T’ai Chi Chih: Lineage or Lone Star?

(Scraps from a Sinological Scrapbook 漢齋閒情異誌, fragment 28)

        For some years now I have been practicing T’ai Chi Chih, and like many who have studied it and kept up with it, I have benefited in health and spirit. Unlike most, however, I also studied Chinese at the university and went on to spend years in Taiwan. Knowledge of the language, and the experience of studying tai chi for several years with a Taiwan-Chinese teacher, gave me access to a very different perspective on the tai chi-related disciplines in general, and on T’ai Chi Chih in particular.

        By saying this and contextualizing T’ai Chi Chih in this way at the outset, I am making a statement. I am saying I beg to differ with the standard publicity image of T’ai Chi Chih (hereinafter TCC). That view would have us believe TCC just dropped down from the sky in 1974; it is unique; it had no important antecedents. Justin F. Stone, the ‘originator,’ experienced ‘intuitive flashes’ and devised the various movements based on them.

        I believe that account, though it contains truths, is one-sided and misleading. It ignores, or has been ignorant of, some conclusions that I have drawn based on research into Justin Stone’s own books and some relevant books in Chinese.

        I own three successive editions of Stone’s instruction manual titled T’ai Chi Chih![1] Their publication history is complicated, but the first printing of each seems to have been in 1974, 1984, and 1996 respectively. For convenience, rather than repeating the title I will refer to them simply as ‘1974,’ ‘1984,’ and ‘1996.’ Giving us three quick-freezes in time, each appearing some years after its predecessor, they enable us to piece together a more nuanced version of what I believe actually happened. In particular, the introductory material, forewords, and prefaces contain valuable hints.

        To begin with the original handbook which came out in 1974, the first thing that meets the eye is the prominent role played by Wen-Shan Huang. Huang is the volume’s dedicatee – Stone calls him ‘my friend and teacher’ – and is also the author of an extensive foreword placing TCC in the context of various Chinese concepts and practices.

        Huang, whose name would now normally be written Huang Wenshan (黃文山), lived from about 1898 to 1988 (sources differ). Unlike many other guiding lights of what was then called the Human Potential Movement, he was highly educated and held high academic credentials as an anthropologist. Aside from his scholarly work, he had studied tai chi in China and had learned from some of the most famous masters including Dong Yingjie, Zheng Manqing, T. T. Liang, Da Liu, and Xiong Yanghe.[2] Huang had been Justin Stone’s tai chi teacher in California. Stone himself also taught tai chi – I am referring to what most people nowadays understand as ‘tai chi,’ which in Chinese is called taiji quan or in the older transcription t’ai chi ch’üan – for many years before the advent of his own TCC system. I will detail this shortly.

        Very clearly, Huang places Justin Stone’s system in the context of existing Chinese disciplines. He says: ‘T’ai Chi Chih, or any other forms of the exercise of the Inner School...derived their basic idea from T’ai Chi Ch’uan.’ More specifically, on the first page of his preface Huang explains ‘T’ai Chi Chih’ as meaning ‘T’ai Chi Ruler.’ (‘Ruler’ in this context means ‘footrule’ or ‘foot-long piece of wood.’ The reference is to a sort of stick about a foot long, which in the Orient is held between the hands during certain exercises to keep the hands equidistant. In the transcription used in those days, technically called the Wade-Giles Transcription, actually the Chinese word for ‘footrule,’ 尺, should have been written ch’ih and not chih, and the name of the whole discipline should have been spelled t’ai chi ch’ih, but those apostrophes were often omitted.) Huang writes: ‘My friend, Mr. T. T. Ching, who was taught...by Chao Chung Tao in 1957, in Peking, has maintained a Taoist Center in Hong Kong in recent years for the teaching of this exercise-discipline; I was a member of this Center...Basing his studies upon the fundamental movements of the Art, Mr. Stone, thru his own experiments and creation, has added many new movements...’ In the Chinese-language Appendix C to his own book, Huang specifically mentions 太極尺 or t’ai chi ch’ih as one of the disciplines he himself had studied.

