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
j'aime la vie
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 practitioners
are usually those of Bruce Lee, Jackie Chan, and Jet Li flexing muscles and
agility to kung fu, or, the ivory
heads 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 David
Carradine as the wily Taoist monk Kwai Chang Caine righting the world’s wrong
in the wild, wild west.
All that tradition comes into prominence as a discipline and art in
the Wudang mountains astride Shiyan prefecture, flourished and intensified during
the Ming dynasty when China turned inward; the martial arts of Kung Fu and Wushu
now popularly practiced as sport’s competition even as the Qigong graces home
parlors and the Taijiquan is performed en masse along Shanghai’s Bund and
Chicago’s northshore.
Let us get metaphorical for a moment and take the code words YHWH
from the Levant and the tao of Wudang,
noting that what they mean, The Way Life
Is, lets us realize what a human folly it is to wage war against one another
over the variance of religious practices.
Let us do the YHWH code word first.
The German translation made it into our familiar “Jehovah”, which became
personalized in the atomic science of Europe before the advent of quantum
physics, 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 makings
of the Holy Roman Empire – Christo Rei, King and Pope, representing the
transcendent 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 not
faith in the belief sense, rather, it is focused on practice in effortless
action, not the anxious moral virtue we find in the ethics of law and order, of
what be ought and should!
The social form of the YHWH tradition became “civilization”, the
Empire and the maintenance of social order through individual integrity, at
first, 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 the
reality of social authenticity.
Historically, human right in the YHWH tradition devolved into
individual duties and obligations; in the Tao,
human right evolved into social stability and social responsibility. Neither tradition is exclusive of the
other. The variance is on emphasis. One is promised a land of plenty elsewhere in
time, from genesis to apocalypse, in Canaan or in Heaven; the other is the
command not to do unto others what one would not want others do unto them, in
space, organized, socially stratified, and circulated in the here-and-now.
In the scriptures of the Christian YHWH, the believer becomes a
disciple of Jesus who self-confidently claims: “I am the way, the truth, and
the life, no one comes to the Father (read, YHWH) except through me,” asking
followers to do likewise. Believers
become the revealers of truth, the vessels of the real, and the demonstration
of what is authentic. The universal “the
way life is” is the logos incarnate
in every birth.
Nothing earthshaking here, except the grievous mistake of turning the
logos into a book (biblos = books), or “doing likewise”
into light-upon-the-hill exceptionalism and manifest destiny. The universal incarnate is everyone’s
prerogative. Even the Rotary Club’s
four-way test says as much, and they are definitely ahead of the Anglican
Church in getting female leadership in their ranks.
The tao is profoundly seen
in the symbol of the taiji and like
the logos in the Johannine sense, it
is 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 the
tao! Followers of tao focus on the action, the practice that is in tune with the way
life is, which is always experienced as seeking the balance between humanity
and nature. Maintaining unity and harmony
in the midst of diversity is the swirl of the yin-yang; creating and innovating from the tranquil center is the
art and discipline of the motion meditations of kung fu and qigong. Balancing the interior with the exterior, the
individual and the social, is the tao, the
way life is!
The tao leads to a life of
virtue, the cultivation of the qi, the
life force, consonant to the way life is.
Nothing particularly novel here, save the calcification of ancient rites
and rituals, and stratified society of ingrained patriarchy. The maintenance of social order and harmony
is everyone’s responsibility. Even members
of China’s Communist Party aspire to do so!
So, what has this got to do with the woods of Wudang, let alone, the
seashells of Saipan?
It is the image of “the way life is” that comes careening at our
face, from the Levant to the Wudang foothills of the Sword River. The religious traditions of both YHWH and tao have been shaped by the requirements
of time and space. Today, we no longer
seek the Will of God in time, or the Mandate of Heaven in space, to enlighten
the choices we make of our lives. We
have become secular, this worldly whether we say so or not, with only one question
to 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!
Yesterday, appreciate; tomorrow, anticipate; today, participate. In all, Celebrate!