The Tao of Wu Page 2

  This is a book of Wisdom—an accumulation of songs, parables, meditations, and experiences to help manifest that truth in your life. Wisdom is what shows those in darkness the Light, what reveals the path or the Way. It’s what we all need to live. The sutras of the Buddha teach that without wisdom there is no gain. In the Bible’s Book of Proverbs, King Solomon chooses wisdom over all the other gifts that God offers him—long life, riches, fame—but through wisdom achieved these gifts and many more, including seven hundred wives. In Islam’s Divine Mathematics, we learn that Wisdom is the Two after One, which is Knowledge—it is proof of knowledge, reflection of knowledge, knowledge in action. In my life, all these understandings of wisdom have proven true.

  Krishna said that you can study all day, pray all day, chant all day, but you’ll get to Heaven faster if you hang with wise men. I’ve been blessed by wise men my whole life—whether it was my cousin GZA, who first taught me Mathematics, my Chinese brother Sifu, who teaches me kung fu, or the philosophy students I met in Athens, the villagers I shared mud huts with in Africa, the audio inventors I worked with in Switzerland, the film directors in Hollywood, the mullahs of Egypt. The kind of artist that I am, I tend to meet people who want to show me something, and I’m always down to learn. In the Wu-Tang Clan, I’m known as the Abbot—which, like Sifu, means “teacher”—but a real teacher is also a student, someone who never stops learning.

  The Book of Proverbs says that King Solomon sought wisdom from the cradle to the grave. That’s a way of saying he sought rebirth. Just as you must come through a woman’s womb to attain physical birth, so must you come through Wisdom to achieve mental birth. And like childbirth, Wisdom often comes with pain. Pain, joy, fear—all have borne in me wisdom, which, like water, is an ever flowing spring from a bottomless ocean, a flow of life that takes the shape of any vessel, that reveals itself in all bodies and all moments. For Wisdom is the Way.

  You’ve been given the chance to hear the true and

  living

  So do the knowledge, son, before you do the wisdom.

  —RZA, “A DAY TO GOD IS1,000 YEAR S”

  FIRST PILLAR OF WISDOM

  THE CALL

  From the heart of Medina

  to the head of Fort Greene

  Now-Y-C: Now I See Everything

  —R ZA , “N. Y. C. EVERYTHING”

  Let the caller and the called disappear; be lost in the call.

  —RUMI

  In every story and life, there’s a call. In the Book of Exodus, it comes to Moses after he leaves Egypt as a shepherd: One of his sheep gets away, he goes looking for it on a mountain, and he hears a voice—God calling to him. In the Koran, it comes to Muhammad after he’s had kids and has lived a full, righteous life: He’s forty years old and meditating in a cave, and he hears a voice— Allah calling him to be a prophet. Or look at San Te, in the film Thirty-sixth Chamber: He’s out in the country-side rebelling against the Manchu government and sees a dude break a box of fish open with his bare hands. He asks him, “How’d you do that?’ and the guy says, “It’s kung fu; I learned it at Shaolin.” That one word, Shaolin, was a call to San Te—what sent him to seek knowledge, become a monk, and spread the wisdom of kung fu around the world.

  I believe the call can come to anyone, at any time. I know because it came to me, one night in a Staten Island housing project, in July of 1976.

  I was born Robert Fitzgerald Diggs, in Brownsville, Brooklyn, to one of the biggest families in New York. My mother had eleven kids, so she’s responsible for thirty-five, forty people. My great-uncle had eight children—one of whom would become Ol’ Dirty Bastard—so that sprouted another forty, fifty people, and it goes on from there. Through marriage and bloodline, we spread across all five boroughs. Part of the reason is we were scattered from the beginning.

  My family broke up when I was three years old. In my last memory of my father, he’s holding me in one hand and a hammer in the other, smashing up the furniture. Since my mother couldn’t afford to raise the five of us herself, she sent us away, and I went off to live with her father’s family in North Carolina. That’s where I got to know my uncle Hollis, the first wise man in my life.