        As a little research in internet sources and libraries in the Far East has shown, T. T. Ching (1898-1975) was a teacher in Hong Kong whose name written in Chinese characters is 程達材.[3] Starting in the early 1960s he published several books on what he called ‘Tai Chi Ruler’ and indeed claimed to have learned from Chao Chung Tao (趙中道, in the modern transcription Zhao Zhongdao) in 1957. (I have a book of Ching’s in Chinese dating from 1964, as well as a more extensive later volume called Xiantian qigong taiji chi quanshu先天氣功太極尺全書 whose English title – the main text itself is in Chinese – is The Book of Tai Chi Ruler with Complete Details.) Ching’s work and methods were known in Taiwan as well, via at least one unauthorized reprint.

        I have not found any specific evidence that Justin Stone himself ever studied with T. T. Ching. But in his 1974 description of the movement that he calls Bass Drum (which aside from lacking a wooden ‘ruler’ is virtually the same, including the crucial foot and leg movements, as what Ching in Chinese called yao chi or Rotating the Ruler), Stone includes a footnote: ‘In Taiwan a stick somewhat like a bone is held, so the two hands must remain equidistant apart.’ This would seem to imply that Justin Stone at some stage had seen Taiwanese students performing Ching’s version of this movement. Or perhaps he had heard about this from Huang or someone else. In any case, at this point in time Stone was not averse to publicly associating part of his own system with a pre-existing set of exercises. (This and the bare-handed movement which Ching called mo yu or Groping for Fish, which Stone calls ‘Around the Platter,’ are now the standard first two movements in the regular T’ai Chi Chih sequence.)

Comparing the 1984 revised edition with the original book from 1974, at first sight we see mostly similarities. With a few exceptions, the movements and postures described are the same, and for the most part the descriptions and illustrations are unchanged. Turning to the introductory material, however, we discern a striking new accent in the way the book is now being presented to the world. The original preface by Huang, unmistakably implying a direct link between Justin Stone’s system and the Tai Chi Ruler which had already been taught in the 1950s by T. T. Ching, has been entirely deleted. Stone’s ‘Instructional Introduction’ has been maintained, but the wording of its first paragraph has become less modest. In 1974, Stone had written: ‘The movements...are the results of many years of experimentation. They represent an extension and development of the original movements taught by a Chinese master. The important principles have been retained as the repertoire has been expanded.’

        In the 1984 revision, this has been changed to: ‘The movements...are the results of many years of experimentation. From a development of the original two movements shown me, adding the leg motions and making other changes, I expanded and added eighteen more...Drawing on my meditation experiences and T’ai Chi Ch’uan training, I intuitively devised the other movements...’

        The ‘New Introduction’ to the revised volume also includes the snippet: ‘These are not ancient forms; they were originated by me...’

        Another dramatically new feature is that the system’s name, ‘T’ai Chi Chih,’ is now being construed to have a different meaning in Chinese. Rather than ‘Chih’ being referred to the Chinese character for ‘ruler’ as Huang had done, it is now said to be a different character meaning ‘knowledge.’ The whole expression is said to mean ‘Knowledge of the Supreme Ultimate.’

        In the still newer and extensively revised version which came out in 1996, the new stronger statements of originality are maintained. The name is again ‘Knowledge of the Supreme Ultimate,’ and once again there is no trace of Huang’s original preface. (The revisions are mostly in the illustrations and instructions to the movements, not the movements themselves.)

In the newer publicity material on TCC, Justin Stone is simply said to have ‘originated’ the system in 1974. (See, for example, the brief biography of Stone at the back of his 1996 volume, and later brief biographical summaries on the internet.) The emphasis is less on the ‘many years of experimentation’; indeed, the 1996 biography goes so far as to say that Stone originated the set ‘through intuitive flashes’ in 1974.

        This sudden-precipitation model does not quite tally with what Stone himself wrote in his 1984 introduction (and repeated in 1996): ‘...I began, around 1969, to experiment with my own forms based on the ancient principles. Having been fortunate enough to learn several little-known movements from an old Chinese man – movements practised in former days – I used these as the starting point for my experiments...In 1974, Sun Publishing Company asked me to write a book...and I began the laborious task of finishing and naming the nineteen forms...’

