The Tao of Wu Read online

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA

  Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario M4P

  2Y3, Canada (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.) Penguin Books Ltd,

  80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England • Penguin Ireland, 25 St Stephen’s Green,

  Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd) • Penguin Group (Australia), 250

  Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia (a division of

  Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd) • Penguin Books India Pvt Ltd,

  11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi-110 017, India • Penguin Group

  (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, North Shore 0632, New Zealand

  (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd) • Penguin Books (South Africa)

  (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa

  Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  Copyright © 2009 by RZA Productions Inc.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or

  distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not

  participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s

  rights. Purchase only authorized editions.

  Published simultaneously in Canada

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  RZA (Rapper).

  The Tao of Wu / the RZA, with Chris Norris.

  p. cm.

  Ebook ISBN: 9781101150955

  1. RZA (Rapper). 2. Rap musicians—United States—Biography.

  I. Norris, Chris. II. Title.

  ML420.R984A

  782.421649092—dc22

  [B]

  While the author has made every effort to provide accurate telephone numbers and

  Internet addresses at the time of publication, neither the publisher nor the author

  assumes any responsibility for errors, or for changes that occur after publication.

  Further, the publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any

  responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

  penguinrandomhouse.com

  Version_2

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Foreword

  Introduction

  FIRST PILLAR OF WISDOM - THE CALL

  ISLAND - A PARABLE OF SOLITUDE

  THE ART OF LISTENING

  SECOND PILLAR OF WISDOM - KNOWLEDGE

  FEAR

  HORROR

  CHESS LESSONS

  THIRD PILLAR OF WISDOM - CHAMBERS

  HEART - A STREET PARABLE OF COURAGE

  THE HEART SUTRA

  HOLY WARRIORS - A STREET PARABLE OF FAITH

  WIT - A PRISON PARABLE OF VERBAL KUNG FU

  FOURTH PILLAR OF WISDOM - DARKNESS AND LIGHT

  ABOVE THE RUCKUS - A GUIDE TO KNOWLEDGE OF SELF

  FIFTH PILLAR OF WISDOM - ENTER THE ABBOT

  CHESS VERSES - THE AESTHETICS OF STRATEGY

  THE OTHER CHEEK - A MEDITATION ON KUNG FU AND CHRISTIAN MERCY

  GANGSTA CHI - A MEDITATION ON ART AND VIOLENCE

  PEACE

  IDEA TRAPS

  SIXTH PILLAR OF WISDOM - DISSOLUTION

  HIP-HOP KOANS

  BLING AND NOTHINGNESS - ON FAKE JEWELS AND FALSE PROPHETS

  MAN AND ANIMAL

  SEVENTH PILLAR OF WISDOM - GODS AND HEROES

  SOUL - A MEDITATION

  DIGITAL BRAIN - A PARABLE OF HUMAN INTELLIGENCE

  DIGITAL CULTURE - ART IN THE AGE OF ONES AND ZEROS

  DIGITAL DJINNS - A CAUTIONARY TALE

  NOVICE MIND - A GUIDE TO CREATIVE RESURRECTION

  CONCLUSION

  THE MEANING

  THE UNIVERSAL CHANGER

  FOREWORD

  by Sifu Shi Yan Ming

  Amituofo.

  I congratulate the world for this beautiful gift, wisdom from the life and travels of RZA, wisdom I truly believe draws from the deepest pools of human thought and spirit.

  I was born in China’s Henan Province, and when I was five years old, my parents left me at the Shaolin temple. There, I grew up and became the most handsome of the thirty-fourth generation of Shaolin warrior monks, the world’s oldest practitioners of the Cha’an Buddhist philosophy and martial art known as kung fu. In 1992, on a Shaolin U.S. tour, I defected to the United States to share Shaolin wisdom with the world. With no money, no possessions, and no English, I made my way from San Francisco to New York, where I founded the USA Shaolin temple. Not long after that, I met the RZA, whose life I found very similar to my own. In fact, I felt I had known him forever.

  We met in 1995, at a party for the release of Liquid Swords. RZA was dressed very simply, but when we were introduced, I could feel a profound presence. To a Cha’an Buddhist, wisdom is expressed in the physical as well as the mental—there’s no difference—and it’s the same with the RZA. You feel his wisdom in what he says, how he stands, how he moves. We shook hands and hugged—like a hip-hop hug—and began to talk.

  At that time I didn’t know much English—and he speaks very fast—but, as strange as this sounds, I completely understood what he was saying. We talked about the Shaolin temple’s history and philosophy, and I was very impressed with his knowledge. We talked about music, film, and science, and I could feel such understanding, such intelligence. I had met many Americans by this time, but the RZA was different. He was American—born in the United States—but he had truly absorbed Buddhist and Taoist philosophies in his own way, with an open mind and an open heart. That’s how we communicated then—mind-to-mind, heart-to-heart—and it’s how we communicate to this day.

  I travel to many countries, meet many people from around the world, but most of them cannot have that kind of open mind and open heart. A lot of people think that if they believe in Buddha, they cannot go to church. If they believe in Muhammad, they cannot be in a monastery. But there’s no difference. You are the monastery—always, wherever you are—and this is something the RZA has understood for a long, long time.

