Preface: Music as art.

A while back, I built a vinyl hunting guidebook for fun to help make my trips to the vinyl shops more intentional and interesting. Upon all the lists of valuable vinyls, I saw this one called Once Upon the Time in Shaolin that sits on top as the most valuable record ever made, estimated to be 4 millions and more. I had no idea what the record was about, little did I know about the Wu Tang, vaguely knew their music as it's usually not my comfort zone, until I watched this movie. It's going to be on Netflix, but watching it in a theater was such a fun experience. I have to say, I'm a fan of the idea. Why can't a record be treated as the Mona Lisa? Why can't we make music less accessible as how accessible it is today might be taking the value away from the music as a background instead of a piece of art you empty your calendar to see? Since it is art?

The Disciple: A Wu-Tang Fable is marketed as a film about scarcity. Joanna Natasegara’s documentary, which premiered at Sundance on January 22, 2026 and arrives on Netflix on October 16, tells the story of Once Upon a Time in Shaolin, the Wu-Tang Clan album that exists as a single physical copy. In an age when streaming has made music free and disposable, a single-copy album is a protest, an argument that recorded music can still be art in the way a painting is art. The film tells that story, but it keeps returning to something else. RZA is called “master.” A Shaolin monk in Manhattan says that the members of the Wu-Tang Clan, though never ordained, are monks in their own way, spreading love and wisdom. Beneath the story of the album runs an older one about how a teaching passes from master to disciple, and how often that passage happens through leaving.

Shaolin Temple, on Mount Song in Henan, was founded in AD 495 and is traditionally called the birthplace of Chan Buddhism and Chinese kung fu. Wudang, rendered “Wu-Tang” in older romanization, is a range of mountains in Hubei associated with Daoism and the internal martial arts, including tai chi. The legend that connects them is about a student who walks away. In one account, which Shi Yanming told RZA in a recorded conversation, the Daoist Zhang Sanfeng trained at Shaolin for ten years during the Yuan dynasty before the abbot and monks sent him off, and he went to Wudang to found a school of his own. Historians treat Zhang Sanfeng’s biography as largely legendary, and the Shaolin episode has no support in contemporary records. As structure, though, it establishes something: the founding myth of Wu-Tang is a disciple leaving his master’s house.

Centuries later the story reached New York by an unlikely route. The Wu-Tang Clan learned about China from cinema, and from a particular kind of cinema. Shaolin and Wu Tang, a Hong Kong film directed by and starring Gordon Liu, depicts a rivalry between the two schools; sources date it to 1981 or 1983. It reached American audiences through the grindhouse circuit, the cheap urban theaters that ran exploitation and martial-arts films back to back, many of them concentrated on Manhattan’s 42nd Street. The films were dubbed into English, often badly, and that dubbed English is what RZA and Ol’ Dirty Bastard absorbed. When the group formed on Staten Island in 1992, they took their name from the film. Their 1993 debut, Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers), combined the titles of Enter the Dragon, The 36th Chamber of Shaolin, and Shaolin and Wu Tang, sampled the last film’s English-dubbed dialogue, and ended on one of its lines: “It’s a secret, never teach the Wu Tang.” They renamed Staten Island “Shaolin.” In The Wu-Tang Manual, RZA explained the scheme in two halves. Shaolin was the mind, Wu-Tang the body. The members were Wu-Tang, and Shaolin was where they came from.

It had passed through Hong Kong studios, American distributors, and voice actors before it reached Park Hill, the Staten Island housing projects where several members grew up during the crack years. The group built a cosmology out of translated material and made it their own. Then they met a man who came from the place itself.

In 1992 Shaolin Temple sent its first touring troupe of warrior monks to the United States. One of them, Shi Yanming, a 34th-generation Shaolin monk who had entered the temple as a small child, slipped out of the troupe’s hotel at night at the tour’s final stop in San Francisco and did not return. Newspapers reported a missing Shaolin monk. He went underground for about a week, lived in Buddhist temples upstate and in Chinatown, and in December 1994 founded the USA Shaolin Temple in New York. Asked later why he left, he told the New York Times he had “American dreams.” He did not leave a pure institution. By his own account, Shaolin had begun to change in the early 1980s, when the young wushu champion Jet Li arrived to film Shaolin Temple. The temple had opened to tourists in 1978, and the 1982 film set off a national kung fu craze that turned the monastery into a destination and eventually, under the abbot Shi Yongxin, into a global commercial brand. The Shaolin that cinema had sold to Staten Island was by then being reshaped by cinema in Henan.

Shi Yanming also left the rules behind. When he left, he said, the temple held its monks to 250 of them. In New York he did not keep the vow of celibacy; in 2006 the Times reported that he had two children with his partner, Sophia Chang, who managed the temple. So when Shi Yanming says the Wu-Tang Clan are monks without ordination, he is describing himself as well. He is a monk who walked out of his monastery and kept the title, and he extends the same standing to his students.

Wu-Tang members met Shi Yanming in 1995, and the attraction ran in both directions. The group had spent years sampling films about Shaolin monks, and here was one who had trained in the actual temple. RZA began studying with him and has called him “master” ever since. Shi Yanming, in turn, learned his American English partly from Wu-Tang. He has credited the group with teaching him words like “represent” and “respect,” and his speech came to carry the cadence of Chinatown and hip-hop together. In 1999, seven years after his defection, he returned to China for the International Shaolin Festival at the head of a large delegation, with RZA beside him. They visited Shaolin Temple and then traveled on to Wudang. The man from Staten Island’s “Shaolin” stood in Henan’s. The same year, Jim Jarmusch gave Shi Yanming a small part in Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai, for which RZA wrote the score. The film’s fable framing tends to smooth this exchange over, but it is worth stating plainly. Wu-Tang did not receive Chinese tradition itself. They received a dubbed, commercial version of it, built a mythology on top, and then found a teacher who was himself an exile from the institution that tradition claimed as its source. Each side authenticated the other.