        A bit of background on this is to be found in an article on Stone in the Albuquerque Journal for 28 July 2005. There we read: ‘During a 1971 trip to Albuquerque to visit a friend, Stone wandered into a bookstore. The owner asked what he did...“I said I teach T’ai Chi Ch’uan,” he recalled. That comment immediately generated so much interest from the owner and customers that classes were soon organized for Stone to lead...One of his students was a local book publisher who asked Stone to write about T’ai Chi Ch’uan. Because a definitive text on the subject had already been written by Huang, Stone was not keen on the idea. Huang, however, had shown Stone three movements that Stone modified and used as a warm-up...The publisher then suggested Stone write about these instead.’

        ‘“It was just a few movements, so there wasn’t much to write about, but then, over the course of the next week, movements just started coming to me along with their names,” Stone said.’[4]

       

What all this suggests is that (1) the precipitation of the forms was not as sudden as all that, and (2) the inviting prospect of a publication played a strong catalytic role in the ‘intuitive’ process.

        The year after Stone’s book was first published, T. T. Ching died at age 77, not because he had been neglecting his health by ‘rotating the ruler’ insufficiently, but as the result of a traffic accident. It is interesting to speculate on what might have happened if he had lived long enough to see the success and growth of Justin Stone’s system after all references to him personally had been dropped. Would the two Teachers have joined hands in a collaborative effort, perhaps through the intermediary of Wen-Shan Huang, friend of both, who lived till 1988? Or would there have developed a rivalry of the ‘only-my-school-is-orthodox’ type which is so common in the Far East?

        One also wonders whether Stone’s mysterious ‘old Chinese man’ was Wen-Shan Huang himself...at the time of Stone’s publication, he would have been in his seventies. Or was it Tin Chin Lee, a Tai Chi master whom Stone met on a trip to Hawaii in 1958?

        Does any of this matter? To the present-day Western practitioner, of course not. Once you have abandoned the idea that only something with an ‘ancient’ pedigree can be right, what works for you is right for you.

        On the other hand, although I am no longer a professional scholar – long since retired, I am now as old as Justin Stone was when his revised edition with its revised claims appeared – I am still enough of a scholar to enjoy sorting out old strands, old clues, old loose ends. From this point of view, it is unfortunate that the compilers of Spiritual Odyssey: Selected Writings of Justin F. Stone 1985-1997 were so un-scholarly as not to provide source dates or details on the various pieces included in the volume. On page 78 of that volume, in a section called ‘Comments on Newspaper Articles,’ Stone is quoted as writing: ‘Please don’t falsify and say to interviewers that T’ai Chi Chih is a thousand years old, a well-kept court secret.’

        The interesting thing is that this is exactly what Wen-Shan Huang did say, at the very beginning of his enthusiastic foreword to Justin Stone’s book. Interpreting ‘Tai Chi Chih’ as ‘Tai Chi Ruler,’ Huang wrote: ‘More than a thousand years ago, this exercise...was kept as a secret known only to the clansmen of the Emperor. Mr. Chao Chung Tao, who was the descendant of one of the Emperor’s clansmen, was taught the secret...My friend, Mr. T. T. Ching...was taught the teaching, or Imperial secret, by Chao Chung Tao in 1957...’

Huang was probably, at that stage, trying to help Justin Stone. In the Far East, if you are teaching a martial art or a tai chi-related health discipline, the best thing is to claim that your method is not original – no such thing, it is the authentic continuation of a school whose unbroken tradition goes back many centuries. If you dare to set yourself up as a Teacher, you are supposed to have a venerable background.

In the West, the opposite holds. Only the new is truly relevant. Especially in anything involving health, only a recent discovery is really credible. I suspect that in the 1970s, thrilled at the chance to get more attention for his method by publishing a book on it, Justin Stone was perfectly glad to be endorsed, and placed in an old Oriental tradition, by an eminent Teacher like Wen-Shan Huang. Later, perhaps feeling more confident that he could make it on his own, he was Western enough to want to emphasize his originality. Since then, most of his followers probably have had no idea of what a Chinese reader would undoubtedly think of as the main roots of the whole thing.

