Someone, I can't remember who, said to me recently that every teacher needed to give inspiration to their students. I accept this responsibility readily, but where is the poor teacher to find inspiration? Although for more than 20 years I have only followed one master and only practiced one method, I have had many sources of inspiration.
But what is inspiration ? My dictionary defines it as, "a divine influence or action upon the lives of certain persons that is believed to qualify them to receive and communicate sacred revelation; or the act or power of moving the intellect or emotions". Let me tell you about some of these "divine influences or actions" in my life.
I once said to my master's eldest son that his father was a great teacher. His son said that his father was not a great teacher, but a man of great knowledge and experience. This was nearer the truth. I spent most days from 1975 to 1984 going to my master's house and training on the rooftop. He ran morning and evening sessions, six days per week. When I first went he was always there and spent most of the class time on the rooftop. He didn't teach a class in a conventional sense. People would just do their practice singly or in groups, sometimes under the guidance of an elder brother. Sifu (which is how we all addressed him) would circle the rooftop, deep in thought, more often than not puffing on a cigarette, sometimes he would speak to us, sometimes he would even show a technique or explain a concept, mostly he just walked around.
It was only after some months when I began to spend more time with him outside of the class that he started to show and explain things in a deeper way. I realize now that I was fortunate that I had no family ties in Hong Kong and that working odd hours in the police force gave me more access to Sifu. He was a powerful personality and a great influence for bad as well as good, both inside and outside the martial arts.
I liked his many maxims and have in translation made many of them my own. He told me:-
"Woman is the enemy of the hero" (so many women, so many enemies, so few heroes).
"If you don't rob somebody, somebody will rob you" (he robbed me).
"The only good woman in the world is your mother" (untrue in my case).
The last meaningful thing he taught me was:-
"The mouth communicates, the mind interprets".
In recent years, many of my Tai Chi brothers and sisters, while they admit the effectiveness of my approach, they disagree with it. I am accused of doing the weapons too fast and hard, of doing a martial form, of doing Nei Kung exercises differently from him, of having too deep a stance for free pushing hands.
He told me before I left Hong Kong to do weapons the way I do. He told me to practice Nei Kung more than form as it would have a radical effect on all aspects of my Tai Chi. He told me to sink and root in everything I did, including pushing hands. He did not have just one way of doing things, but many ways and I learned these ways as we travelled together in Hong Kong, Singapore, China, Malaysia, Australia and Britain.
He told me not to be lazy like him - although I think his diabetes played a part in this, to teach things personally as far as possible so that people in the West could receive a true transmission. In all the years I have known him I never saw him do a complete form from beginning to end. I never saw him practice Nei Kung. He did practice some rolling and other conditioning before he went abroad with me to teach and sometimes he would push hands and wrestle with students in the class.
When he started out as a sifu, he was nineteen years old and a renegade from all the famous Tai Chi families then he became successful through his ability to fight and to produce fighters. This inspired me when I returned to Britain to follow his example. I strongly believed that there was a gap in the market to teach Tai Chi Chuan as a complete martial art rather than as just a health exercise. He is now sick and hopelessly poisoned against me; he has nothing to say to me anymore, but I think of the things he said and did in the glory days and they help me to carry on.
The most inspirational martial arts teacher and probably the greatest martial arts genius I met was Yoshinao Nanbu. People don't talk much about him these days. I met him in January 1973 when he came to Glasgow to show our Shotokan club his Sankukai method. He didn't hit or brutalise us like the other Japanese we had encountered; he strolled around in his shades smiling at us. He captivated my interest with his whirling and spinning and most of all with his emphasis on evasion. He was by then a renegade and a legend. His master, Tani, of Shito-ryu and Shukokai fame said some years ago that he did not know any Nanbu. My Tai Chi brother Ian Cameron saw him years ago singing as he demonstrated Sai Kata as senior Japanese masters looked on in disapproval. Nanbu was the first and as far as I know only Japanese master to compete in Europe. He always won because he said he would commit seppuku if he lost.
I visited Nanbu in Paris in 1974 just after he awarded me my black belt. I stayed in the dojo of the famous Henri Plee, which is where I was to teach Tai Chi 20 years later. Plee told me that martial arts were like women; some of us could find the right one straight away others needed to try a few before they found the right one, while others drift from one to another like latter day Casanovas. In the martial arts at least I have not become a Casanova.
Meeting these men of respect, men of the sword and of the pen, made me want to become one too. I need at this point to apologise to my readers for the dearth of articles in the last couple of years - I lost my inspiration for a while and felt, as my old granpappy used to say, "One door shuts and another one closes". I tried to write a few times, but felt a kind of impotence. The inspiration has come back now and proceeds from those who hate me as much as from those who love me; doors are opening.
I feel now that like these men I can also be an emissary. I found a boy yesterday at my class and he was reading about the super heroes that I used to read about myself more than thirty years ago. Like me his favourite was the Silver Surfer, an emissary, a wanderer and a man who had his own truth, not exactly one of the good guys like say Captain America and yet not exactly one of the bad ones like Doctor Doom. I guess my parents knew how dangerous the Surfer was because one day I returned from school to find then tearing up all my comics, but it was already too late. Somehow everyone knows about the Silver Surfer, even Pascale, and like the Surfer she inspires me, maybe because she reminds me of the Scarlet Witch, but that is another story.
I met another boy yesterday too. A Chinese boy called Zeus, a god who like the Surfer had his own truth. The boy's mother talked to me about things I hadn't thought about for years like the Tai Chi and Yi Chuan master, Lee Ying-arng whom nobody knows now and how he saved the life of the President of Guatemala as they travelled together on a plane and thus changed his own life for ever. Maybe all you need to be inspired is just to live, I've heard you're a long time dead. I buried my father nine days ago.