Silk Roads: China, The Middle East, and The New World

From the Identity, Gender, and Self Cultivation Forum

Master Chungliang Al Huang
transcribed by Corine Martin

I was born and grew up in China. I came to America as a teenager to go to college and I have lived and taught here for more than half a century. I became an architect, a teacher and a Tai Ji dancer. When I was a professor in college, I realized what an important cultural heritage I had inherited from my family, but I was hardly using it. When I was given the opportunity, beginning in the early 1960s, I began exploring the ways, and I have been offering my bi-cultural, East/West synthesis learning ever since.

Now in my teaching I use Chinese discipline of the art of brush calligraphy and explore its symbolism and deep wisdom. As a child, as soon as we could hold a brush, we practiced calligraphy, I was fortunate to have sustained my discipline without interruption. In my work, I always use it to help people to enter into a different kind of perception--a visual and kinetic language that is holistic and involves multi-dimensional levels of consciousness.

When I think about “Identity”, the word Dao is the best symbol to describe it. Many of you know, if you study Daoism or Chinese philosophy, you define Dao as a way of nature, as a path in your life; It is the way of being, your personal journey. How does one bring this spiritual dimension into one’s journey in life? When one moves with Dao, one flows with it.

The best metaphor for Dao is the water. Water flows. The last stroke in the character Dao means flow, means moving, naturally. When you look at this, it looks like a small boat flowing in the current in a Chinese landscape painting. These tiny little boats flow with nature, the “Watercourse Way”.

And right in the middle of the character Dao is a part that is almost like the eye of your consciousness. If you want to interpret it in an identity way, to follow your Dao is to understand the way of being in your life. You embody the universal, spiritual energy from “nature” into your personal deep consciousness, into yourself. Open your own “eye”, heart and mind in true harmony; learn to follow with the way of nature.

The word Da in Chinese means a Great Person. When you think of identity, a person’s identity is his/her own mental and physical awareness, with all sensory perceptions alive; your thinking, feeling, sensation, and intuition--all the functions of a fully developed individual. This is a holistic view of a human being. Whether you are born Chinese, American or any other cultural ethnicity, no matter what color, religious background, or nationality, we all have the same instrument, the miraculous Human Body. Da is a picture language showing the identity of a human being to be able to open up and to relate to the universe, a microscopic expression of the macrocosm.

I learned Tai Ji when I was a little boy in China in the villages, through osmosis. Everybody in China realized the best thing you can do in the morning is to get out in the field, tune into the universe and wake up with your whole body. Once you open up, you become a Da person; you understand your true identity as a human being. That is your centering. These are symbols we can relate to from the Daoist point of view. Through the image of Da, understand your greatness as a human being. Regardless what cultural background you come from, the color of your skin, or your age, once you can stand up, stand tall with arms open; open your mind, heart, and center, you are a great human being. Then you follow the Dao of your life, you follow the way through nature. You practice Tai Ji of your personal Tao Living.

The very first line in the Dao De Jing can be translated as:

Even the finest teaching is not the Tao itself.
Even the finest name is insufficient to define it.
Without words, the Tao can be experienced,
and without a name, it can be known.

This first line states that the Dao we talk about is not the real Dao, yet Lao Tzu continued to help us to understand its essence with another 5000 words. Fortunately, it’s all in poetic verses so it leaves room for you to contemplate on your own. It’s a way to enter into something that is almost impossible to be literal about. We must not concretize these symbols, but we can meditate, we can learn to enter into a deeper meaning and consciousness between the words as all poetry can allow us. Poetic image is very much like the symbol Dao. You open the door and you enter into different dimensions, if you are willing and fortunate enough to enter. Hopefully you will not be blocked on the surface. The surface is only the beginning; by opening doors of perception, you get to go deeper, otherwise you become superficial and you become something other than the real human being. Your identity will be lost. You will be identified with your nationality, the color of your skin, with your jobs in life, the “doing” not the “being”. We are not human doings, we are human beings! So those of you who have spent too many years becoming your human “doings,” it’s time for you to start being the person you are.

Let me enter the next part of our theme which is gender. In China, Mao Ze Dong, the first chairman of the People’s Republic, was a very smart politician with a gift of a combination of military strategy, poetry, and calligraphy. One of his early political slogans was: “Women hold up half the sky”. Mao was able to get all the potential force of the women into the work force because China needed all the human power. China suddenly doubled productivity and the women became liberated because they could do man’s works, equally well, even better at times. Mao understood the essential meanings of the gender wisdom.

In the Western society we usually see yin and yang. We see everything listed as yang or yin category: man is yang and woman is yin, sky is yang and earth is yin, black is this and white is that. We have this need for division. The original concept about yin/yang is that there is no such thing as an “and” In between. The symbolic way that the yin/yang symbol curves in the center, which makes this symbol so universally powerful, is that it is moving and it is integrating constantly. The masculine and the feminine in the person are always intertwining to become whole. To be a feminist or a macho man is his and her personal limitation. It’s not acknowledging the wisdom of the identity of a whole human person. The true gender blend into a Tai Ji Yin/Yang whole in the ancient learning, is androgynous. The whole person is fully YinYang integrated, as in Tai Ji, often translated as the integration-centering of the polar opposites, “The Ultimate Reality”. In Asian cultures we tend to focus on the more feminine part of the balance to help the obvious macho influence from Western cultures so often tend to emphasize the Yang power. It’s not only intellectually, but also spiritually, that the Asian cultures tend to be much better integrated with the yin/yang Tai Ji whole.

The symbol for the word sheng represents a person that knows how to listen with the ear and speak with the words on how to be open. The bottom of the symbol means King or Emperor. When a person can connect the higher spiritual energy, with humanity, and earthly grounding with the centering connection, then this person deserves to be a Kingly person, the true leader. If you have all these qualities, you are a cultivated, sagely person. Confucius and Lao Tzu are known to be cultivated, sagely persons. Such a person knows how to listen, how to learn from listening, how to express with clarity, and how to receive and how to give. Such a person also knows how to connect the spiritual/ intellectual dimension, with humanity, and earthly consciousness into a centering experience.

The symbol for the word yi means that the feeling heart, thinking mind and centering consciousness, are all connected. An awareness of both the horizontal and vertical dimensions that open in the Self, with one heart, one mind, one body. If a person can meditate, or exercise with this concept, this is a person who knows how to cultivate himself. This person knows how to balance his physical and emotional worldly ideas with the spiritual/intellectual dimensions of the Self. He has a clear vision, one Wholeness. This is a virtuous, powerful human being.