        In sharing what I have discovered, it is not my intention to detract unduly from Teacher Stone’s reputation. If his methods are effective – and I say they are – then they are legitimate regardless of their exact provenance. It is undoubtedly true that most of the movements he taught were of his own devising. It is also demonstrably true that some of the most basic ones, including the leg and foot movements which Stone himself emphasizes are characteristic and essential, were already being taught by his teacher’s teacher many years before.

--Lloyd Haft

May 2015

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[1] Published respectively by Sun Publishing Company (Albuquerque, 1974); Good Karma Publishing (Fort Yates, Nevada 1994, but apparently a reprint of the ‘new revised edition’ by Satori Resources, 1984); and Good Karma Publishing (Boston, 2004 – the sixth printing of a ‘second edition’ which originally appeared in 1996).

[2] This information is from the original 1973 Hong Kong edition of Huang’s massive illustrated handbook Fundamentals of Tai Chi Ch’uan (see the Acknowledgements in English and Appendix C in Chinese). The book was reprinted in 1974 with a new introduction by Laura Huxley, the wife of Aldous Huxley and a widely known inspirational and self-help author in her own right. Four years previously, Laura Huxley and Alan Watts had both written forewords to a much briefer book on tai chi by Gia-fu Feng – surely one of the grand old books of the Human Potential Movement!  

[3] In the modern international Mandarin transcription this would be Cheng Dacai, but I do not agree with the practice of automatically rewriting Cantonese speakers’ names as if they were actually pronounced in Mandarin in daily life.

[4] The article as I have consulted it on the internet really does say the ‘trip to Albuquerque’ was in 1971, but I have not been able to confirm this.

Why is Death ‘The Great Upload’?

      In the blog post ‘What Do I Think Death Is?’ which appeared immediately before this one in April 2015[1], I call dying The Great Upload.

Why?

     This goes back to a line by T. C. Lethbridge that I read more than thirty years ago, which immediately rang a bell and I hope I will never forget. It was:

Man exists on many levels, of which the earth life appears to be the lowest. On this level he gathers information to be used by his real self on the levels above.[2]

      This ‘rang a bell with’ me, and has stood since then as a perfect statement of what I myself believe, for two reasons. It implies that (1) there is more to life than just physical life and the physical body is not our only ‘setting,’ and (2) we are here for a purpose that has something to do with consciousness (‘gathering information’).

        By way of visualizing this, just as a bit of imaginative make-believe, let’s say that every possible content of consciousness, everything you could possibly be aware of, is like a ‘dot’ in one of those old-fashioned newspaper pictures that were made up of dots on a white background. Or a dot in one of those join-the-dots puzzles that used to be featured in newspapers.

By the things you are doing, experiencing, thinking, and cognizing in this visible world, you are connecting some of the dots. But in this world, you will never see the Big Picture because we as individuals just don’t have, so to speak, software that could focus it. Maybe the, or a, Larger Provider does have such software. Or is in the process of developing it though our very efforts as we struggle with the parts of manifestation that come within our view.

A few additional rules would seem to apply:

1.     A ‘dot’ exists only to the extent that it is experienced by, or experience-able by, one or more persons.

2.         When one or more persons experience a dot, they thereby connect it with one or more preceding or following dots.

3.          When dots are connected, they tend toward forming a picture. The more the dots, the bigger the picture.

4.        Streams of dots which we have connected are in the same medium or on the same continuum with, and can be immediately linked into, streams of dots connected by others. This process goes on all the time whether or not it is consciously intended.

5.           Streams of dots which have been connected by former people in former times, and which for any reason have a particular affinity or applicability to our own, or which need our own context to gain intelligibility, can become linked or assimilated into our own. This is the explanation of the kind of experiences that are often taken to be evidence of reincarnation.

6.           The pictures which we are building or substantiating by viewing our parts of them in our world, go to make up a Big Picture. Or Pictures.

7.           A Big Picture is not our ‘own’ in the sense of only existing ‘within’ ourselves. On the other hand, it is our own in the sense that without our participation it would not exist.

So then, what we are doing in this world is to ‘get’ bits of consciousness...maybe even in the old sense of ‘begetting’ them, causing them to come to life...and to relate some of the bits with other bits. And, very importantly, to relate to other people who are similarly engaged. While ‘connecting’ the dots, we are also connecting ourselves, maybe even ‘assembling’ or ‘constituting’ what Lethbridge called our ‘real self.’

