My visit with Chuang Tzu and Yellow Mountain the first week of October 2016 acknowledging the pivot. 

(While in the city of Huangshan and on Huangshan (Yellow) Mountain I took over a hundred photos, some of which appear below).  

My trip to Anhui Province and Huangshan (Yellow) Mountain the first week of October 2016 is two-fold.

First to write about my relationship with Chuang Tzu and wu wei, and secondly to make an adjustment and begin making a concerted effort to live the life I have written.

All that I have ever written is autobiographical in nature and simply a road map to follow. That I abhor contention and strive only for a life of contentment and study the art of transcendence…

That I live in the state of becoming and that is tied solely to my writing while knowing that the more I lose in attachments the more I gain.

This is where Chuang Tzu comes into play. It has been my own lack of discipline that has kept me from achieving my ultimate goal. This lack of disciple is why I am here, generally speaking. For an eternity I’ve been reminded that I have always known the words, it’s putting them into practice internally that has eluded me.

As if I have this upper heaven thing worked out, but it’s this lower heaven thing that has eluded me. One would think that the opposite would be true. I begin anew reciting the line that my weaknesses are my strengths…  Chuang wants to know after all this time if am I ready to make the pivot? This is why I came here to be near his hometown to visit with my old friend once again.

On Wednesday October 5, I am up at 5 AM to join tour bus for the day to spend the day on Huangshan Mountain.

Huangshan (Yellow) Mountain is one of the five most famous mountains in Taoism in China.

I have been to all of them. Qingyang Mountain near Chengdu, Mount Taishan near Qufu, Song Mountain south of Luoyang, and now Huangshan Mountain in Anhui.  In October 2018 I went to the fifth, Huashan in Shaanxi Province.

A sixth mountain credited to the early development of Quanzhen Taoism is Mount Laoshan north of Qingdao that I visited in 2017. 

Finding yourself above the clouds is about as close as one can get to Chuang Tzu. There’s a feeling you get when you are here above the clouds that you find nowhere else. It’s easy to find yourself above earthly concerns because you are no longer attached to them. This detachment from self is the central theme of understanding the purpose of meditation. For the Taoist, it is about as close to home as you can get.

When I first began writing in 1993 my moniker or name given to me was Cloud Dancing. Finding myself as one with dragons above the clouds… above earthly endeavors… and here I am twenty-three years later above the clouds at home with Chuang Tzu on the peak of Yellow Mountain.

Here for a full accounting of where I have been and more importantly where I am going with all this and if I am ready to make the pivot. It’s amazing how the hundreds of thousands of words I have written over the years take on new meaning as I approach the edge of my own humanity or become nearer to my ultimate destination. To be nearer to the other side and happily going there again.

I came to Anhui unsure I would meet with Chuang Tzu. But living in spontaneity creates the essence of what true living is all about.

Fairy Peak on Yellow Mountain

It becomes wei wu when you revert to your cosmic essence in total humility realizing your own nothingness and life itself totally forgetful.

You become rooted in the nature of things, full of life and awareness… often referred to by others as having mindfulness, or as Joseph Campbell would say, you have come to a place where you can live by or through bliss. Or better said when you rise above transcendence returning once again to who you have always been.

You may say that one does not need to be above the clouds on a mountain to understand this, but you must be in a place where you are truly at peace and home with your surroundings.

There are many great sages and Taoists, who over the centuries have left all earthly attachments behind to live on these mountains in a reclusive lifestyle to be nearer to nature and the Tao. They have come, seen the other side, and decided to stay. Others have come and gone with the journey to stay still on-going.

But with this cosmic understanding of the ultimate pivot along with a deep personal sense of the meaning of wu wei, comes an acknowledgement of why we are truly here, and once found we come to know our purpose.

It is as if here atop Huangshan Mountain with my mentor Chuang Tzu alongside, he is telling me to take the great leap and truly learn how to fly.

I say all this as a preface to what comes next. I think I am extremely thankful to two college students, Sherlock and Lilly, (their English names) who came to find me when I got separated from the tour group. If they hadn’t found me I would probably still be on the mountain… with my head and friends above the clouds.

Oh well, and the bus got us back to the hostel about 8 PM that evening with our guide giving me stern looks and not speaking to me along the way.

