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MY STORY WITH SIFU
A long winding road brings me to this page. I must
confess I had no idea I was beginning it when in 1978 I first walked up
the long flight of stairs in the little building on Sixth Avenue which
housed The Tai Chi Chuan Center. I could never have known how my body,
my mind, my whole life would be changed. When I rounded the corner on
the landing and walked into the room, Master Chu had just begun to lead
a group of his students in the Tai Chi form. I remember stopping in my
tracks. I had never seen anything so powerful and so beautiful before.
Immediately thereafter, when I first attended
class with Master Chu I was impressed with his complete lack of
pretense. He was totally informal and available to his students, and he
had a great sense of humor. I had tried several martial arts styles in
the past but I was really put off by the repressive structure of the
classes and the militaristic attitudes of the instructors. This school
and this teacher were completely different.
I came to tai chi chuan as a typical American who
was feverishly trying to stay in shape with weight training,
isometrics, calisthenics and all the other types of hard body systems.
Every now and then Master Chu reviewed my stiff, tense physique and
gave me a poke followed by a big laugh, "You look like a piece of
concrete! You can’t move!" Tai Chi changed all of that, as it did
the chronic low back problem I had been struggling with for years.
The atmosphere of the school was contagious for
me. I took all the classes I could afford and though I never fought in
tournaments, I trained with Master Chu’s champion fighters every
week. Those were some awesome guys to be around.
I will hold myself back from going on at length
about the virtues of true Tai Chi Chuan "soft style" fighting, but let
me at least draw this analogy: Imagine two powerful bulls squaring off
and charging into each other, force on force. That is "hard style"
fighting. Now imagine a matador working another charging bull with a
cape, moving with the animal just out of reach of the attacking horns,
"sticking" to him until the exact opportunity arrives to lunge with the
sword. That is "soft style" fighting. The skilled Tai Chi Chuan fighter
is a mighty and beautiful thing to behold.
Master Chu’s champions were grounded in a
secret discipline which he taught only to them and the people who
trained with them. Nei Kung was the source of the speed, flexibility,
striking power and super human endurance which put them several cuts
above the hard style traditionalists they would encounter in
tournaments.
In the early 80’s, however, Master Chu
decided society at large needed this fantastic source of energy and
conditioning to heal and help all people and so he began conducting
classes for the general public.
By this time I knew Master Chu fairly well and he
was aware that I was an aspiring writer. In 1983, he asked me to help
him draft a letter related to a complicated business entanglement. I
agreed to do it and between the two of us we crafted a highly effective
response to the matter which resolved the issue completely. Master Chu
was very pleased. Soon after, he approached me with the idea of
assisting him with a much bigger project.
Beyond the classes and workshops that he was now
holding in Nei Kung, Master Chu wanted to put on paper a record of his
synthesis of this remarkable system. He wanted to delineate it exactly,
clearly, in an understandable and precise way. He wanted to write The
Book of Nei Kung. This had never been done before in either English or
Chinese, ever. He offered me the full range of classes at the school
free in exchange for helping him put this knowledge into English.
For the next two years I took virtually every
class I could during the week and every Saturday Master Chu established
the following routine for us: From the early morning until noon I
attended the training classes with the other students. At noon, a light
meal was ordered in, and then the rest of the day, he and I worked on
the book. My job was to pick his brain and record, reference and make
sense in English out of all of the various concepts and principles he
spoke on. I soon found my western mind stretching across a cultural as
well as a linguistic divide.
Throughout, Master Chu was patient and relaxed,
bringing his own special brand of scientific method and humor to bear
on everything. Slowly, he led me to an understanding of this high art
which represented his life’s work. These sessions opened up whole
new subjects for me that I never even knew existed and, needless to
say, inspired a voluminous amount of note taking and further reading on
my part.
Since Nei Kung was the foundation for the entire
system of Tai Chi Chuan as he conceived it, the range of subject matter
was formidable. It stretched from secret principles of physical
conditioning, to theories of fighting and martial art styles; from
Chinese history, medicine and acupuncture, to philosophy and meditation
technique; and finally to interpretation of the Tao Te Ching, which is
the seminal Taoist tract which started it all. The breadth of this
man’s knowledge was absolutely enormous. And so, consequently,
was the first draft of the book, which after two years of work, totaled
over four hundred pages.
Absolute accuracy and precision were paramount in
Master Chu’s mind. This book was to be both an explanation and a
practical workbook. In addition to the text, illustrations of the core
principles of alignment in the system had to be drawn. Also, each of
the ten postures had to be photographed and then delineated with exact
sequential instructions that would reflect the sequence of the
pictures.
This next phase of the project, as a consequence,
involved coordinating a small army of Master Chu’s family and
student volunteers to pull all of these conceptual elements together
and make them real. Eventually, after another year and a half, the
massive manuscript got boiled down to a sleek book of seventy-five
pages of the essence of Nei Kung.
On those Saturdays during the first couple of
years of writing, when we had finished our work for the day, Master Chu
would take me down to Chinatown for a meal at one of the many
restaurants where he is known simply as Sifu. Here, too, he was full of
information, always eager to explain any aspect of Chinese culture to
me from every day life to the most esoteric concepts of the great
sages. For me, this whole experience was far more than just assisting a
man with the text of a book, it was an education.
In 1986, the Book of Nei Kung was published. It
has been honored by both martial arts masters and laymen alike as a
ground breaking classic.
I stayed on with my classes with Master Chu for a
few more years after that until, as with all things, time and
circumstances took me elsewhere.
In 1992, I came to a fork in the road in my life.
Writing opportunities had brought me to Los Angeles and in the course
of business I made the acquaintance of a fellow New Yorker. Somewhere
in the middle of a conversation at lunch one day, he mentioned that he
had taken a great seminar in Chinese energy exercises in New York with
a Tai Chi master. He said he wished the teacher was in L.A. so that he
could study here. I asked him what the teacher’s name was and
when he said Master Chu I told him my whole story. We both flipped out
over the coincidence. He offered right then and there to pay me to
teach him Nei Kung.
Although I had been practicing Nei Kung faithfully
over the years, I never considered teaching it. I didn’t see
myself that way. I said I would love to try it, but that I would have
to get Master Chu’s permission. When I called to ask Master Chu
his response was simple and direct, "Yes. I certify you. Open a school
if you want." It was one of the proudest moments of my life.
I started teaching. From this one student, others
came; and by word of mouth, more came; and now several years later, I
have introduced literally hundreds of people to Nei Kung and Tai Chi.
So this is my story. I put it into the best words
I could, but we all know this: That no few lines of text can do justice
to the impact that the generous, knowledgeable and open minded Master
C. K. Chu has had on all of our lives. Through his genius in the
martial arts, as well as his example as a human being he deserves our
deep and heartfelt gratitude. Thank you, Sifu. Go with Nature.
James Borrelli
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