        But why do I say dying, and not living, is the Great Upload? Aren’t we engaged in connecting, expanding, clarifying and sharing Pictures every moment of our lives?

        Of course I think we are. But there is an added dimension that only dying can bring into it. That is the very fact that all of our experiences, our ‘dots,’ have been parts of a specifically human life. If our earth life did not have an end as well as a beginning, it would not be ‘rounded off’; it would not have a distinct form and would not be cognizable as a coherent entity. It is only by virtue of the Larger Frame that the Viewer comes into View.

--Lloyd Haft

April 2015

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[1] (Link)

[2] The Essential T. C. Lethbridge, edited by Tom Graves and Janet Hoult with a foreword by Colin Wilson. London etc.: Granada, 1982, p. 188.

What Do I Think Death Is?

This spring, coming back to Holland after a wonderful carefree winter in Taiwan and Japan, I have been confronted from nearby with a sudden health crisis faced by a 92-year-old friend. The prognosis is still unclear: as the Dutch say, ‘Could freeze, could thaw.’

        Since I live nearby the eye of the storm as it were, I have been sending brief ‘reports’ by email to a few concerned friends. One of them was written shortly after an unflinching conversation in which the possibility of stopping medication was considered. Such discussions involve whatever one does or does not think about The Last Things, and in relating the main points in writing, I found myself formulating with unusual succinctness my own view as of right now (I’m 68).

        In Dutch, what I said was: ‘Ik geloof persoonlijk dat het fysiek-belichaamde leven noch het enige, noch het beste leven is dat er is. Wat de meeste mensen het "sterven" noemen en ik liever The Great Upload, is niet het einde ergens van. Het is het verder waarmaken van een wijder perspectief.’

        Then I got to translating it into English. What I came up with was: ‘Personally, I do not believe that physically embodied life is either the only or the best life there is. What most people call "dying" and I prefer to call The Great Upload, is not the end of anything. It is the continuing substantiation of a wider perspective.’

        As so often, although I felt the translation was a pretty good representation of what I meant, something had been lost in the process. The Dutch word ‘waarmaken,’ which I made into ‘substantiation,’ can or does indeed mean ‘substantiate,’ as well as ‘live up to’ in the sense of ‘living up to a promise.’ But the very structure of the word, its being a combination of ‘waar’ meaning ‘true’ and ‘maken’ meaning ‘make’...somehow conveys an added glint of ‘making it true,’ making something which was only potential into an actuality.

        Does this mean I think you have to die before you become immortal? Certainly not. Like William Blake, I believe the apps that enable our immortality, so to speak, are already installed and running during our life in this visible world. Normally we are not aware of them because the shine or glare of immediate exigencies bears in on us more insistently. But let’s defer that discussion for later. Or for Later...

--Lloyd Haft

April 14, 2015

Spirit Writing in Old Matsu, Anno Now

(Scraps from a Sinological Scrapbook 漢齋閒情異誌, fragment 27)

During our recent stay in Matsu, we were lodged in a bed-and-breakfast owned by one of Katie’s former bosses, who is from Matsu. We all call him Brother Tiger because the two characters of his name literally mean Lucky Tiger. Brother Tiger was and is an administrator and advisor of various cultural agencies including one of Taiwan’s most famous traditional-style opera troupes. Like others from this particular part of Matsu, from childhood up he has been a participant in the cult of a local god called ‘The Marshal in Armor’ (in the military sense of a ‘field marshal’).

       The Marshal is a frog spirit. He is called Marshal in Armor because in the local dialect, the word for ‘frog’ sounds like the Mandarin word for ‘armor,’ and being a god, like a field marshal he has power and authority.

       There are several images of the Marshal. The main one is located in a subsidiary altar of the local temple of the ‘Empress of Heaven,’ i.e. the goddess Matsu. The Empress of Heaven, like our Holy Virgin Mary who is also called Queen of Heaven, is said to have been a flesh-and-blood girl during her life on earth. Later she achieved the status of a goddess capable of helping earthlings with many things including saving fishermen in peril, helping women to become pregnant...in short, she is a divine refuge figure who is worshipped by millions and I would say is probably, maybe next to the Buddha in his or her various guises, the single most universal religious focus of the Taiwanese people. I will not now elaborate on the goddess Matsu as that is a whole story in itself...

