With Due Diligence

Post Date:December 04, 2009

In a recent interview, Master Ma Hailong, a Wu Style Grandmaster, remarked that he

“liked the jazz music [of] the 1930s and 1940s.  Their singing was very emotional and expressive.  Beautiful.  It is a little bit difficult for Chinese to sing jazz at that level.  So the main factor is the difference in culture.  This culture difference can make Tai Chi Chuan difficult to practice.”

Culture certainly informs the products of a culture.  Jazz evolves out of the African-American experience and history, and being an outsider may limit the possibilities of rendering that experience in music.  Artists such as Wynton Marsalis have made very similar claims about the authenticity of Jazz music.  Similarly, not being from a Chinese culture, according to such logic, would impede mastery of Chinese Internal Arts.

Since I have spent many many years dedicated to the Internal Arts, Ch’an (Zen) meditation, and Buddhist and Taoist philosophy and culture, Master Ma Hailong’s comment has puzzled me a bit, and I have spent the last few weeks ruminating up both his comment and my responses that Tai Chi Chuan is “difficult”—but not impossible—to master.

The great Taoist text Wen-Tzu offers a pointer:

“Rank, power, and wealth are things people crave, but when compared to the body, they are insignificant.  Therefore sages eat enough to fill emptiness and maintain energy, and dress sufficiently to cover their bodies and keep out the cold.  They adjust to their real conditions and refuse the rest, not craving gain and not accumulating much.”

People throughout nearly all cultures and history have been desperate for rank, power, and wealth, which runs counter to the goals of the sages to hone in upon the essential, which the Wen-Tzu makes clear is not rank, power, and wealth.  (It should not be overlooked that Wen-Tzu is chastising the people of its era—medieval China.)

In general, modern Americans, like most human beings, do not engage the “real” conditions and this is the source of the difficulty mastering an Internal Art such as Tai Chi.  Contemporary culture is predicated upon desire and attachments—rank, power, wealth—which we think constitute who we are.  Furthermore, we are often challenged by consumer culture to generate wants where such wants did even exist. 

This attachment to something more, something else, something beyond the “real” poses a large obstacle to address the essential of existence.  We are always on the prowl for the “latest” thing, which seems to place us in the process of always “becoming” a person defined by what object we think speaks the self.

Things do not bring us any closer to our authentic selves or our world.  Matter of fact, this process is one of infinite regress—since it moves us farther from ourselves and the real since we place energy upon the exterior instead of allowing the gaze to reflect upon the interior self.

To practice Internal Arts requires a heightened internal awareness.  It is the recognition that what we are now is all that we need and all of the materials of the “real” are always present.    To practice in this way is to recognize that we constantly negotiate the process of constructing an illusion of the self, and our recognition of this process is the first mark of our penetration to what lies beyond the illusion.  What matters is the experience—not the idea—of awareness.

We have tools to help us on our journey—books, teachings, and teachers—but those tools are useless unless we wield them with proper intent.   Perhaps Master Hailong’s critique has to do with the inadequacy of those tools in American culture, although, it is quite clearly not the tools that are the problems but the inability of people to use them. What makes the Internal Arts difficult is not the lack of tools but the lack of diligence and discipline to do the work.  

To continue on this journey, we need to keep working.  Not resting.  Not giving up.  After all, Master Ma Hailong did not say learning T’ai Chi is impossible—just difficult.  Let’s rise to that trial—which is nothing more than the challenge of living a life of value.

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