DIFFICULTY AT THE BEGINNING or
GIA-FU FENG'S THREE STRIKES WORKSHOP

Meeting Gia-Fu Feng at a Taoist Meditation Weekend of Oasis Chicago

Gia-Fu Feng established his Stillpoint Foundation near the Barr trail up Pike’s Peak. He taught tai chi and a lifestyle of Taoist meditation. With his wife Jane English(whose photographs were overwritten with Chinese calligraphy), Gia-Fu had published his Tao Te Ching of Lao Tsu (Tzu).

The oversize book of gentle poetry, nature photography by his wife Jane English, and Chinese calligraphy upon the photos, became a Random House best seller a year or so before I met him. This opened up a whole new world to Gia-Fu, he was now a celebrity author of a best seller, the archetype of Establishment in any field.

Mainstream America embraced these pretty nature photos with their gentle, enigmatic poetry and exotic Chinese calligraphy over various size photos of nature scenes, leaves, shells, and rustic buildings. They made the book a best-seller to this day. It not make Gia-Fu Feng or his translation of the Tao Te Ching the paradigm of a new science of the Tao.

Gia-Fu Feng’s original translation differed from the 50 or so others available, bringing forth for the first time the morally neutral stance of Taoism. He alone translates the lines in Lao Tsu’s first poem with “Ever desire less” and “Ever desiring” as equals. The rest all take the Christian view that desire is bad and desire less is much better.

A very understandable Christian gloss added to the ancient text, however, totally inappropriate to Lao Tzu or fundamental Taoism. Traditional Chinese Taoism is a millennia old mixed of everything ancient and Chinese including many folk superstitions. The beauty and mystical essence of the 81 poems calls to many translators though only a native Chinese raised with traditional Taoist training and roots could hope to truly understand its Siren Song.

For the rest, and there are oh, so many, the 81 poems are a Looking Glass which their probing searchlights, trying to illuminate the text to translate it best, closed them out forever from the magical realm within. That mystical connection within Self and Through the Looking Glass to Source was Gia-Fu Feng’s special Taoist wellspring.

Gia-Fu Feng was a true Taoist Sage which means he had no place in the Establishment or in any official position. The Best-Seller status of his book gave him an income and an entrée to have his workshops promoted as part of the New Age Spiritual Revival of the early ‘70’s. It worked to get him an invitation to be a visiting professor at a Midwestern college in the spring of ’74.

As with most native born Chinese, he found America a strange and peculiar place with many delights but also many unfortunate lapses of basic civility. When originally sent here to study modern American methods in banking he deal with this by speaking the perfect English of the educated overseas Chinese. As he settled into America more and more he abandoned that.

First he accepted the “Crazy Chinaman” role which fit into the San Francisco Beat scene. When this became too demeaning for him to continue he took refuge in his Chinese Taoist stranger-in-a-strange land. Accentuating his Chinese accent and small size and age he was able to pursue his interests unmolested by mainstream society.

I bought a copy of his Tao Te Ching and when I saw a Taoist meditation weekend with him advertised, I signed up. The workshop was a life-changing event for me. I had no awareness at the time why. It was a very active time in my life, however, also one that left many personal loose ends flapping about.

Looking now at my original copy of Gia-Fu Feng’s Tao Te Ching which I brought with me to that Taoist Meditation Retreat I am first struck by the dark oil stains along the edges of the back cover. Those came from the polishing oil I used on a hand sanded personal altar I made over several weeks when I lived in Toronto in ’78.

The book is inscribed in pen by Gia-Fu Saying, “To my “mind” Frank: Gia-Fu 1973 Oasis (the name of the group sponsoring the weekend) and then his signature again in Chinese calligraphy. Everyone who presented their copy of his Tao Te Ching got an inscription to some appropriate body part of Gia-Fu’s.

Over the course of the weekend we did a myriad of activities: played Taoist volleyball, went on various explorations and walks in the beautiful rural setting of the workshop, we learned some tai chi moves, had group therapy and a session of deep regret on the final morning which started with reading Gia-Fu Feng reading us poem 20 of the Tao Te Ching.

And then he launched into a passionate, graphic tirade of apology for how bad everything was and what a failure he was, and how the setting, the workshop and everything he could think of was “shitty” and terrible and a failure. This was a mixture of what must have been playing in his head from the complaints that this and everything else he did was not up to the perfect standards of his parents and his own expectations.

It was intended to be part of the final retrospective of the weekend where we would all be encouraged to express our regrets and disappointments of any kind as well as with this weekend. Then he would pickup on the last line of poem 20, “I am nourished by the great mother.” And then give a sense of Cosmic support for us each and all together as a group.

The participants knew nothing of Taoism. Nor were they prepared for this particular activity in a Taoist meditation weekend. Not at all what they had ever experienced in Zen meditation or yoga. Poem 20 begins with the line:
”Give up learning and put an end to your troubles.” This was a group who was here as a learning experience.

I loved that part of the weekend and found poem 20 my personal favorite, at least until I read all 81 and found many particularly insightful to me. In general it was one of the less successful weekends for the other participants. Who didn’t understand the point or Taoist meditation of many of the activities.

I recognized the feeling from a lecture I had given one day to an environment class at U.C. Berkeley during the Survival Walk in 1970. I used the f-word in a sentence and I could see the kids visibly recoil at their cloistered classroom suffering such language. The Free Speech Movement had been a decade earlier and these kids were clearly a younger generation.

Our retreat house still had the old bell from its days as a school house. We gathered at a rustic former school house retreat center near the beach on the Eastern shore of Lake Michigan on Friday evening. Before Gia-Fu arrived with his wife and two others from Stillpoint to run the workshop, the group assembled started off into their more familiar ground, chanting the sacred Hindu syllable AUM. The Stillpoint folks arrived during that chant, wondering who these weird New Age Americans would turn out to be.

Miscommunication was common that weekend. One of the participants was so disquieted by the events that he disappeared in the night, driving home and stranding his passenger he had given a ride there. Gia-Fu maintained the traditional Chinese view that those who did not accept the commitments of marriage, but only engaged in sexual relationships were fundamentally homosexual.

At one point he challenged An(drew) in this way. From his reaction when someone thought his name An was actually Anne, this was a problem for him. Gia-Fu missed the opportunity to connect with him about his intimacy avoidance. He only got the defensive stonewalling of a businessman who adamantly was not gay.

Gia-Fu started our group the last morning by reading poem 20 of the Tao Te Ching. This is a poem of alienation of society and connection to the mystical. Gia-Fu then became very sad and angry. He apologized for his mistakes that weekend, for the difficult moments as his various exercises did not work out as he hoped.

He attacked the poor quality of the rustic school house, of his limitations and inabilities, and so on. It was a performance by a workshop leader which was unexpected, and clearly very strange and inappropriate to many of the polite human potential folks in attendance.

As this exercise was not going over so well, Gia-Fu Feng explained he was trying to release all bad feelings and negative experiences. He invited the group to individually speak out and release as well. This was a Taoist emotional exercise our group was not quite prepared to join. I was having an amazing experience and didn’t have any bad feelings to vent. I lacked sufficient perspective at that moment to vent my bad feelings over where my life had been before I arrived at the workshop.

The weekend broke up on Monday afternoon, and my ride back with An was quiet and unremarkable. He was a businessman and had already amortized the loss of this workshop. He went back to his normal life, as far as I know. For everyone else, it was the first and last experience with Taoist meditation and they moved on to other workshops.

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