       As I was saying, there are several images of the Marshal. The main one is worshipped at the Empress of Heaven’s temple, but an important role is also played by a compact mobile image, a wooden thing maybe a foot high, which is mounted on a wooden ‘litter’ or ‘sedan chair’ that can be carried around during processions or...as I will go into shortly...on inspection trips or even airline flights. The sedan chair is carried by four men, two in front and two behind. Besides serving as the Marshal’s vehicle when he needs to go somewhere, it is also the instrument of his ‘spirit writing’ when he chooses to communicate with humans. When this happens, the procedure is that the bearers tilt the whole sedan chair 90 degrees while continuing to hold it from below...the Marshal can’t fall out because he is mounted inside. The writing is done by placing a table under the tilted sedan chair. The table is covered with ash from burnt incense. The bearers bend over somewhat, enough so that a crossbeam of the sedan chair is in close proximity with the top of the table. When a question is asked or the Marshal wishes to make a pronouncement, the whole Ark, so to say, gets to Moverin’...bearers plus chair plus crossbeam get to vibrating, heaving up and down and sideways, till the end of the crossbeam bumps repeatedly into the ash and makes markings in it. The markings are Chinese characters or other familiar signs...although in reporting this, I am taking it on faith because when I looked at the marks, it defied my imagination how anyone could read anything out of them. This point is important, though, as it is a somewhat unusual manner of spirit communication. It is not at all unusual for the Chinese to receive guidance from gods or spirits, but oftentimes either the message is spoken through a medium who is in trance, or writing is done by other means including the ‘planchette,’ which is a mechanical device made up of connected sticks that looks something like a pantograph.

       The Marshal is a testy character and not averse to letting his displeasure be known. One of the stories about him is that when the County Chief was in town, the Marshal demanded he should come to the temple for a visit. At the Marshal’s instruction, a very large glass of the renowned local firewater (116 proof kaoliang) was prepared for the County Chief and he was told to drink up and listen. What the Marshal had to say was that certain repairs were needed on the local scene and would the government please do something about it. (The story does not go on to tell whether the repairs were all subsequently put through.)

       One of the Marshal’s quirks is that he loves opera. About two years ago, when Brother Tiger was in town and went to see the Marshal, he said he was planning to take early retirement. The Marshal said Hey, not so fast now, you’re not done yet. Since you’re a big shot in the opera world, I want you to stay on long enough to arrange a nice opera performance for me to watch. So Brother Tiger agreed! (This was not the Marshal’s first interaction with their family...years previously, when their daughter was having a difficult pregnancy, the Marshal gave a medical prescription, a certain remedy to be drunk by the girl for a certain period of time, after which the trouble disappeared. Another time, when Brother and Auntie Tiger’s son was getting married in Taiwan, the Marshal was a guest at the wedding...he had been flown over to Taiwan, sedan chair and all, in a regular passenger plane.)

       So at the Marshal’s behest, Brother Tiger shelved his early retirement and busily set to work to organize the opera – finding a suitable play, enlisting musicians etc. The Marshal himself designated which performers were to play which roles. This all took time, but by the time we got over to Matsu for a visit a few days ago, things were at an advanced stage and the opera was being rehearsed at a locale provided by a local school. We went to watch. The Marshal was present in his chair rig, watching the whole time.

       After the rehearsal, a table was set up with incense ash on it so that the Marshal could write out his reactions and suggestions. The bearers brought him over, tilted his rig into writing position, and the bumping and marking commenced. Brother Tiger, based on all his professional experience, gave the performance a ‘grade’ – 85 points out of a possible 100. Not good enough, said the Marshal; next time I want you to get it up to 95.

       Certain performers were singled out as needing improvement. This time they got by with a mere admonishment, but on other occasions the Marshal has been known to demand ‘punishment’ in the form of making the deficient performer kneel on the cold stone floor for the time it takes one stick of incense to burn to the end – about one full hour.

