The Dancing Wu Li Masters Read Online Free Page B

that these were the people who read dictionaries. Nonetheless, my bad pronunciation never prevented me from being understood. That is because inflections do not change the denotation of an English word. “No” spoken with a rising inflection (“No?”), with a downward inflection (“No!”), and with no inflection (“No…”) all mean (according to the dictionary) “a denial, a refusal, negative.”
    This is not so in Chinese. Most Chinese syllables can be pronounced several different ways. Each different pronunciation is a different word which is written differently and which has a meaning of its own. Therefore, the same syllable, pronounced with different inflections, which unaccustomed western listeners scarcely can distinguish, constitutes distinctly separate words, each with its own ideogram and meaning, to a Chinese listener. In English, which is an atonal language, these different ideograms are all written and pronounced the same way.
    For example, there are over eighty different “Wu”s in Chinese, all of which are spelled and pronounced the same way in English. Al Huang has taken five of these “Wu”s, each of which, when combined with “Li,” produces a different “Wu Li,” each with the same English spelling, and each pronounced (in English) “Woo Lee.”
    The first Wu Li means “Patterns of Organic Energy.” This is the Chinese way of saying “physics.” (Wu means “matter” or “energy”).
    The second Wu Li means “My Way.” (Wu means “mine” or “self.”)
    The third Wu Li means “Nonsense.” (Wu means “void” or “nonbeing.”)
    The fourth Wu Li means “I Clutch My Ideas.” (Wu means “to make a fist” or “clutch with a closed hand.”)
    The fifth Wu Li means “Enlightenment.” (Wu means “enlightenment” or “my heart/my mind.”)
    If we were to stand behind a master weaver as he begins to work his loom, we would see, at first, not cloth, but a multitude of brightly colored threads from which he picks and chooses with his expert eye, and feeds into the moving shuttle. As we continue to watch, the threads blend one into the other, a fabric appears, and on the fabric, behold! A pattern emerges.
    In a similar manner, Al Huang has created a beautiful tapestry from his own epistemological loom:
     
    PHYSICS = WU LI
    Wu Li = Patterns of Organic Energy
    Wu Li = My Way
    Wu Li = Nonsense
    Wu Li = I Clutch My Ideas
    Wu Li = Enlightenment
     
    Each of the physicists at the conference, to a person, reported a resonance with this rich metaphor. Here, at last, was the vehicle through which we could present the seminal elements of advanced physics. By the end of the week, everyone at Esalen was talking about Wu Li.
     
    At the same time that this was happening, I was trying to find out what a “Master” is. The dictionary was no help. All of its definitions involved an element of control. This did not fit easily into our image of the Dancing Wu Li Masters. Since Al Huang is a T’ai Chi Master, I asked him.
    “That is the word that other people use to describe me,” he said. To Al Huang, Al Huang was just Al Huang.
    Later in the week, I asked him the same question again, hoping to get a more tangible answer.
    “A Master is someone who started before you did,” was what I got that time.
    My western education left me unable to accept a nondefinition for my definition of a “Master,” so I began to read Huang’s book, Embrace Tiger, Return to Mountain . There, in the foreword by Alan Watts, in a paragraph describing Al Huang, I found what I sought. Said Alan Watts of Al Huang:
    He begins from the center and not from the fringe. He imparts an understanding of the basic principles of the art before going on to the meticulous details, and he refuses to break down the t’ai chi movements into a one-two-three drill so as to make the student into a robot. The traditional way…is to teach by rote, and to give the impression that long periods of boredom are the most essential