Chapter One

The two kinds of happiness

The Chinese believe that growing old doesn't necessarily mean growing ill too. People can age as well as staying healthy. However, there is a code of practice to having a long life and remaining healthy. The practice is a combination of two main ingredients; physical health and mental health.

Physical health is about knowing how to harness the genuine chi energy into our body. The Chinese believe that the energy is all around us, a gift from Heaven and is everywhere in good natural environments. We have a duty to harness that energy into our body by doing regular exercises such as Yoga, Tai chi, and correct breathing. The shallow and mechanical breathing without self-awareness, as we normally do, is not enough to sustain good health. The correct way of breathing should be slow, even and deep; this way of breathing can come about only with self-awareness and intention. This slow and deep breathing will create a state of turbulence in the energy system. The Chinese believe that the chi energy runs along a few meridian lines which transport the energy to different parts of our inner organs. As a result, any congested energy or ill chi, which is one of the reasons causing physical illness, will be cleared away and good health can be restored. That's why regular exercise in different forms of Tai chi and Qi Gong is very important to the Chinese as a way to maintain good health when they descend into their old age.

Sustaining good health has always been a big issue in our modern life. We have used up a great deal of our natural resources in order to keep us healthy and to live longer. People are more aware of their diet, their living environment and try to do their best to keep in good health. All our medical research and treatments are devoted very seriously to our physical health. It is ironic though because the more careful we are about the health issue, the more health hazards we have. Nevertheless, the problem which appears to be more serious is our mental health. A large number of people in our society nowadays have to rely on some form of drugs either being prescribed by doctors or illegally and this has become the source of endless social problems.

Mental health is indeed the second ingredient in keeping long life and good health. Body-mind is one entity, not two separate ones. Theoretically, when the mind is healthy, the body is healthy too and vice versa. We are bound to feel miserable when we don’t feel well physically. This is quite understandable. In reality, there are also many people who have perfect physical health but for some either known or unknown reasons, they still feel miserable and discontent. When their ill mental health drags on for a long period of time, it will eventually affect their physical health. This is a well known fact. Consequently, having a healthy mind is indeed a more important issue. When the mind is healthy and strong, people will find it easier to cope with any problem in front of them even their own physical illnesses.

According to the Chinese concept, having a healthy mind means knowing how to live in Tao or how to live in harmony with Tao. The idea is made up of a few words which sounds rather simple but it might take people in the West a whole life time to tackle their profound meaning. So, what do the Chinese mean by that saying ? I think it is very important to spend a bit more time talking about our mental health.

To the Chinese, living in harmony with Tao indicates two significant matters about life in general. They are the state of inner peace and the profound insight which allows people to know how to balance their lives in nature. This concept is not much different from the Buddhist idea at all. In fact, they are based on the same kind of goal and practice. Maybe that's why the Chinese opened their arms widely to Buddhism just eight hundred years after Lao Tzu, the founder of Taoism had passed away. The Chinese found that the two ideas agreed with and supported each other. It was Buddhism which helped to give a very clear guideline in putting this abstract concept of living in harmony with Tao into more perspective. It was Buddhism which assisted in creating a code of practice which was much easier to identify with. Shao Lin was the first Buddhist temple in ancient China.

Nevertheless, to the western mind, it isn't at all easy to tune into the concept of Tao and Nirvana in Buddhism, is it ? After all, who wants another religion ? The world is complicated enough with different religions, beliefs, sects, etc. I have no intention to add more confusion to what we already have. As a result, I intend to use Tai chi as a means for people to understand the ancient concepts which already exist but are rapidly fading away even in eastern society. Tai chi is indeed part of the Taoist's and Buddhist's culture. Through Tai chi, I intend to approach Taoism and Buddhism in a non-religious way.

The words Tao and Nirvana, which are the supreme goal of the two eastern beliefs, sound rather remote and irrelevant to us. We can't help thinking that they have nothing to do with us unless we talk about Nirvana as a pop group. It is quite to the contrary, this has everything to do with us. If we give value to and treasure our inner peace, we have everything to do with Tao and Nirvana because this is what they are all about. Therefore, instead of using the term Tao or Nirvana as the objective of life, we shift to use a simple term such as "peace of mind" instead. To the Buddhists, the reason they pursue their religious practices such as meditation is because they want mental tranquility and stability or peace of mind. This is all to it. It is a simple idea that even people in the West can easily identify with, isn't it ?