       The cult of the Marshal in Armor is not practiced in Taiwan proper or even in Matsu as a whole. It is specific to the locality of Qinbi where we were staying, and (I have been told) to certain spots on the Chinese Mainland.

--Lloyd Haft

February 4, 2015

On the Matsu Shore (poem)

Is this a sound

of water or of wind,

day or night that wakens me,

wants me here

waiting with the wind,

watching over water?

How many centuries,

how many me’s are gathered

in this moment yet to go,

yet to know the we, the way

from all of here to more of here,

ever more of here,

hearing with the sea,

wondering the wind...

--Lloyd Haft

at Qinbi, Beigan, Matsu

February 2, 2015

early morning

Tips for Tired Translators

(1) Yours is one of the most thankless professions in the world You are being paid – if we can even use the word ‘paid’ for the disgusting pittance you are undoubtedly getting – to help somebody else earn money and become famous. Accept it! Publishers will always think of you, if they think of you at all, as a sort of glorified typist. As for authors, take comfort in the words of an Italian sinologist friend of mine who said: ‘The nice thing about translating Ancient Chinese poetry is that the authors are already dead!’

(2) Try to avoid translating authors who know more than five words of your own native language. They will always think they have found mistakes in your translation, and want you to change your text accordingly.

(3) If you can’t see what the damned text MEANS, take a deep breath and just translate what it SAYS. An obscure original has the right to an obscure translation.

(4) Don’t break your back trying to make the original sound better than it is. We are not in business to teach people to write decently.

(5) If you are an American, never expect that one single European, never one single one of them in your lifetime or in all eternity, will ever think you know anything at all about a language called ‘English.’

(6) Don’t assume that just because a word is in the dictionary, it must be wrong.

Lloyd Haft

January 2015

Justin Stone's Chinese Name

Justin Stone's Chinese Name

(Scraps from a Sinological Scrapbook 漢齋閒情異誌, fragment 26)

Fundamentals of T’ai Chi Ch’uan, by Wen-Shan Huang who was Justin Stone’s teacher, contains a preface by Justin Stone – just as Stone’s T’ai Chi Chih!, published at about the same time (1974), not only includes a foreword by Huang but is dedicated to him as a ‘friend and teacher.’ Huang’s book, unlike Stone’s brief manual, is an imposing tome, 559 pages in all, more like a reference book for a lifetime. Probably nobody ever read it at one sitting.

       It took me forty years to get around to the Appendices at the back, which are in Chinese. (By that time I had at least a reasonable knowledge of Chinese, though I still had to ask my wife what certain key phrases meant...)

       In the third Appendix, where Huang lists some acknowledgments, he calls Justin Stone by a Chinese name, adding the English name in parentheses. The Chinese name is Shi Dong 石東, the two characters meaning ‘stone’ and ‘east’ respectively. Shi is an existing Chinese family name, and Dong is a plausible first name.  If we rearrange the characters to put the first and last names in the usual Western order (‘Dong Shi’), they mean ‘Oriental Stone’ or ‘Eastern Stone.’ Very appropriate, given Justin’s intense study and assimilation of Oriental meanings and values.

       I have no way of knowing whether it was Wen-Shan Huang himself who gave Justin this name, but it is a reasonable guess. Western students of Chinese things often receive a name from their Chinese teacher. (I did.) And there is a technical detail of ‘Shi Dong’ which adds to my suspicion that Teacher Huang himself gave this name to Teacher Stone. In giving names to foreigners, the Chinese like to select Chinese syllables which are not only meaningful but more or less resemble the original sound of the person’s name. In Southern Chinese speech, ‘Shi Dong’ would likely be pronounced ‘Si Dong,’ or if pronounced very fast – as is usual – ‘S-dong.’ To Chinese ears that would sound very close to ‘Stone.’ And Wen-Shan Huang was of South Chinese origin.

       I don’t know if Justin actually used this Chinese name much. (Incidentally, in the older spelling common in those days, 'Shi Dong’ would have been ‘Shih Tung.’) But maybe there are other students out there who, like me, have been curious as to what his Chinese name might be. If somebody does know of another attested  Chinese name for Justin Stone, please do let me know!

Lloyd Haft

January 2015