Qigong, Calligraphy, and the Tao Te Ching
My well thumbed copy of Embrace Tiger, Return to Mountain.
Yesterday I picked up a book by one of my most influential teachers, Chungliang Al Huang: Embrace Tiger, Return to Mountain. I was curious to read his take on the Tao Te Ching, Taoism’s mysterious, paradoxical, and seminal poem.
Al Huang first learned the Tao Te Ching as a child in China, chanting the verses to memorize them, but having no idea what they meant. As he grew older some of the verses began to make sense. He would copy them in Chinese calligraphy, gaining fresh insight into each verse as he studied the pictographs and ideograms he was creating with his brush. For example, the character drawn in the middle of the pictograph for “tao” depicts a symbol for “center” or “self”. Under it is a swirling line which could be interpreted as “path”, or “water” or maybe even “boat”. Now a man in his 90’s, as his life continues to change and flow like the water, I’m sure he’s still discovering new perspectives in each pithy little verse.
As Al Huang teaches, it is most fruitful to approach the Tao Te Ching in a spirit of openness, curiosity, and creativity. It holds enough interpretive wiggle room that we are invited to dive deep into our own centers, to discover what its lessons have to tell us about the present moment we are experiencing. In his words, “The Tao Te Ching is a very beautiful learning and meditation book. It is like a Zen koan: either you dismiss it as nonsense, or you have to really dig in to understand it. It immediately takes you out of that intellectual confinement of getting stuck with ideas, with what you think you know. Much of it seems like nonsense if you translate it literally; but if you allow openness for all possibilities of each character, deeper meanings emerge.”
There are wonderful, rich lessons here for how we practice, Qigong, too: each movement entails connecting to our center, while acknowledging the flowing, ever changing moment we call “now”. My teaching attempts to guide you to feel this; it’s a never-ending process of discovery, just like interpreting the Tao Te Ching. I’ll pull it all together---poetry, movement, Taoism-- in Moving Through the Tao Te Ching: Poetry, Garden, and Body as One at Innisfree Gardens later this month. I think it’s going to be amazing, reading and cultivating qi in those beautiful gardens. I hope you can join us!