Gia-Fu Feng
Encyclopedia
Jane English
Jane English is a physicist, photographer, journalist and translator.English received her B.A. in Physics from Mount Holyoke College in 1964 and Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin–Madison for her work in high energy particle physics...
) of Taoist classics and a Taoist teacher in the United States
United States
The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
, associated with Alan Watts
Alan Watts
Alan Wilson Watts was a British philosopher, writer, and speaker, best known as an interpreter and popularizer of Eastern philosophy for a Western audience. Born in Chislehurst, he moved to the United States in 1938 and began Zen training in New York...
, Jack Kerouac
Jack Kerouac
Jean-Louis "Jack" Lebris de Kerouac was an American novelist and poet. He is considered a literary iconoclast and, alongside William S. Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg, a pioneer of the Beat Generation. Kerouac is recognized for his spontaneous method of writing, covering topics such as Catholic...
, The Beats and Abraham Maslow
Abraham Maslow
Abraham Harold Maslow was an American professor of psychology at Brandeis University, Brooklyn College, New School for Social Research and Columbia University who created Maslow's hierarchy of needs...
.
He was born in Shanghai in 1919 into a fairly wealthy family of some influence. His father was a prominent banker, one of the founders of the Bank of China
Bank of China
Bank of China Limited is one of the big four state-owned commercial banks of the People's Republic of China. It was founded in 1912 by the Government of the Republic of China, to replace the Government Bank of Imperial China. It is the oldest bank in China...
; his mother died when he was 16. He was educated privately in his own home in the classics of the Chinese tradition and in private boarding schools. He was for several months tutored by the wife of the British Consul-General. His family members were Buddhist. For the springtime holiday, they traveled to the ancestral tombs in Yuyao
Yuyao
Yuyao is a city in Zhejiang province, China, capital of Yuyao County, Ningbo. Administratively Yuyao is under the direct jurisdiction of Ningbo....
, in Chekiang Province, for the spring festivals. During the Japanese Occupation, Gia-Fu went to Kunming
Kunming
' is the capital and largest city of Yunnan Province in Southwest China. It was known as Yunnan-Fou until the 1920s. A prefecture-level city, it is the political, economic, communications and cultural centre of Yunnan, and is the seat of the provincial government...
in Free China to complete his Bachelor's Degree at Southwest Associated University in the liberal arts. Gia-Fu once commented that he had become a millionaire three times in his life, giving his money away each time. The first time was when he worked for the bank in Kunming.
After he returned to Shanghai
Shanghai
Shanghai is the largest city by population in China and the largest city proper in the world. It is one of the four province-level municipalities in the People's Republic of China, with a total population of over 23 million as of 2010...
in 1946, he left again in 1947, to go to the U.S. for a Master's Degree in international finance
International finance
International finance is the branch of economics that studies the dynamics of exchange rates, foreign investment, global financial system, and how these affect international trade. It also studies international projects, international investments and capital flows, and trade deficits. It includes...
at The Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania
University of Pennsylvania
The University of Pennsylvania is a private, Ivy League university located in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States. Penn is the fourth-oldest institution of higher education in the United States,Penn is the fourth-oldest using the founding dates claimed by each institution...
. After the communists took over China and the Korean War
Korean War
The Korean War was a conventional war between South Korea, supported by the United Nations, and North Korea, supported by the People's Republic of China , with military material aid from the Soviet Union...
began, U.S. policy kept many Chinese students from returning home. Then, when Chinese Communist Party policies made life for the Feng family and all of China less certain, his father advised him to stay in the U.S. During the Cultural Revolution
Cultural Revolution
The Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, commonly known as the Cultural Revolution , was a socio-political movement that took place in the People's Republic of China from 1966 through 1976...
, some members of his family were persecuted.
After this, he started wandering across the country “in an old jalopy.” He spent some time in a Quaker community, lived in a Georgia commune during the time of the Supreme Court decision in Brown v The Topeka Board of Education, and in the mid-fifties moved to the West Coast. There, he 'hung out' with Jack Kerouac
Jack Kerouac
Jean-Louis "Jack" Lebris de Kerouac was an American novelist and poet. He is considered a literary iconoclast and, alongside William S. Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg, a pioneer of the Beat Generation. Kerouac is recognized for his spontaneous method of writing, covering topics such as Catholic...
and other Dharma Bums, and began teaching Taoism
Taoism
Taoism refers to a philosophical or religious tradition in which the basic concept is to establish harmony with the Tao , which is the mechanism of everything that exists...
.
Initially he translated Chinese classics for Alan Watts at the American Academy of Asian Studies, the center where Alan Watts
Alan Watts
Alan Wilson Watts was a British philosopher, writer, and speaker, best known as an interpreter and popularizer of Eastern philosophy for a Western audience. Born in Chislehurst, he moved to the United States in 1938 and began Zen training in New York...
served as administrator primary teacher. Alan Watts was later to state that Gia-Fu was “The Real Thing,” sending aspiring Beat
Beat generation
The Beat Generation refers to a group of American post-WWII writers who came to prominence in the 1950s, as well as the cultural phenomena that they both documented and inspired...
