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

From the Identity, Gender, and Self Cultivation Forum

Master of Ceremony: Hirsh Diamant

Master Chungliang Al Huang spoke to us yesterday about the essence of the world as our family. That we need to cultivate an awareness, compassion and understanding of the whole world as one family, not divided into countries, cultures and individualities of different people but embrace it all as one.

Master Chungliang Al Huang is an accomplished Tai Ji Master, author, calligrapher and philosopher. It is very special that he could come and be with us and share the depth of his knowledge. He is like a door that opens us to this big ancient wisdom of China and the East.

Master Chungliang Al Huang

Welcome everyone; it’s an honor to be back for the fourth year to celebrate this time with you. I feel very honored to be on this panel with my esteemed colleagues. I am looking forward to hearing them and to share our different world prospective through different traditions.

I have a very mixed background. I was born Chinese and I grew up in China but I came here as a teenager to go to college in America. I lived in America 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 from my culture that I was hardly using it. In a way my journey goes back and revolve back and now my work and through my small foundation is on the East West culture synthesis and I am interested in comparative philosophy, comparative religion in many disciplines. I feel I am a world citizen. I’m interested in all concepts and to become a family.

In my work I use my Chinese discipline, the calligraphy. As a Chinese I grew up as a child and as soon as we could hold a brush we practiced calligraphy. It’s a wonderful discipline, I am so grateful I had it. Now in my teaching I always use it to help you 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, which is probably different from most Western people. We are much more of a literal thinking style. As you enter into the Chinese language suddenly you enter into a different consciousness. I hope you will be enticed to join me on that.

In a way of the Tai Ji sense before we do anything we open our arms and create a sense of unlimited energy level. As you open the circle you are beyond your finger tips. It this amount of electorates of a wonderful environment we are going to discuss and share some of our interests. We are here to open up possibilities, open our mind, open our heart, to open our awareness. This open circle, a very simple symbolism is the reason in our Chinese ancient learning we practice the 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. The size of a circle you can measure it and you suddenly realize 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 extending you into a much bigger space.

I will go backwards a little bit; I want to first immediately do a beautiful Chinese symbol for you. He made the Chinese original symbol for Tao pronounced Dao. When I look at the title “Identity”, that would be the best symbol from my prospective? That symbol is Tao. For those of you that do not recognize it or it still looks Chinese to you, let me help you to enter. Then Master Chungliang Al Huang displayed the Tao symbol in his Tai Ji form. 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, there’s so many ways about Tao. If you look at symbols it’s very simple. It’s truly about how the individual can funnel in the spiritual dimension from above. You bring the power into yourself. You embody the power. When you move with it, you flow with it. The best metaphor for Dao is the water. Water flows. Many years ago my mentor, friend, colleague Alan Watts and a wonderful philosopher and interpreter of Zen Buddhism, we had a collaboration. 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 the Chinese painting with the tiny little boat that flow in the water, they flow with nature.

When I try to interpret identity I look at Tao. Right in the middle of the symbol is the mu, the center, almost like a target center. It’s the eye of your consciousness. You are the chief of your own consciousness. The Chinese symbols are a composite of many minis. If you want to interpret it in an identity way, to follow your Tao, to understand the way of being your life you embody the universal powerful energy from the sky, from your consciousness into yourself. Open your own consciousness, open your eye, open your heart and learn to follow the way of nature.

Master Chungliang Al Huang than drew another symbol. This symbol meant 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 human being. The identity of who you are. I want to talk more about being Chinese, Ukrainian, American or any culture you come from. I’m talking about human beings. No matter what color, religious background, or nationality we all have the same instrument. This is a universal language. It a picture language showing the symbolism showing the identity of a human being from a very small person to be able to open up to relate to the universe to say I am a great human person. Once you put the great human centering in your gut, you become a Tai JI, great human being.

I learned Tai Ji when I was a little boy in China through osmosis during the war in the villages, only later when we moved to the big cities that there were Tai Ji Masters and classes. In the villages, everybody in China realized the best thing you can do in the morning is to get out in the field and tune into the universe and wake up with your whole body. Tai Ji Trong was invented, was created basically from that origin. Later you have stories about temples, lineages, martial arts and all those philosophical things. Basically everybody is a Tai Ji person. Once you open up you become a Tai person, you understand your true identity as a human being. That is your centering. So I thought in my meditation the last couple of days, 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, no matter what color skin you have, no matter what age you are, once you can stand up, stand tall, wide stride with arms open; open your mind, open your heart, open your center, you are a great human being. That’s a great way of thinking about identity. 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.
The Toa we talk about is not the real Tao. Then he continued to write another 5000 words. That’s the human ambivalence also it’s a dichotomy right there. You still have to talk about the inevitable. 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, deeper consciousness between the words as all poetry will give us. Poetic image is very much like the symbol I’m talking about. Your entrance is not it, just like the open circle. You open the door 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 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! In the Taoist sense we want to be the person, you are being a person, you are not identified by your doing. So those of you who have spent to many years becoming your human doings, it’s time for you to being the person you are doing yourself with.
I love to play with language because English language is still my second language therefore I often have little more detachment, I enjoy playing with it and it’s really fun to do that.
Let me enter the next part of the title which is gender. We have this great helmsman for away in China, Mao Ze Dong, he was very smart, he was quite a politician, and he also knew how to get the country when he took over the columnist. He did quite a bit for China for a while. 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. China suddenly doubled productivity, the woman became suddenly liberated because they can do man’s works because China needed all the man power, including woman power. For awhile it really worked well. Mao Ze Dong was very smart and a poet in his youth. He was a wonder combination of military strategy and he study poetry and wrote wonderful calligraphy. He knew some of the essential meaning of the gender wisdom and he homiest that power.
Master Chungliang Al Huang wrote another symbol. He drew the yingyang, a universal symbol. In the Western society we usually see ying and yang. We see everything listed as yang event or everything listed as 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, the feminine in the person is 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 ancient learning is androgynous.
In Asian cultures we tend to push the 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.
The third part is self-cultivation. Master Chungliang Al Huang then drew another symbol that meant the sagely person or cultivated, wise person. This person knows how to listen with the ear, speak with the words or how to 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. The also know how to connect the main spiritual intellectual dimension, humanity, earthly into a centering experience.
The next symbol he drew was virtue or power. It means feeling heart, thinking mind and centering consciousness all the same. This is the connection of the horizontal and vertical consciousness that opens with one consciousness; one heart, 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, emotional worldly ideas with the spiritual intellectual ideas. He has a clear vision…one focus; heart – mind consciousness. This is a virtuous, powerful human being.
I have spoke about the identity idea of a great human that follows your tao. What is a cultivated, sagely person? And, the yingyang symbol about the whole person regardless of your gender. Gender is such an issue now in the world and we need to go back deeper into the essential idea that creates human beings, not the separation between male and female gender identities which are still so prevalent in many world cultures. We are still fighting to deal with that.