  Before I met him, I mostly listened to Buddhist music. Now I listen to the Wu-Tang Clan every chance I get. (Whasup! Represent!) Wu-Tang is known as the most famous group ever to practice rap as a martial art, which, in the RZA’s case, happens to be the absolute truth. In kung fu, martial art and philosophy are the same, no difference. When the RZA makes music, it’s just like that—his philosophy and music are as one. Some of his sounds and lyrics might seem simple, but they’re not. He’s a very funny guy, but his understanding is also very deep. And even when he’s not making music, that philosophy is in everything he says and does—like a true Cha’an Buddhist.

  In Buddhism, the highest and most valuable number is seven. When a wise monk passes away, the monastery builds a pagoda in his memory. Some pagodas get one floor, some get two or three. But if the man was known as the wisest and most enlightened of all monks, his pagoda gets seven. I believe the seven pillars of wisdom in this book are like the seven floors of an exalted monk’s pagoda. They represent the wisdom, knowledge, and enlightenment of a soul that has never stopped training, never stopped learning.

  At my temple, I give my disciples, students, and followers around the world a few basic messages: (1) Life is beautiful
; (2) More Chi! Train harder! (3) Be honest with yourself and be honest with others; (4) Respect yourself, respect others; (5) 100% express your beautiful life. When the RZA began studying with me, I never had to tell him this. He already knew.

  In case you’re wondering, How is his kung fu? Fantastic! Beautiful! How could it be otherwise? He’s the RZA: different from the others. His spirit drives his actions, and those actions change the world.

  Amituofo,

  Sifu Shi Yan Ming

  Founder and Abbot of the USA Shaolin Temple

  New York City, 2009

  All Praise due to Allah, Lord of all the Worlds.

  Supreme Peace and Blessing. This Book of Wisdom is Volume Two of the Wu-Tang Manual and a second installment to the chambers of ideas of the Wu-Tang as told by the Abbot.

  In the Divine Mathematics, Knowledge is 1: the foundation of all things. Wisdom is 2: the manifestation of Knowledge. It is knowledge in action. Manifestation=Man Fest=Speak Action is action.

  Wisdom is the separation that begins life. It is the explosion that created the universe. It is the division of every cell that multiplies to form a single life. It is the partition God renders when he says, “Let there be Light”—separating light from dark, sky from ocean. It is the detachment of man from his rib to create woman.

  Wisdom is woman. It is the womb one must pass through to become mentally born. Knowledge and Wisdom give birth to Understanding just as man and woman give birth to a child.

  Wisdom is the word. It is the way to make Knowledge known. “In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God and the word became flesh.” God’s Knowledge was made manifest through words to create life.

  Wisdom is reflection in time. Knowledge is static and timeless. It is the moment before the Big Bang, the explosion brings and borns Understanding through the fourth dimension, which is time.

  Wisdom is water. It is the flood that drowned the wicked in the time of Noah. It is the sea that drowned the Pharaoh’s army when Moses used it to part the waters. It is the universal solvent into which all things dissolve in time.

  WISDOM n.

  1: the effectual mediating principle or personification of God’s will in the creation of the world . . . 2a(1): accumulated information: philosophic or scientific learning . . . (2): accumulated lore or instinctive adaptation . . . b: the intelligent application of learning : ability to discern inner qualities and essential relationships . . . 3a: an embodiment of wisdom . . . b: a wise attitude or course of action . . . c: a person of superior intellectual attainments . . . 4: the teachings of the ancient wise men (as of Babylon, Egypt, or Palestine) relating to the art of living and sometimes to philosophical problems concerning the universe, man, or God and forming a class of literature represented in the Hebrew books of Job, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, Ecclesiasticus, and the Wisdom of Solomon

  —Webster’s Dictionary, THIRD NEW INTERNATIONAL EDITION

  INTRODUCTION

  TRAVELS

  The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.

  —L AO - T Z U

  If you live in the projects, you don’t leave them much. Everything is right there: laundry, grocery store, check-cashing place—all set up so you can live your whole life in a four-block radius. I’ve lived in at least ten different projects in New York—Van Dyke in Brownsville, Marcus Garvey in East New York, Park Hill and Stapleton in Staten Island—and they all taught me something, even if they were lessons no one would choose.

  Imagine you’re eight years old, going to the store with thirty-five cents to buy a pack of Now and Laters and a bag of sunflower seeds. You get there, three teenagers choke you with an umbrella, take your thirty-five cents, and buy cigarettes. That’s the projects—math and economics class on every block. Imagine you live with eighteen relatives in a two-bedroom apartment across the street from the courthouse and county jail. You wonder why the jail and courthouse are so close to the projects; when you get locked up there a few years later, you learn. You learn civics, government, law, and science every day—especially science. Because the projects, like jail, is a science project. One no one expects you to leave.

  I did leave—moved out of Stapleton projects at twenty-three, in 1992—and not long after that, my brothers in the Wu-Tang Clan and I became citizens of the world. But those project lessons are still with all of us, one of the foundations for wisdom. They’re the darkness that lets us see light.