In trying to understand how to create our individual inner peace through the practice of Taoism and Buddhism, we have to, first of all, know how to distinguish between two kinds of happiness in general. If not, we can easily get mixed up. The first kind of happiness or way of putting our minds at peace comes from the ability to fulfil our wishes, in other words, when we can get what we want, it can make us feel good and happy about ourselves. In our everyday conversation, we hear people express themselves about what they do to make themselves feel good. The majority of people can be happy when they can exaggerate and put a bit more spice into their basic needs. Instead of eating to live, we tend to live to eat. That's why some people have to make a lot of fuss out of food and can be happy only when they have expensive and exotic food and drink. Some women can feel good and happy when they wear designer clothes, expensive make-up, accessories, silky lingerie, etc. They believe that those objects can really help them feel good and boost their self-esteem. So they claim. Some housewives can be happy and content when they can catch up with their neighbours on the new kitchen, new three piece suites, new carpet, new curtains, etc. Career-oriented people can only be happy and content when they have good well-paid jobs, promotion, etc.

It is quite obvious that this kind of happiness and contentment revolves around money, status and power. We all have to struggle to earn money so that we can pay our bills and keep up our comfortable life-style. The more money and status we have, the more opportunity we have to fulfil our wishes and the more happiness we will get. We tend to think so anyway, don't we ? We never question this norm. This is what everyone does and we are all part of it. Therefore, this kind of happiness has created a culture which is based on creating more wealth, prosperity and opportunity. The whole of our civilisation, whether it is our politics, economy, education, technology, etc. is all geared up for people to have more wealth and have more opportunity to get what they want and to be happy. Higher education means greater opportunity, a better job, better pay and finally a better house, a better life-style and so on. Our economy is more concerned with making the cash flow by urging people to spend more, invest more and putting more money into people's pockets. Our politics aim at creating a prosperous country with the hope that we can all live happily ever after because we have enough money to get what we want.

As a result of this concept about gaining happiness, we have turned the world into a highly consuming world and used up most of our natural resources which took millions of years to mature. Look at how much oil we have used in just less than two hundred years since we found it ! Look at the trees that we have chopped down and the pollution we have caused to this lovely planet as the result of consumerism ! All these facts are quite shocking to the younger generations to come. The nations which have more wealth and power have a better opportunity to suck the natural resources from the poor countries. America alone has used up a quarter of the whole natural resources of the world. The people in rich countries can lead comfortable life-styles because their governments have more wealth, more power and of course, more opportunity to exploit the poor countries.

We are savaging our natural resources, which are meant to be for every single human-being in the world no matter whether rich or poor. During the process of creating more prosperity, we have also come across a massive scale of social problems which has never happened before in the history of mankind. People experience more emotional turmoil than peace. Drinking, taking some form of drugs, promiscuity, family breakdown, crime etc. have become part of our modern culture and civilisation and cause endless problems. Something has gone very wrong in this process of creating worldly happiness.

The obvious reason is that when happiness and contentment can be bought by money and power, it inevitably creates more greed, more craving, more jealousy, more anger, more hatred, more violence, more arrogance, more discrimination, and so on. How can we not expect turmoil in society when we keep on putting in just the right ingredients for this troublesome potion. Our objective is one thing-hoping to create more happiness for people-but the means to that goal do not agree with the objective at all. It is very much like wanting to put out a fire in a chip pan, but instead of putting a damp cloth over it like we are told, we throw petrol into it. God and morality have been shockingly undermined because they cannot agree with our consuming culture. Prosperity cannot come easily to anyone without dismissing a few moral precepts. How can we not lie, cheat, back bite, exploite or even kill just to give us a bit more opportunity to climb to the top ? We have people who walk the streets with severe stress and dissatisfaction. The government do not realise how much disappointment and unhappiness they have caused to people in the nation, especially the poor, on the nights when the national lottery reveals its winning numbers. Through ignorance, the government offered dreams and false hope to millions of people. For the poor and less fortunate, winning the lottery might be the only way to take them out of their miserable boring lives to join in with the wealthy and the famous. That dream may not come at all in their life time. Through education, we merely prepare our young people to be employed, we do not prepare them to be happy people. The government thinks that as long as we can keep the rate of unemployment down, we should be happy. Then again, how many people nowadays have job-satisfaction and are truly happy ?

