China's ancient Shaolin temple seeks Zen master of new media

China's most famous Buddhist business venture - the ancient Shaolin temple, spiritual home of kung fu - has been swamped with applicants who want to help it use social media to build its brand at home and abroad.

The 1,500-year-old temple, the cradle of Zen Buddhism, advertised for a media director and chief editor to help spread the word about kung fu culture, according to state news agency Xinhua.

State media said on Friday that there had been more than 300 applicants, including some from Xinhua itself and from the state broadcaster China Central Television, as well as businessmen and recent graduates of top universities.

The job will include building a social media platform for the temple and propagating its message on WeChat, the Chinese instant messaging platform.

Non-monks, non-vegetarians and even non-Buddhists are all eligible for the posts, temple staff told local media. The job ad was posted on Yuji, an account on the Twitter-like Chinese microblog Weibo, and aimed at journalists in the central province of Henan, where Shaolin is located. Applicants may even be female - though the temple's monks may not.

Those who can speak and write English well and are fluent in the arts of new media will have a jump on the job, according to Xinhua. The agency quoted a monk who works at the temple's Intangible Assets Management Centre as saying the temple needs to improve interaction with its domestic and foreign fans, including many who are not Buddhist. "The need [for the new jobs] arises from the internationalisation of Shaolin," he was quoted as saying.

The move is the latest attempt by Shaolin's controversial abbot, Shi Yongxin - known in China as the "CEO monk" - to build the temple's international brand of spirituality.

Buddhism is the biggest religion in China with as many as 300m believers across the country. In recent surveys as many as a third of China's richest people have identified themselves as Buddhist.

Branding experts say the Shaolin temple brand may be one of the most famous to have come out of China in any industry, partly due to the efforts of Abbot Shi. According to Xinhua, the temple was the first religious institution in China to go digital, building its first website in 1996.

The temple's business ventures include investments in its globetrotting kung fu performance troupes, and renting out the Shaolin name for films, cartoons and stage productions.

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