  I’ll give you an example.

  In 1978, my mother, who worked in a numbers house, hit the number for about four g’s—enough money to move eight of us into a three-bedroom place on Dumont Avenue. This was in Marcus Garvey, a violent ghetto, but for a minute there we felt like the white kids on the TV show Eight Is Enough: eight kids with toys, bikes, and a new home. But before we could move in, the place was robbed. All our stuff—toys, bikes, furniture—was gone, right before Christmas. We were heartbroken but moved in anyway, and before long I got to know our next-door neighbor, Chili-Wop.

  Chili-Wop was the coolest motherfucker you’d ever meet. He was a drug dealer with muscles, gold chains, mad style, and a crazy way of talking. “Whasuuup!” he’d yell. “It’s Chili-Waaawp, nigga, whaaaat!” For some reason, Chili-Wop took a liking to me. He started taking me on trips—drug runs, really, although I didn’t know it at the time—and began looking out for me. Chili-Wop became an ally, a protector in a violent world. Finally, after I’d lived there for nearly two years, he told me something. “When y’all first moved in, I robbed your house, maaan. I never knew you was gonna be a cool family.” When he told me, there wasn’t much I could do about it, and by then he was like my best friend—or as they say in the hood nowadays, my big homie—so in a way it was cool.

  That’s just one hood lesson: Your allies can arrive as enemies, blessings as a curse.

  When I was ten, Chili-Wop was sixteen. By the time I was eleven, Chili-Wop’s crew was shot up by rival drug dealers, and he ended up in jail. That was life on Dumont Avenue, which I now see for what it was: hell—a hell of violence, addiction, misery, and humiliation. These forces were in even the air and water; in times of heavy rain, human excrement floated by under our basement-level bedroom, where me and my five brothers slept on two twin beds. No one chooses to live like that, but I now see that even that experience—living where shit floats—was a source of precious wisdom.

  It’s like a story from the life of Da’Mo, the Indian monk who brought Zen Buddhism to China. One day, Da’Mo was talking with another monk, who began to denounce mud—saying how dirty it was, how a man should stay clean, keep away from mud. But Da’Mo observed that the lotus grows on mud: “How can you defame mud when such a beautiful flower grows from it?” he asked. Da’Mo’s teachings reached everywhere—from the samurai class of Japan to the kung fu monks of Shaolin to the housing projects of Staten Island. I apply Da’Mo’s wisdom to the projects. I believe the misery there brought forth a certain flower that wouldn’t have grown anywhere else.

  I was thirteen years old when I saw the kung-fu film The Thirty-sixth Chamber of Shaolin, the story of a man who trains to be a Shaolin monk then leaves the temple to teach the world their style of kung fu. Nine years later, I formed the Wu-Tang Clan—and we left Staten Island to teach the world our style of hip-hop. Eight years after that, I came to the original Shaolin, saw the real Wu-Tang Mountain—and saw that it was all part of one whole. I saw that we really were what we’d always claimed to be: men of Wu-Tang.

  Shaolin is about as far from Staten Island as you can get. It’s on Mount Song, the center peak of Taoism’s Five Great Mountains in China, a sacred place, high above the banks of the Yellow River. There on the mountain’s western edge stands the Shaolin temple: low and sturdy, red walls and round windows, the same courtyard where monks have practiced kung fu ever since Da’Mo visited in the sixth century.

  Shaolin
is seven thousand miles from New York City. Wu-Tang Mountain is even farther. Five thousand feet above sea level, a five-hour bus ride through winding mountain roads, and a home to Taoist monasteries going back fifteen hundred years. But when we stood on this mountain and looked up at the range of peaks called the Nine Dragons, this is what we saw: three mountains forming a giant W—the symbol I chose to represent a crew of nine men, nine years earlier. It was as plain as day, and has been for a million years. But some things aren’t visible until you’re truly ready to see them.

  I stood there with Shi Yan Ming, a man I call Sifu, which means “teacher.” He’s a thirty-fourth-generation Shaolin monk who defected to the United States the same year we formed Wu-Tang. As we looked over the mountains, Sifu and I talked about the original Wu-Tang—how it was founded by a monk named Zhang Sanfeng, who had been banished to this mountain for causing violence and doing wrong. Zhang Sanfeng came to the mountain to meditate and find God and eventually founded the Wu-Tang. Our crew had lots of meanings for the words Wu-Tang—“Witty, Unpredictable Talent and Natural Game,” “We Usually Take Another Nigga’s Garments”—in China, I learned another, the original one: “Man who is deserving of God.”

  So in that sense, we are all Wu-Tang. You are Wu-Tang. If you ever stood on a mountain or by an ocean and felt a deep connection, a vast infinite presence inside you, you felt it: what Taoists call Oneness, Muslims call Allah, others call God. That’s what I felt on Wu-Tang Mountain, but it’s also what I felt in Staten Island and even Dumont Avenue in Brooklyn—only dimmer, quieter. Allah’s truth is within us all, all the time—a seed waiting for light to help it grow. Wisdom is the Light.