent the next several generations in a sort of trial and error to find their identity straddling the two cultures." "They were happy to stay in the mountains at first, but then the fourth generation again felt the pull, this time to the north and northeast. And they realized that if their culture had enriched so greatly from the influence of India, and they had found such great wisdom there, what might they find with yet another culture? And so they wandered into China. And they learned from their time in India. Thus began a pattern of several generations among the people, wandering as nomads, then retreating into the mountains for several generations. Thus we... studied, tried, tested, and selected the best of the cultures and philosophies and beliefs we found, slowly and carefully molding our culture in the wisest way we could."

"That's... it's a wonderful way to build your culture." "Yes, our past masters thought so too. The level of control we showed has been studied, vaunted, and debunked by countless sociologists over the years. It's surprisingly controversial," he laughs. "We have also been an integral part of Chinese history. For example, we were there when Qin Shi Huang first began his attempt to unify all of China. We acted as his army, understanding the great ambition to make a single country, strong and proud. We then struggled to temper his excesses and counsel wisdom, to protest and also quietly rebel, trying to preserve the books he would burn, protect the history scholars he would silence..." He laughs. "And of course monks and the history of martial arts are as warp and woof on a loom."

"After centuries in China, the monk people split into three groups. Some stayed in China, some went north to Russia, but the bulk of the monk people crossed the sea to Nihon. Japan. There we continued to grow as we always had, taking the gems and discarding the dross and always, always remembering the word of God."

"Because of that, actually, we have always been distrusted and reviled and outcast. Never fully a part of any culture we're among, espousing different ideals and sometimes radically different values, and of course never afraid to speak up in defense of what we believe to be right - you know how popular that is," he mutters. "And to top it all off, back in the times when religion could be everything, we always followed a foreign religion and a foreign God with strange prayers... Jews are persecuted enough in lands that still follow our holy book as half of their own! Imagine how it was for them in the far east."

"The next great change came at the beginning of the Meiji Era, when Japan started to meet with the outside world. Now, you know that magic is partly genetic and partly... random, yes?"

"Anthropological studies discovered a few decades ago that this was not always the case with monks. In the beginning, monks were purely genetic. We were created around 1350 BC, and yet anthropologists have found no sign of random monks until a thousand years later. In fact, not until monks had gone to India and joined the people there. While in Israel, we bred only with ourselves. We did not even breed with the other Jews. It was not until India that a monk married and built a family with a non-monk. It is believed that this opened the gates of magic for random monks to be born."

"Now, even though they were not the golems created by druids for the Jews, the purpose of the monks was hard-coded into their magic. It was a fail-safe created by each of the druid makers. Even the Moshil could be somewhat dangerous without a conscience to control them. Each and every randomly born monk felt the deeply instilled need to serve, to protect, to look out for the community. They became soldiers, police, priests, scholars, doctors, teachers... You can imagine. Now, the monks in Russia had discovered their fellow monks to some small degree, as well as some of the scattered Jewish people, and re-assimilated with their people. But the real change came, as I said, in the 1800's when the Chinese and Japanese monks became exposed to the rest of the world. They discovered the monks scattered all over the world, and they decided to spread out. For the first fifty years or so they sought to discover the culture of their estranged cousins. They imparted some of their hard-earned wisdom, taught of their history, but made no move to impose their culture upon these new monks. And after they'd learned about the world and their many new family members, back to the mountains, so to speak," he smiles.

"Some of them returned home and went back to the mountains, and there they shared all they had learned with those who'd remained home. They poured over these many cultures and values and, goodness, Christianity! That was entirely new to them! They spent a great deal of time discussing the word of Jesus. After all, he so well matched their values. But as the Jewish people did not believe him to be the son of God, they felt they could not switch to Christianity. So they decided to treat Jesus as the Muslims did. He was a prophet, and a great one, and most certainly divine, but not God. Once they had reshaped their culture one last time, they went forth, all over the world, and strove to make the monks a single people once more."

Civil History
Do you know much about the Border Crossers?" "We "invaded" America and performed an early version of sit-ins in front of interment camps. We took no illegal action except for entering the country, we made no move to threaten the camps... But it's very frightening to see a line of monks encircling your interment camp, just sitting. A number of Border Crossers were shot, some lethally