Finally, the problems in our society and the world have been tangled up like a gigantic ball of cotton. We don't know where to begin to undo those knots. What we have been trying to do is to undo the immediate knots just to get stuck with the next one and the next one and so on. Trying to solve the world's problems is indeed an exhausting job !

However, there is another kind of happiness which we overlook all along. We have all had the experience of being somewhere in a natural environment, such as: a park, by the river, the mountains, some forest, a quiet beach, etc., where we feel really relaxed, unwound and peaceful. We can all identify that inner tranquillity which relates to those peaceful environments. We all have been through that kind of peaceful feeling at one time or another. This kind of happiness is not the result of fulfilling our wishes or having what we want. It happens to be more profound and somehow special to each individual. This may be one of the main reasons that we get away on holiday to some peaceful environment so that we can experience that nice, relaxing feeling. We all say that it is nice not having to think about our stressful job for a few days.

It is indeed this kind of inner peace which I talk about in my Tai chi class. This state of inner peace is the direct result of the slowing down of our demanding thoughts and the fading away of our minds' clutter. There is, as a matter of fact, a nature of our mental state (mind) which is rather calm, still, tranquil and peaceful and is the resource of our profound wisdom and insight. Wisdom allows us to know and understand the true essence of our inner-self and how to keep our balance with nature. This calm and peaceful state of mind can reveal itself when we are amidst a natural environment. The question of how to reveal this mind a bit more often is what Taoism and Buddhism and probably Christianity are all about.

The problem is that our knowledge about our inner peace as well as our inner-self is not coherent enough to put this whole thing into more perspective. Our knowledge concerning our inner peace is still very scattered and inadequate. Scientists try to link the state of mind with the chemicals in our brain and hope that by keeping those chemicals in good balance, we should feel on top of the world. As a result, we have Prozac, sedatives and various kinds of drugs to keep control of those chemicals in our brain. It took us more than a decade to find out that the magic drugs are only another disaster. Of course, we can try a bit harder to produce more drugs and experiment more on our people. We can only keep our fingers crossed that everything will be all right. Then again, ten or twenty years after, more bombshells explode.

I do not claim that I know everything because I don't. My knowledge is only a very small handful which is the result of following in the footsteps of the Buddha. Through the Buddhist practice, I found out that it is this state of inner peace that we all struggle to have but don't know how to attain. My confidence about this concept of inner peace grows stronger as time goes by and it results in my Tai chi teaching here.

In trying to put everything in perspective about how to attain our inner-peace, I have gradually taken a further step by creating a new approach for my students to follow. The approach for this modern time, when most young people no longer have faith in God, has to be rational, logical and easy to identify with. This is how Tai chi comes in so very useful at this point. Essentially, Tai chi is the non-religious practice which in itself is a means leading to the end result (individual inner peace), unfortunately this essence has gone missing, not only in the West but in the East too.

Literally, Tai chi chuan means a set of movements which enable one to reach the state of the grand ultimate or great heaven. The holistic and glorifying term can only point to the same objective as in Taoism and Buddhism. If there is any ultimate truth at all, there can only be One Truth not two or three. Therefore, the movement of Tai chi chuan is only the means to a definite end result. This method is, in fact, meditation which is the crucial practice in Buddhism. It is understandable why the essence of Tai chi has gone missing. If the teachers do not have any knowledge about Buddhism, about meditation, it is very unlikely that they can pass on the essential knowledge. As a result, different forms, styles and physical health in generating the chi energy, have overshadowed the spiritual side of Tai chi. After all, those concepts are the easy part to grasp because they are tangible.