-and-Hippie
Hippie
The hippie subculture was originally a youth movement that arose in the United States during the mid-1960s and spread to other countries around the world. The etymology of the term 'hippie' is from hipster, and was initially used to describe beatniks who had moved into San Francisco's...
Taoists to him.
Watts' championing of Gia-Fu as a genuine Taoist Adept substantially abetted sales of Gia-Fu and his wife, Jane English's classic Taoist philosophy, coffee-table picture-books, which were published by Random House
Random House
Random House, Inc. is the largest general-interest trade book publisher in the world. It has been owned since 1998 by the German private media corporation Bertelsmann and has become the umbrella brand for Bertelsmann book publishing. Random House also has a movie production arm, Random House Films,...
in many languages. Gia-Fu and Jane's books contained Jane's artistic black-and-white photos in conjunction with his outstanding calligraphy and readily understood wisdom translations. They initiated an important segment of what would become for the global book industry a highly popular, multicultural spirituality and philosophy genre. They also foreshadowed a trend toward multi-media usage in an emergent, classy, holistic marketplace.
California Institute of Integral Studies
California Institute of Integral Studies is a private institution of higher education founded in 1968 and based in San Francisco, California. It currently operates in three locations just south of the Civic Center district...
. This was part of a core sociocultural transformation that became known as the San Francisco Renaissance. Regarding that, Alan Watts stated, “I know what it is, but when you ask me, I don't. I am too close to what has happened to see it in proper perspective. I know only that between, say, 1958 and 1970 a huge tide of spiritual energy in the form of poetry, music, philosophy, painting, religion, communications techniques in radio, television, and cinema, dancing, theater, and general life-style swept out of this city and its environs to affect America and the whole world.”
Michael Murphy
Michael Murphy (author)
Michael Murphy is the co-founder of the Esalen Institute, a key figure in the Human Potential Movement and author of both fiction and non-fiction books on topics related to extraordinary human potential.- Biography :...
, a primary founder of Esalen Institute
Esalen Institute
Esalen Institute is a residential community and retreat in Big Sur, California, which focuses upon humanistic alternative education. Esalen is a nonprofit organization devoted to activites such as meditation, massage, Gestalt, yoga, psychology, ecology, and spirituality...
, was also a student at the AAAS during his Stanford student days. From this network, including the community of the Sri Aurobindo Ashram
Sri Aurobindo Ashram
The Sri Aurobindo Ashram was founded by Sri Aurobindo on the 24 November 1926 . At the time there were no more than 24 disciples in the Ashram...
in San Francisco, the seeds of Esalen were planted. Gia-Fu was drawn to Esalen by his close friend Dick Price. At Esalen, Gia-Fu served as accountant, “Keeper of the Baths” and Crazy Taoist, a few stories of which can be found in the entertaining and informative history of Esalen and birth of the human potential movement, The Upstart Spring.
During the early and mid-1960s Gia-Fu and Fritz Perls
Fritz Perls
Friedrich Salomon Perls , better known as Fritz Perls, was a noted German-born psychiatrist and psychotherapist of Jewish descent....
, arguably Esalen's key resident teacher during that era, had a difficult relationship, with Perls being the primary reason Gia-Fu left Esalen to found his own community in the Los Gatos hills. There, Gia-Fu held Perls in high esteem, and was very distraught when Perls died in 1970. Perls' Gestalt Therapy
Gestalt therapy
Gestalt therapy is an existential/experiential form of psychotherapy that emphasizes personal responsibility, and that focuses upon the individual's experience in the present moment, the therapist-client relationship, the environmental and social contexts of a person's life, and the self-regulating...
and method of enlightenment became a primary influence in Gia-Fu's later work. Gia-Fu also viewed Virginia Satir
Virginia Satir
Virginia Satir was an American author and psychotherapist, known especially for her approach to family therapy and her work with Systemic Constellations...
, a famous resident teacher of Esalen, and her practice of Family therapy
Family therapy
Family therapy, also referred to as couple and family therapy, family systems therapy, and family counseling, is a branch of psychotherapy that works with families and couples in intimate relationships to nurture change and development. It tends to view change in terms of the systems of...
as a primary influence in his own advancement of such, which he termed “Cultural Therapy.”
To illustrate how different people perceived Gia-Fu, one person writes: Toward the end of the 1960s Gia-Fu gained a great degree of notoriety as a Patriarch of the Countercultural Free Love
Free Love
Free Love may refer to:*Free love, a social movement that rejects marriage, which is seen as a form of social bondage, especially for women*"Free Love", a song by Morphine from their 1995 album Yes...
movement. As a hippie-beaded, Chinese Guru and Taoist Adept, he became popular as a focus for newspapers and magazines around California. At the time, Taoist-Buddhist Yoga was not popularly known, and Gia-Fu effectively acted as the primary agent or Master in America teaching such. He founded his own center of Taoist studies in the Santa Cruz Mountains and called it Stillpoint, after T. S. Eliot
T. S. Eliot
Thomas Stearns "T. S." Eliot OM was a playwright, literary critic, and arguably the most important English-language poet of the 20th century. Although he was born an American he moved to the United Kingdom in 1914 and was naturalised as a British subject in 1927 at age 39.The poem that made his...