On Thursday, October 6, the day spent in quiet meditation and fasting thinking only about Chuang Tzu and the eternal meaning of the pivot. The central element of true writing is you don’t simply write about something, you become someone that epitomizes what you have internalized and written about.

It is as I have said… your writing becomes you. The central core of this began with the shaman eons ago needing to impart eternal wisdom beyond the spoken word. The shaman knew that to sway people he/she had to become the word himself. Speaking for the eternal dragon often referred to in Chinese history.

What Chuang Tzu understood was each of us had to endure what was to be called the “pivot”.

One might even say that his butterfly dream was emblematic of our becoming someone beyond who we think or appear to be.

Understanding and becoming this are two separate things. What you need to know is not something new, it is what you have always known but forgotten. Something to be built upon. Meditation and self-awareness simply coming to know who you really are and living it.

Chuang Tzu laughed and made humor about Confucians because they were too full of themselves and what they sensed was the way to live. 

He and the Taoists understood that what was good for one must be for all, or it was without virtue. 

Life for the sage became so much less complicated and simpler on top of mountains.

They understood that the riches of a lifetime were a mere flash of lightening in eternity, so why bother. Except to learn about ourselves through the experience.

The Taoist differs from others in his heart. He is centered on the Tao not himself. Ultimately, he concluded that the true sage must engage himself in the world, not follow his innate reclusive nature to retreat to mountaintops and in doing so become the Perfected Man. He must be the change he wants to see in the world.

The central understanding to the pivot is how opposites complement each other.

You cannot just stop with a sense of opposites. (Black vs white, up vs down, high vs low, yes vs no, etc.)  This is the basis of the true meaning of the I Ching. It is when you can pass through both yes and no, the I and not I, to understand that all things are in a state of flux. That like all things in nature, nothing is all set, or permanent.

What is yes today could easily be not tomorrow and vice versa.

It is in refusing to grasp either yes or no as absolute that the complimentary opposite automatically comes forth to find the way to proceed or find common ground.

It is the ability to watch yes and no pursue their alternating course of action as if in a circle, that you can begin to understand the central meaning of the pivot.

It is that opposites produce each other, depend on each other, and complement each other.

It is the inability to wait and not be impatient that most men lose their best opportunity for good results. Or as the Buddhist would tell us, that we are to wait until our mud settles.

Bad results often occur when we act to soon before our time to act appears. Wisdom and luck are often in knowing the right time to act in the proper way. Who can know?  In early China this became the central role of the shaman to convey and tell us.

How did Chuang Tzu put this central tenet of the I Ching, this idea of complimentary opposites, into play? By using his concept of the Perfected Man in living a life in wu wei.

He furthers this in his story of the butcher cutting meat. So in tune with the cutting, that he pays little attention to the blade. Because he effortlessly knows ahead of time where it will land. Both the knife and where the meat was to be cut were the same. So how could the cutting not be perfect? 

Wu wei has taken on several meanings over the centuries depending on the needs of the commentator. Often it has taken on the simplistic meaning as the “Art of Doing Nothing”. But it is so much more than that.

It is that when what you do becomes so much a part of who you are that it appears as if you are doing nothing outside yourself, or who you naturally have become.

What you do is nothing more than an extension of who you are. Chuang Tzu takes this a bit further. It is action that is performed effortlessly, as if spontaneous in perfect harmony with our nature and the Tao. In this way all relationships find their proper order and expression. Nothing can then exist or occur that is beyond self-conscious expression.  You can see why becoming the sage is no easy task.

It was by returning to human form one lifetime after the next that one can begin to get a glimpse of his ultimate endeavor and destiny.

Many have come to see the Way; few have followed the path to know enlightenment and where it might lead.

What can all this mean and why should one be concerned with all this? Especially as a “foreigner” when almost no one I meet seems to care about any of this… especially the people I meet here in China.

They live in the midst of 5,000 years of history. It surrounds them in all they see, do, and are.

It is as much a part of them as the air they breathe, the ground they walk, and the water they drink every day.

Something both known and seemingly unknown while in the midst of something that changes but never changes as well. To have already unconsciously arrived.

It is what I found in the countryside when visiting the families of my students in Shandong who have lived and farmed the same piece of land for hundreds of years.

Most of their ancestors are buried out in the field they toiled in for a lifetime. They don’t just farm on the land they become and are the land itself. It was easy to see in the eyes of the grandparents who have seen so much change in China over the past eighty years or so.