  Hollis had that Solomon kind of wisdom. He was a doctor, a wealthy man with hundreds of acres of land, many adopted children, and a joy of life that followed him everywhere. He was the kind of man you’d have to call enlightened. Every one of my mom’s brothers and sisters had a different father, and her father’s family didn’t like my grandmother, who had my moms when she was sixteen. But Hollis had love for his brother’s daughter. He was always checking up on her, trying to put her in school—although she never went, and just kept having kids instead. But Hollis had a compulsion to take care of these kids, especially me.

  As soon as I got down to North Carolina, Hollis started teaching me things, setting aside books for me to read, saying, “Bobby, I want you to study.” Before I turned four, I was doing my older brother’s homework. From Hollis I learned about science and religion, but also poetry and spoken word. One of the first books he gave me was a collection of Mother Goose rhymes—which I started memorizing immediately—and he was always going around saying these strange verses.

  “Never cry when a hearse goes by,” he’d say. “Because you may be the next to die. They’ll cover you with a cold white sheet. They’ll put you down about six feet deep. It’s not so bad the first few weeks, until you start to mumble and creep, and the worms crawl in and the worms crawl out, and the ants play pinochle on your snout, your stomach turns the sickest green as pus runs out like thick whipped cream . . .” It was an old Southern folk rhyme—one of many Hollis used to say—and before long I started saying it myself.

  Hollis also took us to church every Sunday. It was an old Southern Baptist church where the services bugged me out. I loved the Bible stories I was reading, but I didn’t like this room where people were falling out, catching the Holy Ghost, slobbering all over the place. That happened in a lot of black churches, and I could immediately see it was phony. The screaming and moaning just didn’t feel right. The spirit of God sounded beautiful to me, but I quickly separated the experience of God from church. I just couldn’t see God in the fake-ass preachers or people wallowing on the ground. But I could see him in Hollis, my first real teacher.

  Then, when I was seven, my mother called us back to New York. Eight of us moved in with her at Marcus Garvey projects in Brooklyn. There, a different kind of education began.

  Our place was on Dumont Avenue, right across the street from Betsy Head Pool—a vicious, violent place, the kind you definitely weren’t coming back from with your sneakers. Kids from Brownsville projects, Tilden projects, Van Dyke projects, and Marcus Garvey used to hang out there, and two guys named Bighead Mike hung at the basketball court next door. One was Mike Tyson, the other was a drug dealer who later shot up our stoop trying to get a rival dealer (who happened to be my friend Chili Wop). My second night living there, I got jacked at the store by three teenagers. When I got home, my mother asked me what happened. When I told her, she grabbed me and a butcher’s knife and, still in her nightgown, walked me back to the store, looking for these motherfuckers. That was when I got a sense of the family with me now.

  But the fact is, at this point I was a nerd: deep into books, saying “Yes, sir, no, ma’am,” going to church every Sunday. I may have been staying in the hood, but I was living in my head. That changed in the summer of 1976.

  Something was happening in New York that year. There was a force in the air that didn’t have a name yet. And this one afternoon, it was alive at a block party in the Park Hill projects in Staten Island. I had come by to visit my cousin Gary, who would become the GZA. There, between the two buildings where kids played stickball, some DJs had plugged their systems into the lights. I remember walking in, hearing the sound, feeling the energy, and getting sucked in.

  It was DJ Jones, and the MCs were MC Punch and Quincy. They were on the mike saying just a couple of very simple rhymes, the same two or three lines all night long. That was rap way back then—just one or two phrases repeated. Like a mantra. And when I heard that beat and those rhymes, I felt a euphoria I can’t even explain. I ended up staying there through the night, not getting back to the house until eleven o’clock and getting an ass-whupping from my mother.

  Because in that parking lot, I heard the love of my life calling to me.

  The night was cooling off; I was dancing with a girl—me just eight years old and doing the wop, grinding up on her, freaking her. Then I heard one of those MCs.

