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The Sages and the Secret Traditions
An Interview with Wu Jyh Cheng
By Ely Britto
Wu Jyh Cheng is the son of a respected Chinese Taiji master in Brazil: the elder Master Wu is about 80 years old, while his son (who uses the name Cheng to distinguish himself from his father) is in his 40s, an acupuncturist and Yijing teacher. He runs a Daoist Society (the Sociedade Taoista) in Cosme Velho, Rio de Janeiro. Cheng has written two books: I Ching - A Alquimia dos Numeros (Yijing - The Alchemy of Numbers, 1993) and Tai Chi - A Alquimia do Movimento (Taiji - The Alchemy of Movement, 1997). Both are published by Objetiva Editora in Rio de Janeiro; neither has been translated into English. The following interview gives a unique opportunity to discover how the Yijing is thought of and presented by a Chinese practitioner who lives and works in Brazil, and is also a practicing Daoist priest, and whose own viewpoint differs quite radically from the academic approaches presented elsewhere in this issue.
Ely Britto is a Brazilian writer, Yijing teacher and meditation instructor (International Healing Tao techniques). Her book I Ching - Um Novo Ponto de Vista (Yijing - A New Point of View) was published in 1993 by Cultrix Editora, Sao Paulo. She interviewed Cheng for the Oracle in May 1998.
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It was exactly 3 o'clock on a rainy afternoon when I arrived at the gate of a very old two-storeyed house in Cosme Velho, still showing signs of rebuilding. Not long afterwards I was taken into a big, blue-walled office with a glass roof, built in a beautiful art nouveau style. Through a big window a very tall tree could be seen, that seemed to embrace the building with its branches. The room was peaceful, spacious and simply furnished: a table with an incense burner, a piano, a couch for acupuncture, and a chair. Some Chinese paintings were discreetly placed on the walls.
Cheng himself is very thin and tall. He gave me a friendly greeting, and as we sat I began to explain about the Oracle and how it was trying to present serious scholarship; but that because the editor was a westerner he was interested in dates and precise details. He listened in silence.
I began by asking him about the passage in his book where he said that the story of the hetu diagram being found at the Yellow River wasn't to be taken literally, because there was a correspondence between the Huanghe (Yellow River) and our galaxy, the Milky Way, both being called, according to Cheng, "Ho Tan". Would he tell me if this information came to him by ancestral oral tradition, from books or from a master? He replied:
"I would like to say that nothing is precise in Chinese culture and we do not care about the origin of knowledge. The Chinese consider what we learn from oral transmission, and from our masters, as the truth. Do you know why? We respect the words of our wise men. We know that in order to become sages they must cultivate the most perfect virtue inside themselves. We never doubt their words because when they talk to us they do not let their own personality interfere, and they never lie. When a sage talks he uses the words of his ancestors, and he always tells the truth. Our people don't believe in dates, they care about who is telling them this or that, and not when the facts happened. I think that is why our wisdom was never lost. A holy man will never talk to you as if the knowledge was coming from him. He passes on what's held in trust from ancient times. He received his knowledge from another sage, so the information is trustworthy. Three things are taken into account in China when deciding whether knowledge should be respected:
a- The personal experience of those sages b- The oral transmission -- what I call the dynamic data c- The Classic texts
"That is the order in which we judge the information. As to what I said in my book, I learned it both from books and from my master Li Kai Huen, the president of the Chinese Yijing Society in Taiwan. I studied with him and I learned the Yijing with him. The hetu was indeed found at the Yellow River, but it was a metal ball with numbers engraved on it. That ball was burned during the Qin Dynasty, but the hetu numbers pointed to stars in the Milky Way. In China the Milky Way matches the Yellow River. It's all in the books and my master taught me the same."
Cheng then showed me Li Kai Huen's book, describing him as a mathematician of the Yi, and told me that he was a specialist in magic squares, being able to draw very complex squares in three dimensions. He added that Li teaches at the University of Taiwan and that in its library more than 3,000 books about the Yi can be found, originally from the Imperial Library. He also said that as the ancient books were written on bamboo, much information was lost.
I returned to the metal ball with the hetu engraved in it, and his story that it was burned during the Qin dynasty. He'd also said that Fuxi found the metal ball after the deluge, at the same period the Bible says Noah landed in his ark. From what source, I asked, did he get that information?
Cheng said: "All that I received was from my master and the Classics. This is all written in books that only the sages know. Do you really think that everything was burned during the Qin dynasty? No, the holy men had their own books. The emperor may have owned the original but the holy men had copies ... or they had the originals and the library had copies that were burned. Don't forget that this wisdom was transmitted from master to disciple. Nothing was really lost in China, because everything was saved by secret societies. There were two kinds of knowledge in China: one was the philosophic, more rational school represented by Confucius, the other the Secret Tradition and the mystic school represented by Laozi. The SecretSchool has all the documents that were lost during the burning. Among that material was the hetu revealed by Chen Tuan."
Cheng assured me that only the official archives were burned, but the personal libraries of the sages were not touched. Instead they were saved in a secret place by the Secret Tradition. Then he turned to the subject of oral transmission, and said that a master could spend many years without teaching anything important, and then one day he would call the disciple to take tea and would say: look at this and that, and the revelation would take place. "We know it was that way," he continued. "Do you think those [western] sinologists had the time and patience to gain the trust of a master and to wait so long to receive it? Do you think the master would tell them the truth?"
I asked him about the lineage of his master, but he said he is not attached to any lineage. He simply claims to be a man who knows about the Yi, and that's all he cares about.
I changed the subject and asked him why, in his system of teaching, the hexagram only changed into a second one when there are three moving lines, and why he used a very different, binary order of hexagrams in his teaching, saying it is a secret order used by the mystic school. He told me:
"Listen, that is the only system whereby the change happens. I don't know exactly why the westerners received that erroneous way of consulting the Yi and transforming the situation from Wilhelm. In China, even if we use the same order of hexagrams as Wilhelm, they only change if you receive three moving lines. One line in motion has no power to change a situation. We consider one line in motion as a focus, as advice to the person consulting, not as a movement of the situation. I don't think the old sinologists received the true knowledge. Remember that at that period the Chinese hated the western foreigners; we called them yang guizi, or in English, 'the demon that came from the sea'. I know that Wilhelm's teacher gave him plenty of good material, but I'm sure that he witheld the main information. I think that the new sinologists of the 70s, 80s and 90s can get much more good information than those old ones. Now we are at peace, while at that time many European countries were at war with China. We didn't like those men from the west. The Wilhelm translation is the best known book here and I think everyone learned the wrong way to handle moving lines from him. His master probably witheld that information from him."
I told him I thought that this was supposition and brought his attention back to the ordering of the hexagrams. The King Wen order appearing in Wilhelm arranges the hexagrams in pairs of opposites to better represent the post-heaven arrangement, the manifested world: I asked Cheng why he uses the pre-heaven, Fuxi arrangement.
Cheng said: "But my arrangement is King Wen's. The one Richard Wilhelm received is simply another King Wen arrangement. Confucius talked about the progressive sequence that runs from hexagram 1 to 64 (the conscious world) and I use the retroactive one that begins with Kun (0) and finishes in the Creative (63). The progressive sequence looks to the visible world and the retroactive looks to the invisible, the unconscious."
The time came to end our interview. Cheng asked someone to show me his temple, which featured a large statue of Laozi, and I left feeling as if I'd had a rare opportunity to hear the oral transmission, as it was passed on in old China.