My students were usually the first in their family to try to break the cycle. If they did not do well in school, it would be back to the village and the land of their parents and grandparents, etc., etc. This was fairly common at Qufu Normal School in Qufu where I taught.

For most of the students the brass ring was too high and the frog at the bottom of the well was them. They knew that they had to say they tried. As if there was an innate attempt to find their place in the universe outside of who they were and as such what occurs becomes you and you become it as well. But it is not that simple.

Again, the law of complimentary opposites comes into play. Their exposure to life away from the village would in and of itself change who they would become. In their own way, my students were the pivot of today.

On Friday October 7^th, I went back to Old Town this morning to buy the two pocket watches I saw that Katie would like for her collection. I saw another hostel entitled Ancient Town Hostel I will stay at if I return to Huangshan and bought a small tourist guide of the Huangshan area that will help with my writing. I leave this afternoon at 1:30 to go to train station. We’re still on the first week of October holiday and its Friday. I have my ticket, but it could be crowded.

My thoughts return to Huangshan Mountain with time spent above the clouds and Chuang Tzu and where I left off yesterday. It’s knowing what I know, how can I not follow the path that has been laid out before me.

Huangshan Old Town 

As if your mind has become sealed to your own eternal truth. (this was further confirmed by my study of the book The Jade Emperor’s Mind Seal Classic when I returned home to USA). A truly great book I would highly recommend.

To truly follow the Tao is to live the Way as if you are on a glide path following a current of no return that you cannot resist.

You have become part of the path itself so that everything depends on how quickly you want to get to your ultimate destination.

Or stop and stay with attachments you have found. You have paved the way for yourself with your journey leading only to the virtue within. The only remaining question as to the time of departure and arrival and do I finally find the discipline to follow my highest endeavor and ultimate destiny?

Lack of discipline and patience – my Achilles heel in eternity. Old nemesis’s who seem to always keep calling or holding me back. The ultimate attachments I find so difficult to shed. It’s time to finally tell them goodbye.

It always comes back to from where I am doing it from and what I am learning while I am here this time.

I can hear Chuang Tzu giving his knowing laugh just now. He knows and hopes my visit will finally serve its purpose. Do I stay or do I go? Where is it my time is better spent for eternity’s sake.

How do I answer the call to become the Perfected Man living only as wu wei dictates, or am I?

The siren call has always been present in the background just waiting to come forward. Is it time to go or is it that there can be no right or wrong that may delay my ultimate return, or arrival?

This is what this week on Yellow Mountain has ultimately been about. To follow as if instructions what I have already written and know is but a decision still for eternity’s sake.

The path always beginning and ending as Lao Tzu has said in the Tao Te Ching, the Way of Virtue…

We are to live moment to moment as the embodiment of virtue and the Tao.

I pay the balance of room at hostel (218 RMB, pd 100 at check-in Total for room was 318) at 12:45 PM. Take taxi to the train station Friday afternoon for 4 PM departure and arrive in Beijing at noon on Saturday.

Postscript to the above:   When I returned to Qufu the following week before returning to USA, there is a meeting in Qufu of the I Ching/Confucius Society.

I was elected the vice president of the national organization. It seems the door has been opened for a much greater accounting of the role I am here to play. (This might have meant something if I could speak, write and read Chinese which I can’t) This was an honorary title out of respect for my endeavors.

If I would have been free with a traveling companion who spoke Chinese to show the way, I could have spent the next year or so traveling throughout China visiting Buddhist, Confucian, and Taoist historic sites as an honored guest… but alas, I returned to USA instead. Always butting up against an invisible barrier that blocks what I am attempting that keeps me from the true task at hand. Like being on the summit, but not ready to stay there… as though only able to write about it.

Perhaps for just a taste and learning, so that I am prepared for the next time.  With so many times over the past twenty years in China the next step always re-directed, asking am I following my eternal instincts, or simply bound by my limitations and current events?

Ah! my brother Chuang Tzu, who has seen and known so many who have come this way running towards the comfort of the Tao. To begin to know and understand some eternal sense of the universe and following the stars above.

To what the shaman came to know and love so well. To have been to the mountaintop, seen the other side and still turn back to voyages of self-discovery. As though not ready to go there just yet.

The search for the Perfected Man that lies within each of us and the paradox of learning and living our role today.