Cilvaringz enters the story inside this lineage. Born Tarik Azzougarh, he is Dutch-Moroccan and was a teenage Wu-Tang fan in the 1990s. According to the film’s account, he moved to the United States and was picked at random from a crowd to join the group on stage at a show in Amsterdam. Given a chance to rhyme alongside RZA, he kept coming back. He signed to RZA’s label, Razor Sharp Records, opened for Wu-Tang on tour, and produced tracks for them. [Insert the stage scene or a defining early moment as the film shows it.] He is an outsider several times over: European, North African, Muslim, a fan rather than a founder, from outside New York. In the lineage the film constructs, that is his qualification, not his obstacle. Shi Yanming left China. RZA turned a housing project into a temple. A disciple’s standing comes from the teacher’s recognition, not from where he was born.

The album was Cilvaringz’s idea: make a Wu-Tang record, produce a single copy, and sell it as a work of art. The film follows roughly six years of recording. Accounts of where it was made conflict; the film places the sessions across Europe, while other reports describe recording on Staten Island with Cilvaringz producing in Morocco. The result was 31 tracks running about 128 minutes, with contributions from Wu-Tang members and unexpected guests including Cher. In 2014 it was pressed onto two CDs, sealed in a hand-carved nickel-silver box, and stored in a vault in Morocco.

In 2015 the album sold at auction for a reported $2 million to Martin Shkreli, the pharmaceutical executive who had become notorious for raising the price of Daraprim, a drug used by AIDS patients, by roughly 5,000 percent. In 2017 he was convicted of securities fraud and ordered to forfeit $7.4 million in assets, the album among them. In 2021 the Department of Justice sold it to PleasrDAO, a collective that pools money and makes decisions through cryptocurrency tokens and buys digital and cultural artifacts. The price is usually reported as $4 million. In later court filings PleasrDAO said it acquired the physical album and its digital rights in two transactions, in 2021 and 2024, for a combined $4.75 million, and it turned the ownership deed into an NFT shared among its 74 members. RZA has since said that selling to Shkreli was a mistake. Under the original terms, the owner cannot commercially exploit the album until 2103 but may play it at listening events. In May 2024 PleasrDAO held a listening session on the Staten Island Ferry, and in June it loaned the album to the Museum of Old and New Art in Hobart, Tasmania, which played a 30-minute mix twice a day for ten days. Before that, the only known public playback had been a 13-minute excerpt at MoMA PS1 in 2015.

As a single copy, the album moved more freely through markets than any streamed album could: auction, criminal forfeiture, government sale, crypto collective, museum loan. What its owners bought was not a record they could sell but exclusivity. A federal court later accepted that logic, describing the album’s value as the owner’s ability to use its exclusivity to create an experience competitors cannot. That value is fragile. In June 2024 PleasrDAO sued Shkreli, alleging that he had kept digital copies in violation of his agreement and shared them widely with his social media followers. The complaint argued that any dissemination to the public would greatly diminish or destroy the album’s value. The court issued a temporary restraining order requiring him to turn over all copies, without finding the allegations true. In February 2026 Shkreli countersued and named RZA, claiming that PleasrDAO had paid RZA and Cilvaringz $750,000 for a stake in the copyrights, which he called a duplicate sale. These remain unresolved allegations. They show that “one copy” is both the album’s entire commercial value and a legal construction that a single duplicate could undo. What scarcity resisted was not the market but the public. Nearly everyone who cares about this music has never heard it.

As music, the album is almost impossible to assess. There are no full reviews and no way to compare it with the group’s other records. As a concept, its purpose is clear. Cilvaringz has said the single-copy idea was meant to provoke a debate about how music is perceived as an art form, and about how digitization was smothering both its monetary and its experiential value. By that standard it succeeded; the album has been discussed for a decade. But the debate has been sustained by commercial spectacle: a record auction price, a notorious buyer, a government seizure, a crypto collective, and litigation. A work conceived as a critique of music’s commodification became the most thoroughly commodified object in recorded music, and the most basic value music has, being heard, is the one its concept excludes.

“It’s a secret, never teach the Wu Tang.” The album works the way a lineage does. It passes through a small number of hands, it is guarded, and access to it is a form of standing. That reading does not make the Shkreli sale less embarrassing, but it explains why the people inside the story do not treat it as a failure of the concept. The documentary is itself inside the lineage it describes. RZA is an executive producer, and Natasegara has said her interest began with a teenage love of Wu-Tang. Visually, the film borrows heavily from kung fu cinema, which means it tells Wu-Tang’s story in the same borrowed visual language Wu-Tang once used to tell its own. The subtitle calls the film a fable, and that is accurate. A fable is told by people who believe the lesson.

Shaolin Temple has since lost the abbot who turned it into a brand. In July 2025 the Buddhist Association of China revoked Shi Yongxin’s ordination, and in November local prosecutors approved his arrest on suspicion of embezzlement, misappropriation of funds, and bribery. Shi Yanming, who left the temple and its 250 rules more than three decades ago, still holds the title of abbot at the USA Shaolin Temple in New York. The only copy of Once Upon a Time in Shaolin remains under contract until 2103. 🌁