“If You Meet a Tai Chi Master on the Road, Kill Him!”
The name of our main website, CloudWater.Com, comes from the Chinese word yun shui. This is the word used for the wandering monks so often depicted in Chinese stories and paintings.
These monks dedicated their lives to developing mindfulness through practices such as meditation, Qigong, and Tai Chi. Because of the high level of mental freedom and detachment they developed, they were called yun shui. Yun shui literally means “cloud-water”, referring to a line in a poem that symbolized this freedom as the ability “to float like clouds, to flow like water.”
In our courses on CloudWater.com, yun shui symbolizes the personal freedom and enlightenment that can be gained from the Chi Development practices. This mental and emotional freedom complements the physical benefits you’ll receive from your practice to create whole body/mind health. Certain “mindfulness” practices aid you in developing “yun shui mind”. These mindfulness practices are designed to give you an unprecedented level of freedom in both mind and body.
Our goal is to make you a “master”, but not in the conventional sense of a “Tai Chi or Qigong master” who is highly accomplished. Instead, we want to make you a master in the sense of “self-mastery” of your own mind and body.
To that end, there is a saying in Zen, another mindfulness tradition that has been a big influence on me. (I was a Zen student for a short while before starting Tai Chi.) And the saying is, “If you meet the Buddha, the Enlightened One, on the road, kill him!”
This outrageous statement is designed to shock Zen students so that they stop looking outside themselves for their enlightenment. Instead, this saying tells the Zen student to look inside themselves. In effect it says, “Dedicate yourself to your practice so that you yourself will become an Enlightened One, and stop projecting to those outside of you what you should be developing inside you!”
And to me, that’s the highest goal of Tai Chi and Qigong – to dedicate yourself to practice to become your own “master”.