Knowing that in death we are simply returning to review our progress as our eternal destiny awaits us as we always simply return to our beginnings and our home amongst the stars.

Saying to Chuang Tzu, until we meet again, I will be forever grateful that you are my forever friend and mentor.

A reminder that the above is written in October 2016… Below is my first two encounters with Chuang Tzu. The first appearing in my book An American journey through the I Ching and Beyond, written in 1994 almost thirty years ago, and the second in my next book an unpublished manuscript written in 1996 a couple years later.

As Chang Tzu’s Perfected Man

As Chang Tzu’s Perfected Man begins by abandoning the ways of the world, you begin by simply letting go of that which is not significant to the Tao.  As you are now seen traveling with old friends who guide you along an unknowable path or way. Just as the dragons would have it, they are pleased.

Eternal sacrifice made to capture the moment knowing everything rests on your finding and staying on the road yet to be traveled. Searching for immortality and freedom to go where few have gone before. Just as a sage would find the true reality of all things. Always leading the way. Knowing that the Tao is everywhere to be found by simply looking and understanding what is and finding one’s own standard within the oneness of virtue.

Eternity existing forever both before, now and yet to come.  As you continually search for your place in the overall scheme of things. With a comfort known as something done repetitively over and over again. A great sense of satisfaction that all becomes and is second nature.

Remain simply within the oneness of everything and pursue nothing ethereal as the reclusive sage. Complete with the knowledge of the Tao and understanding what it means. Remember from where you have come. As we are here to remind you of where you will return with us. Everything is here within yourself to rediscover and relearn.  Keep to the open road as the Perfected Man and know immortality can only follow.  4/12/94

A year later I wrote Chuang Tzu’s  Argument in May 1995 having just arriving in Florida to begin a new job in Boynton Beach. Of all the things I have written over the years this is a personal favorite.

It encapsulates the folly found in those rushing head of heals to always follow the structure found outside themselves as in following Confucius.

Challenging authority and the nonsense sometimes found in those who “make up the rules for their own sake” has always been the hallmark found with Chuang Tzu. He was the perfect foil in arguing against following authoritarian or “conventional” wisdom.

I think I admire him so much because he fits so well into by own sense of identity and character. He epitomizes the idea that the Perfected Man only looks within to his own virtue and proceeds as if unknowingly accordingly. Confucius may rule one’s head as you go about the business of dealing with others, perhaps as Kongdan maybe, but in your heart, you will always be Dantzu… following the dragons to your ultimate endeavor and destiny.

Kind of like living in a dream as you go back and forth between upper and lower heaven found elsewhere here on the website in the I Ching and the Dazhuan. Chuang Tzu’s writing also gave rise to what would later become Chan Buddhism in China.

Chuang Tzu’s Argument

Who can think things out in analytical terms and why should they when there can be no judgment? No determination as to what can be right or wrong in our thoughts, actions or deeds. If alternatives are non‑existent to time and space, what could be the difference?  If as the Tao says, no thing is either noble or base (good or bad) and all things say they are noble and another base, then where is judgment?

As conventional wisdom or what may be considered common sense expands, then neither good or bad can stand alone and cannot depend upon themselves. If you try to judge by degree or get the upper hand, then arguing from one position or the other can lead only to seeing one place in relation to another. If judgments are rendered from a position where something is big in relation to smaller things, then all things become big. If you argue that they are small, then all things become small. If you can argue that heaven and earth may be treated as a tiny grain of sand, then all things remain perfect and can be seen as such.

If you make judgments based on the function of something, then if you judge them from those which they have then all things have them. If you judge them from what they lack, then all things lack them. If you know that east and west are opposites, yet cannot do without each other, then is not their function predetermined?  What can all this mean? Can any judgment be made by what is considered rational? Who can know? Who can say?

Just as in arguing tastes. If you argue that to people who consider them to be good, then all things are good. If you argue for those who disapprove or disagree and say they are bad, then they must be bad. If you know of two people who believe the opposite has occurred, that one believes he is right and the other wrong, standards of taste will be seen in proportion.

In the end if all things remain equal, or in balance as such, then who can there be to judge right and wrong? And can right and wrong truly exist?     4/14/95

Both of the entries above written prior to my even thinking that I would ever travel to China. My first trip to China would not be until May 1997 when we adopted our first daughter Katie from Maoming in Guangdong Province.