  Back then, songs were sung. Instruments were played. This was the voice of a man speaking words over music. It sounds crazy now—I’ve written thousands and thousands of lyrics since then, even lyrics jumping off Hollis’s folk rhymes with the group Gravediggaz, on an album called Six Feet Deep. But that night, these were the first words I heard spoken over a beat. It’s like it says in the Gospel of John: “In the beginning was the Word.” And to me, those words weren’t just rap lyrics. They spoke to something inherent in me. If you ask my older brother, he’ll tell you I was reading Dr. Seuss in rhyme and rhythm at age three. But up until that night, I’d been living in my head. These words and this music, they were a call—a call to something deep inside me. They were a call to my soul. And it came in a simple party rap, a few lines that went on through the night.

  Dip-dip, dive

  So-so-cialize

  Clean out your ears

  Open your eyes

  Open your mind, body, and soul

  to God’s voice in whatever

  vessel that bears it. Let it pull

  you into the world.

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nbsp; ISLAND

  A PARABLE OF SOLITUDE

  I spent my formative years on an island—Staten Island—which is a blessing I’ve taken with me through life. Many cultures consider an island to be the ideal home. First, because you’re surrounded by water, which is life. Second, because you’re isolated from the masses, which allows you to find yourself, to develop inner strengths you couldn’t find anywhere else. An island shows you the true nature of life itself.

  In Staten Island, Wu-Tang niggas were set apart from all the influences and fads that were happening in the other four boroughs. I believe that while everything else in hip-hop culture was in constant flux, this island was nurturing something ancient. When you watch a movie like Godzilla, you see them go out to one of these tiny remote islands and find Mothra. It was the same way with us. A nine-man hip-hop crew based on Mathematics, chess, comics, and kung-fu flicks wasn’t springing up in the middle of a Manhattan art scene. Only on a remote island can something like King Kong grow to his full capacity.

  When I first bought a house out in New Jersey, I got it as a Wu house, but the rest of the members couldn’t stand being there—they wanted to be in the city. But for me this remote house, this island, was the best place to be. It’s a place to break off the antennas on top of buildings, to break away from those frequencies, to break away from everybody’s hustle and negativity. A place to reconnect with your own strength.

  My kung-fu teacher Sifu would come out to this house to train me. My uncle, who was also a martial artist, used to live and train there too. In fact, it was out in this island that he developed a style he called the Universal African Fighting Style. Eventually, he ended up being inducted into the Martial Arts Hall of Fame, all because he had developed something special—a combination of jujitsu, karate, and samurai.

  My uncle was inducted by Moses Powell, the jujitsu expert who founded the style known as Sanuces Ryu. Powell passed away recently, but he was one of the top black martial artists in the country. He trained CIA men, demonstrated for the United Nations, and taught warriors in many different fields. But when my uncle went to study with him, he told my uncle something important. He said, “What you got is unique.” He let him know that he was blessed, that he had it already within him.

  I advise everyone to find an island in this life. Find a place where this culture can’t take energy from you, sap your will and originality. Since anything physical can be mental, that island can be your home. Turn off the electromagnetic waves being forced upon you, the countless invisible forces coming at you all the time.

  Find an island;

  turn inward;

  discover your

  true strength.

  THE ART OF LISTENING

  A man thinks seven times before he speaks. It’s harder to make the glass than break the glass.

