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

From the Identity, Gender, and Self Cultivation Forum

Master Chungliang Al Huang

I was born and grew up in China. I came here as a teenager to go to college in America and I have lived here for more than half a century. I travel all over the world. Only later in my discipline, I came here to study architecture. I became an architect, a theater person, and a dancer. When I was a professor in college, I went back to China again to realize what an important cultural heritage that I had inherited from my family but I was hardly using it. I am interested in comparative philosophy and religion in many disciplines.

In my work I use my Chinese discipline of calligraphy. As a child, as soon as we could hold a brush, we practiced calligraphy. Now in my teaching, I always use it to help people to enter into a different kind of an entry into a visual language which is very much holistic and also involves different levels of consciousness.

In a way of the Tai Ji sense, before we do anything, we open our arms and create a sense of unlimited energy level. We are here to open up possibilities, open our mind, heart, and awareness. When drawing a circle, we want to be sure the second half of the circle does not close. We start the beginning with perfection and the second half we release it. It’s a very simple philosophy; if you close the circle you confine it. A flip chart is to small for your energy. But if you keep the circle open it’s like you open up beyond your finger tips, everything is bigger than your limitations. So when I do a symbol it is not confined to the flip chart but it extends into a much bigger space.

(Master Huang drew the Chinese original symbol for Tao, pronounced Dao.)

When I think about “Identity”, the Tao is the best symbol from my prospective. Many of you know, if you study Taoism or Chinese philosophy, you define Tao as a way of nature, it’s a path of your life, it’s the way of your journey. It’s truly about how the individual can funnel in the spiritual dimension from above. You bring the power into yourself. When you move with it, you flow with it. The best metaphor for Tao is the water. Water flows. Many years ago my mentor, friend, and colleague, Alan Watts, a wonderful philosopher and interpreter of Zen Buddhism, and I collaborated on a book. We worked many years together before he passed away. I had the honor to finish the last book with him and we had the title Tao, The Water Course Way. It came out of mediation on the symbol. The last stroke means flow, means moving. When you think about this, it’s like a Chinese boat in a Chinese landscape painting. It’s tiny little boats that flow in the water, they flow with nature.

Right in the middle of the symbol is almost like the eye of your consciousness. If you want to interpret it in an identity way, to follow your Tao is to understand the way of being in your life. You embody the universal powerful energy from the sky, from your consciousness into yourself. Open your own consciousness, eye, and heart and learn to follow the way of nature.

(Master Huang drew the Chinese original symbol for greatness called Da.)

Da means great Person. Zao means little person. When you think of identity, a person’s identity is your own consciousness with all sensory perception; your thinking, feeling, sensation, and intuition. All these are a holistic view of a human being. I want to talk more about being Chinese, Ukrainian, American or any culture you come from. No matter what color, religious background, or nationality, we all have the same instrument. Da is a picture language showing the identity of a human being from a very small person, to be able to open up and to relate to the universe. Once you put the great human centering in your gut, you become a Tai Ji, a great human being.

I learned Tai Ji when I was a little boy in China through osmosis during the war in the villages. 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 Tai person; you understand your true identity as a human being. That is your centering. The best two symbols we can relate to from the Taoist point of view would be first how to find a human person, understand your greatness as a human being no matter what cultural back ground 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 Tao of your life, you follow the way through nature.

The very first line in the Tao Te Ching written by Lao Tzu is:

1. THE EMBODIMENT OF TAO
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 Tao we talk about is not the real Tao, yet Lao Tzu continued to write another 5000 words. Fortunately, it’s all in poetic verses so it leaves room for you to contemplate. It’s a way to enter into something almost impossible to be literal but you can meditate, you can learn to enter into a deeper meaning and consciousness between the words as all poetry will give us. Poetic image is very much like the symbol Tao. You open the door and you enter into different dimensions as you are willing to enter. You do not get stuck on the surface. The surface is only the beginning, you got to go deeper, otherwise you become superficial and you become something other than the real human being. Your identity will be lost. You become identical with your nationality, the color of your skin, with your major in life, with whatever you do. We are not human doings, we are human beings! So those of you who have spent to many years becoming your human doings, it’s time for you to start being the person you are doing yourself with.
Let me enter the next part of the title which is gender. We have this great helmsman in China, Mao Ze Dong. He was very smart politician with a wonderful combination of military strategy, poetry, and calligraphy. One of his big slogans was: “Women hold up half the shy”. What he did was get all the potential force of the women’s energy into the field because China needed all the man power, including woman power. China suddenly doubled productivity and the women became liberated because they could do man’s works. He knew some of the essential meaning of the gender wisdom.
(Master Huang drew the universal symbol for yingyang.)
In the Western society we usually see ying and yang. We see everything listed as yang or ying event. Man is yang and woman is ying. Shy is yang and earth is ying. Black is this and white is that. We have this need for division. The original concept about yingyang is that there is no such thing as an “and” in between. The symbolic way it curves, the beauty of this symbol which is so universally powerful, it’s moving and it’s intergrading constantly. The masculine and the feminine in the person are always intertwining to become whole. To be a feminist or a macho man is your limitation. It’s not acknowledging this wisdom of a total identity of your true gender. The true gender is of ancient learning is androgynous.
In Asian cultures we tend to push more the feminine part of the balance to help the obvious macho image so often the other cultures tend to push. It’s not only intellectually, but spiritually, that we tend to be much better yang divided by ying. The yingyang symbol is the true sense of what I would call not only identity, but the gender game.
(Master Huang then drew another Chinese symbol that meant the sagely person or cultivated, wise person.)
This symbol represents a person that knows how to listen with the ear, speak with the words or how to be open. The bottom of the symbol means King or Emperor. When a person can connect the higher spiritual energy, humanity, and earthly energy with the centering connection, then this person deserves to be a Kingly person. So if you have all these qualities, you are a cultivated, sagely person. Confucius and Lao Tzu are cultivated, sagely persons. That person knows how to listen, how to learn from listening, how to express with clarity, how to receive and how to give. They also know how to connect the main spiritual intellectual dimension, humanity, and earthly into a centering experience.
(Master Huang then drew another Chinese symbol that meant virtue or power.)
The symbol means that the feeling heart, thinking mind and centering consciousness, are all the same. This is the connection of the horizontal and vertical consciousness that opens with one consciousness; one heart and one mind. If a person can meditate or exercise with this concept, this is a person that knows how to cultivate themselves. This person knows how to balance his physical and emotional worldly ideas with the spiritual intellectual ideas, he has a clear vision, one focus; heart and mind consciousness. This is a virtuous, powerful human being.