Some people can be quite happy in just learning the Tai chi form and physical health aspect and think that there is no need to dig further into the spiritual side. The point is that doing Tai chi in that respect hasn't really taken us to the proper destination yet. The destination that the wise people in the past recommended to us and hid the path in Tai chi chuan with the hope that we can find out for ourselves. The following story might be able to clarify what I am trying to explain. If we walked along a long stretch of road and wanted to find the city of London, of course we would look out for a sign which points the way to London. Then, we find a sign marked London with the arrow pointing East. Now, ignorant people would jump up and down and cling to that sign and think that they had reached London. For them, the sign is indeed London ! Wise people would look at the arrow sign and keep on walking east until they could truly find the city of London.

Unfortunately, the spiritual journey is not as straight forward as a journey to London. This is the reason why a lot of people are quite happy in just talking about the forms, styles and physical health aspect. My apologies if I happen to offend anyone. I have no intention in the slightest to insult anyone but I am merely trying to state a fact.

It is only because of my knowledge of Buddhist meditation that I can see the essence of Tai chi more clearly as time goes by. My meditation teacher did not teach me Tai chi and my Tai chi teacher did not teach me meditation. Over the past ten years of my Tai chi teaching at the university of Birmingham, I have slowly put these two things together, Tai chi and meditation. This has become the perfect answer in creating a rational approach for people to gain inner peace.

Not everyone is taken by the thought of doing meditation with a religious approach. I have come across some Christians who are against meditation of all sorts because they believe that in emptying the mind, it would allow evil things to come into their minds. Well, I don't blame them if they think meditation is like that. Obviously, there are still a great deal of myths and misunderstandings about this Eastern culture of meditation. This is the main reason of my writing and resulting in this book. There are a lot of new concpets which are needed to be clarified. I cannot explain everything here, just a few fundamental facts.

While the word meditation gives a sense of being spiritual and religious, concentration doesn't. In fact, these two words have the same meaning in practice. When we talk about someone having good or bad concentration, we refer to their mental ability; whether or not they can focus on one thing for a long period of time. A lot of people have good concentration and can work long hours on their particular subjects. People have good concentration when they can work on the things they most enjoy. Those who have bad concentration will jump from one thing to another and mostly they have to work on the things they don't enjoy or even hate. Because people have different levels of concentration, that's why those who have less concentration should practise mediation. Meditation basically is about training our mental skill so that we can focus on one thing for a longer period of time. People who practise meditation will have better concentration, and better focus. The actual skill of how to train this mental skill is all we do in my Tai chi class.

Apart from gaining good concentration from practising meditation, one other bonus which results simultaneously is the harmony of the mind, in other words, our inner peace. This state of tranquillity is the direct consequence of the slowing down of our demanding thoughts and the fading away of our minds' clutter. It is the same kind of inner peace that we all experience when we are in some natural environment. It is different from the kind of peace and happiness when we can fulfil our wishes.

There is also another bonus we can gain from practising meditation apart from inner peace and that is profound wisdom and insight. It is the intuitive knowledge which allows us to understand our inner-self. This experience is very individual and cannot be shared with others by excessive words. It is this intuitive wisdom which confirms the practitioners' claim that worldly happiness, which is based on greed, over-indulgence, on massaging our ego, is definitely not true happiness after all. They are only delusions and that's why people cannot be satisfied with what they are and have. Trying to satisfy our ego is the most difficult task on earth !

The state of tranquillity is the spring or the source of more intuitive wisdom and insight about our lives, our inner-self, our reason to be in this world and our duty as human-beings. This is the spiritual fountain from which the Buddhists obtain their knowledge about how to live in harmony with Tao (nature). This is also what the Enlightenment of the Buddha is all about. This is what The Bible is all about too, as far as I am concerned.

I always allow my students to pick and choose. I have offered the Tai chi & Qi Gong form, the breathing exercises for physical health, the concept of Tai chi in relation to Taoism and Buddhism and above all the mental skill of concentration or meditation. This mental skill is the means which gives simultaneous fruits of inner peace and intuitive profound knowledge. Whichever level the students want to get out of this class is totally their choice.