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Kwan Sai Hung, the real storyFrom: Michael Winn
Subject: General
Date/Time 2005-04-05 09:52:15
Remote IP: 66.32.111.200
MessageReply to Jsrit, from below link "We all gsossip, don't we?":
My advice about consulting your shen to find out who is the best teacher for you at Omega this summer still stands.
But I will go deeper into Kwan. He is an interesting character, i really like his playfulness. At the time I studied with him, he was a strongman type surrounded by "weaklings" who wanted to become strong. They thought they needed to protect him from others, and eventually his main lieutenant refused to let me study further with Kwan on the grounds that I might write a book about him.
I was amused, as I didn't really want to go farther into his martial practices anyway. But they later blocked ron diana and other healing tao students from study with him also, based on a general paranoia.
I was just warning that you should not mold your expectations of Kwan based on a novel by one of his students. And his weakling-paranoid students wanted to believe he was God and had studied with every great tai chi master in China. By elevating him, they were elevating themselves. They put it in his brochure. From my point of view, it was a lie and false advertising. Kwan should not have allowed it; but he is a trickster, he is careful never to make those claims for himself, he lets others make them and take the responsbility for their illusions.
When you study with a new teacher, best to enter neutral, with no expectations or illusions. Impossible for most of us, but it helps to try, otherwise you can waste too much time chasing your expectations or illusions about someone else.
You might get something different from Kawn than I got. I noticed he relied heavily on physical breathing methods - a short tai chi chi kung form that had a total of 14 inhalations......
On the other hand, Kwan has apparently used these post-natal methods to rejuvenate himself - he looked 45 at the age of 65. That was over a decade ago. So where he is at now may be a totally different place. At the time his meditations were clearly borrowed from hinduism, he even had us chanting OM, etc. That is partly what tipped me off that he was not into high level taoist meditation.
Kwan has a wonderful spirit, and lots of martial skills. But he got some of them from trading with Ken Cohen. Ken studied Chinese, but never spoke Chinese with Kwan. One day they were ina restaurant, and the chinese waitress said to Kwan, "where are you from? You don't look Chinese.".
Kwan relief to her in Chinese, "I am half-German".
Ken slyly said nothing. He later related the story to my wife, who studied with Kwan as well. You can even find details in his third novel hinting at this truth. It is the most autobiographical, including his years spent working in Chinese restaurants in California, liek many immigrant chinese. But Kwan had a dream to create a different life, possibly fed by kung fu novels and a gift for story telling.
When you look at Kwan, it is easy to see the stocky heavy german build that is NOT typically chinese (except for the northern Chinese/manchurian types, but they are much taller than Kwan). This is not a criticism of Kwan, or change who he is or what he's teaching, but it should open the discerning student to another layer of his reality.
And that's good.
michael
- Kwan Sai Hung, the real story: (7720) Michael Winn (1588) - - 2005-04-05 09:52 am
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