Our rather pedestrian take on life's issues in the Saipan Tribune are occasionally shared with this listserv. Here's the Thursday, July 25 contribution. I've been doing a daily OpEd (five days a week) in June and July, and maybe, August, for those who are curious. The website is www.saipantribune.com/opinion. j'aime la vie Yesterday, appreciate; tomorrow, anticipate; today, participate. In all, Celebrate! -----Original Message----- From: Jaime R Vergara <jrvergarajr2031@aol.com> To: jayvee_vallejera <jayvee_vallejera@saipantribune.com>; mark_rabago <mark_rabago@saipantribune.com>; editor <editor@saipantribune.com> Sent: Fri, Jul 19, 2013 8:27 pm Subject: Thursday July 25 Tao in Wudangshan Our images of tao practitionersare usually those of Bruce Lee, Jackie Chan, and Jet Li flexing muscles andagility to kung fu, or, the ivoryheads and mellow hearts of Big Sur’s Esalen in appropriating the gifts of qigong and t’ai chi ch’uan in the 60s. For some 70s TV watchers, we recall DavidCarradine as the wily Taoist monk Kwai Chang Caine righting the world’s wrongin the wild, wild west. All that tradition comes into prominence as a discipline and art inthe Wudang mountains astride Shiyan prefecture, flourished and intensified duringthe Ming dynasty when China turned inward; the martial arts of Kung Fu and Wushunow popularly practiced as sport’s competition even as the Qigong graces homeparlors and the Taijiquan is performed en masse along Shanghai’s Bund andChicago’s northshore. Let us get metaphorical for a moment and take the code words YHWHfrom the Levant and the tao of Wudang,noting that what they mean, The Way LifeIs, lets us realize what a human folly it is to wage war against one anotherover the variance of religious practices. Let us do the YHWH code word first. The German translation made it into our familiar “Jehovah”, which becamepersonalized in the atomic science of Europe before the advent of quantumphysics, thus, a substantive person. Fling it back to the witness of the Greeks’“Iesu Kristo”, and the iconic “Caesar” of the Romans, and one gets the makingsof the Holy Roman Empire – Christo Rei, King and Pope, representing thetranscendent will of the World Beyond. The Tao means “way”,“path”, “route”, before it is a doctrine or a principle. As a verb, it means, to “speak” – the truth,the real, and the authentic. It is notfaith in the belief sense, rather, it is focused on practice in effortlessaction, not the anxious moral virtue we find in the ethics of law and order, ofwhat be ought and should! The social form of the YHWH tradition became “civilization”, theEmpire and the maintenance of social order through individual integrity, atfirst, of the ruler, and now, the citizen; that of Tao emerged as dynastic social practice of mianzi (face) and guanzi (connection),the assurance of social welfare, the empowerment of family existence, and thereality of social authenticity. Historically, human right in the YHWH tradition devolved intoindividual duties and obligations; in the Tao,human right evolved into social stability and social responsibility. Neither tradition is exclusive of theother. The variance is on emphasis. One is promised a land of plenty elsewhere intime, from genesis to apocalypse, in Canaan or in Heaven; the other is thecommand not to do unto others what one would not want others do unto them, inspace, organized, socially stratified, and circulated in the here-and-now. In the scriptures of the Christian YHWH, the believer becomes adisciple of Jesus who self-confidently claims: “I am the way, the truth, andthe life, no one comes to the Father (read, YHWH) except through me,” askingfollowers to do likewise. Believersbecome the revealers of truth, the vessels of the real, and the demonstrationof what is authentic. The universal “theway life is” is the logos incarnatein every birth. Nothing earthshaking here, except the grievous mistake of turning thelogos into a book (biblos = books), or “doing likewise”into light-upon-the-hill exceptionalism and manifest destiny. The universal incarnate is everyone’sprerogative. Even the Rotary Club’sfour-way test says as much, and they are definitely ahead of the AnglicanChurch in getting female leadership in their ranks. The tao is profoundly seenin the symbol of the taiji and likethe logos in the Johannine sense, itis very active (imagine it not as a one-dimentional yin-yang, but as a continually swirling orb and it will look different). In fact, the tao that can be named is not thetao! Followers of tao focus on the action, the practice that is in tune with the waylife is, which is always experienced as seeking the balance between humanityand nature. Maintaining unity and harmonyin the midst of diversity is the swirl of the yin-yang; creating and innovating from the tranquil center is theart and discipline of the motion meditations of kung fu and qigong. Balancing the interior with the exterior, theindividual and the social, is the tao, theway life is! The tao leads to a life ofvirtue, the cultivation of the qi, thelife force, consonant to the way life is. Nothing particularly novel here, save the calcification of ancient ritesand rituals, and stratified society of ingrained patriarchy. The maintenance of social order and harmonyis everyone’s responsibility. Even membersof China’s Communist Party aspire to do so! So, what has this got to do with the woods of Wudang, let alone, theseashells of Saipan? It is the image of “the way life is” that comes careening at ourface, from the Levant to the Wudang foothills of the Sword River. The religious traditions of both YHWH and tao have been shaped by the requirementsof time and space. Today, we no longerseek the Will of God in time, or the Mandate of Heaven in space, to enlightenthe choices we make of our lives. Wehave become secular, this worldly whether we say so or not, with only one questionto ask, in Wudang or in Jerusalem: Is this the way life is? Our answers are formulated through our lives. Funny that the tao in Wudangshan looks exactly like the YHWH of the Levant. Let us solemnly stand before The Way Life Is! j'aime la vie Yesterday, appreciate; tomorrow, anticipate; today, participate. In all, Celebrate!