's The Waste Land
The Waste Land
The Waste Land[A] is a 434-line[B] modernist poem by T. S. Eliot published in 1922. It has been called "one of the most important poems of the 20th century." Despite the poem's obscurity—its shifts between satire and prophecy, its abrupt and unannounced changes of speaker, location and time, its...
. Gia-Fu and Stillpoint soon proved to be a magnet for aspiring Indian Yoga-meets-Chinese Tao seekers. His biographer views this phase of his life very differently, understanding that Gia-Fu shunned guru-type associations and yearned to create a community where people lived simply, honestly, together in nature. He loved to call himself a charlatan.
On Christmas Day, 1970, Gia-Fu and Jane English were married in Mill Valley in a ceremony performed by Alan Watts. In 1972 Gia-Fu and Jane moved Stillpoint to Manitou Springs, Colorado, purchasing a large, old house at the foot of Barr Trail
Barr Trail
Barr Trail is a popular trail that climbs from Manitou Springs, Colorado, USA to the top of Pikes Peak. The trail is rated more difficult because of its long sustained grade rising to an especially high elevation...
leading up to Pikes Peak
Pikes Peak
Pikes Peak is a mountain in the Front Range of the Rocky Mountains, west of Colorado Springs, Colorado, in El Paso County in the United States of America....
. From there, he and Jane finished the translation of the Chuang Tzu. He became something of a legend as the Chinese Master who would walk up daily along the Pike's Peak Cog Railway track.
The following is another example of the differing perspectives on Gia-Fu: In the spring of 1978, after an intensive two years of challenging his students (using a great amount of what is traditionally called in China, Lung Ch'i, roaring in a compassionate and awakening way) yet not finding them suitable for the engagement of what in Chan/Zen tradition is termed Dharma transmission
Dharma transmission
Dharma transmission refers to "the manner in which the teaching, or Dharma, is passed from a Zen master to their disciple and heir...
, Gia-Fu enlisted the assistance of a Tibetan Buddhist Rimpoche to stay for 100 days at Stillpoint. During that period, he suggested to James Hart, a Professor of Asian Studies at the University of Illinois
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
The University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign is a large public research-intensive university in the state of Illinois, United States. It is the flagship campus of the University of Illinois system...
, who was translating the I-Ching with him, to invite a promising student of his to come live with Gia-Fu. Now known as Sifu Dai, Gia-Fu engaged a formal process of Sealing Heart-Mind or Dharma Transmission with him, declaring him to his students at the time as the “only truly Empty man I have ever met.” By this period, Gia-Fu's students were primarily Germans, other Europeans, and the mysterious Lasso, a young American who became Gia-Fu's favorite and protege in the early 1980s. During the last eight years of his life, Gia-Fu devoted most of his teaching effort to holding Tao Camps in Europe, Canada, Australia, and the final incarnation of the Stillpoint ranch near Wetmore, Colorado, teaching T'ai chi and Shing-i
Xingyiquan
Xingyiquan is one of the major "internal" or Wudang styles of Chinese martial arts. The word translates approximately to "Form/Intention Boxing", or "Shape/Will Boxing", and is characterized by aggressive, seemingly linear movements and explosive power...
and, more broadly, the Tao
Tao
Dao or Tao is a Chinese word meaning 'way', 'path', 'route', or sometimes more loosely, 'doctrine' or 'principle'...
.
Gia-Fu died in 1985, most likely of emphysema. He left behind him several unpublished manuscripts including the I-Ching, The Yellow Emperor's Classic of Internal Medicine, and a partial, stream-of-consciousness autobiography. He left his matters in the care of Margaret Susan Wilson, friend and Stillpoint attorney. Sue Bailey, his partner at the time of his death (he and Jane parted company earlier, but never divorced) had the I Ching published in Australia. When Margaret Susan died in 1991, his estate passed to Carol Wilson, Margaret's sister. Carol's award-winning biography, Still Point of the Turning World: The Life of Gia-fu Feng, was released by Amber Lotus Publishing in April, 2009. also http://www.carolannwilson.info Gia-Fu's translation of the Tao Te Ching remains popular and widely available. It includes photos by his wife, Jane English
Jane English
Jane English is a physicist, photographer, journalist and translator.English received her B.A. in Physics from Mount Holyoke College in 1964 and Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin–Madison for her work in high energy particle physics...
. Like his translation of Chuang Tsu, the translation was a collaboration between them with participation by other students.