  SECOND PILLAR OF WISDOM

  KNOWLEDGE

  On the corner of my block there stood this old man

  A black immigrant from the land of Sudan

  Who used to tell stories to the children in the building

  But never had a dollar to keep his pocket filled in

  He bombed, he knew Deuteronomy the science of astronomy

  But didn’t know the basic principles of economy

  I say the wise man don’t play the role of a fool

  The first thing a man must obtain is Twelve Jewelz

  Knowledge Wisdom Understanding to help you achieve

  Freedom, Justice, Equality, Food, Clothing, and Shelter

  After this, Love, Peace, and Happiness

  He had the nappiest head, I told him total satisfaction

  Is to achieve one goal in the scheme of things

  He who works like a slave, eats like a king

  —“TWELVE JEWELZ,” GRAVEDIGGAZ

  When I stayed down South, Uncle Hollis was my teacher. In the streets of New York, we taught each other. Cousins, hustlers, gangsters—they were all part of my extended family, and each one taught me something. For example, when I was nine my cousin Vince turned me on to kung-fu flicks. He’d take me to the Forty-second Street theaters in Manhattan, where they played triple features for $1.50. That’s where I first saw the Shaw Brothers’ The Five Deadly Venoms, a film that sparked a lifelong obsession. By the time The Empire Strikes Back came out, in 1979, everyone at school was talking about that. I’d be saying, “You seen Five Deadly Venoms?” and no one knew what I was talking about.

  But in 1980, another cousin hooked me up with some different wisdom, a kind they weren’t talking about in school. And for me, this wisdom changed the whole world.

  All through 1978 and ’79, as I was living in Brownsville—writing rhymes, chasing hip-hop, digging kung-fu flicks—I kept looking forward to trips down South. I was hoping to get more one-on-one time with Uncle Hollis, to learn from this man who was like a father to me. Then after about a year of life in Brooklyn, my great- grandfather came over to bring me the news: Uncle Hollis passed away from a heart attack.

  That was the probably the last time I cried until my moms died, decades later. I mean, like, cry, cry, cry, like how they cry in the Bible—wailing, gnashing teeth. It was the most painful experience of my life, and it secured my poverty. When Hollis passed there was no more connection to that family. Now my mother was four months behind in the rent, landlords were telling us to get out. We were about to lose our home—to go from next-to-nothing to nothing.

  But right around that time, my cousin Daddy-O asked me something. He said, “Yo, you heard about those Twelve Jewels?”

  I didn’t know what he meant. Daddy-O was a street hustler, a cool guy, not a spiritual man. But it turned out he was also a Muslim, someone whose other name, his righteous name, was Born Knowledge. He explained that these weren’t physical jewels, like someone in the hood wore to display his wealth. They were mental jewels—principles, ways of life—and that by obtaining them you would find a different kind of wealth. He said the Jewels were part of something called “the Lessons”—teachings from the Nation of Islam.

  It would be a year or two before I heard about the Lessons or the Nation again. In fact, you’re not even supposed to learn the Twelve Jewels first, you’re supposed to learn them third—after the Supreme Mathematics and the Supreme Alphabet. But back then all I wanted to know about were those Jewels. And even today, the Jewels are the precepts I advocate most.

  The Jewels are as follows: Knowledge, Wisdom, Understanding, Freedom, Justice, Equality, Food, Clothing, Shelter, Love, Peace, and Happiness. Each jewel has its own profound meaning, and each one takes work and meditation to achieve, but they break down like a chain reaction.

  First a man gets Knowledge, which is knowledge of self. Then he gets Wisdom, which is the reflection of that knowledge. Then he gets Understanding, which is the power to act on Wisdom. With Understanding he sees that he has Freedom—that he has freed his dome from ignorance—which means he has free will. But Freedom operates under a law: the law of Justice. That means that I’m free to smack you in your face, but justice applies: There will be a reward or penalty for my actions. Therefore, I must deal with Equality, because all men are created equal. By showing Equality to one another we’re activating Freedom, Justice, and Equality—the fourth-through-sixth jewels.

  Now, those are all things that build a man’s character. And after you attain them, you’re able to strive for Food, Clothing, and Shelter—which also have both physical and mental meanings. Obviously, food is nourishment, shelter is a home, and clothing is protection. But mental food is food from the tree of life—wisdom, science, history, food for your mind. Mental clothing is how you carry yourself—the way you walk, the way you move and speak. If you have clothed yourself in righteousness, even the bummiest clothing has dignity. And mental shelter is the mind’s protection from the evil atmosphere—the lies and corruption of the outside world. So if you have these three jewels, your home is like a king’s even if you’re living in a shack.