LUCKY CHANCE
Lucky Chance
Third in a four-part series of interviews with Michael Acton
At our third meeting, Michael talks to me about his time in China, the place where he would meet Master Li and Master Liu. He also describes how meeting his wife Suzie in the late 1980s was deeply significant for his connection with China. As a Burmese woman of Chinese heritage, Suzie caused him to connect to China in ways he hadn’t imagined.
“You never know who you’re going to meet and who you’re going to partner with, but you find yourself with somebody who comes from another culture and immediately you need to understand something about that. And by default you gather things up and they filter.”
After studying with Seow and Fu Hua, painting for the Palace of the Dalai Lama, meditating on Buddhist teachings and travelling in India, Malaysia and Thailand, Michael moved to China with his partner Suzie. Having met Suzie in London, they married in Hong Kong in 1989, finding their way to China just a few years later in 1992 where Michael taught English at the Teacher’s University in Guangzhou before they moved to Shanghai. Describing his time in Guangzhou, Michael mentions meeting a rather aggressive young teacher who had trained at Chen village.
“I can’t say I got on with him, because he hurt me. Two of his students came and challenged me one day because they’d seen me practising on my own and they wanted to push hands with me. I was able to deal with that situation ok, and the next thing I know, their teacher, this guy, turns up and sets out to destroy me, which was a bit much really… but he was very good at what he did.”
Next he mentions He Lao Shi, whose name means ‘crane,’ a very different character.
“He was an old Daoism guy, he didn’t claim anything of himself. People called him Laoshi which means teacher, as opposed to Shifu which means master.”
Michael studied Qi Gong with Teacher He, who was quite elderly and had a small group of followers who met daily to practice Qi Gong. While Michael heard that Teacher He was a Ba Gua master, he never saw him practice. He doesn’t pick out any particular methods or sets, but says “I learned a lot from being near him really,” adding:
“He was quite a powerful presence in my world, in my mental and training world. He was like a dream or mythical character from old China, but who dressed in the workman’s blue clothes of the Mao era.”
Still based in Guangzhou, Michael followed up a contact he’d been given for Master Li, who lived in Shanghai. His aim was to follow this lead to find Masters Ma Yueh Liang and Wu Ying Hua, the gatekeepers of Wu Jian Quan’s Taiji Quan lineage in China. Michael called up Master Li, and was invited to the park to meet him.
“Some of these masters in China… they seem almost dismissive, you feel you’re being examined, and you are in a sense, but as soon as you’ve moved they know whether they’re going to be interested in you or not. So in the west you think, I’ll do my whole form, but actually you do a couple of moves and they say ok, enough, and you think, well I didn’t have time to really get into it! But it was ok with him, he recognised the stuff that I was doing because it was the Wu form, so Master Li said, welcome to come back. I re-studied the form with him… we went through it, he corrected it, it was as if I hadn’t quite got it right all the years I’d been doing it.”
Oh no! I am genuinely horrified at the idea of having to start all over again. Michael laughs.
“Oh yes! I’d got it right on one level, but I realised that it really wasn’t on a very deep level, it was ok but they would say it was very Western… didn’t really have much depth to it. It was like learning it again but I didn’t need to go all the way back to the beginning… I had my slow form corrected, I learned a lot about how it should be done, but they were subtle messages… in Taiji terms a mile off is a million miles, so you’re still out on the periphery of knowledge, and he was pulling me in a bit. So I knew he had a lot to offer, and that sealed it for me, that he became my teacher.”
Michael stayed with Master Li, describing him as “a perfect fit.” He also fulfilled his ambition, and went on to meet Grand Masters Ma and Wu that same Chinese New Year, at their house, surrounded by their disciples. He was accepted as Master Li’s student, and recognised by the senior disciples of Grand Master Ma, although still not technically a ‘disciple’ himself. This only came later, once Michael had proved his sincerity and commitment. We go on to discuss Michael’s thoughts on this process of finding a teacher, what is important, and how one should go about it.
“It’s really important when you learn from somebody that the personality fits you. It’s best that you judge the teacher, rather than the teacher judges you, because it’s you that’s going to learn. Some teachers feel responsible for what they teach, other teachers don’t care, but the student must be sure that they feel the teacher is capable, competent and understands what they’re teaching, and is inspirational… has a good provenance, that’s the way I look at it. So I was always looking for somebody who fitted how I felt. Fu Hua was one of them, being an artist as well, and I liked his nature, it was really feisty and strong, but quiet as well. There was an incredible quietness in him, and I came to realise this was a quality that some of the older teachers I met in China all had, there was a real depth of stillness in them. So when I met Master Li and he said ‘Ok,’ I liked him immediately. Not just because he said ok to me, but because there was something about his manner, it was light but it was serious, it was deep but it was shallow, he was strong but he didn’t appear to be, all those things.”
I ask about this period, when Master Li was putting Michael through his paces; what did the training look like?
“I was up and down to Shanghai and Guangzhou studying and Master Li would say, go away and practice for a month and come back. I was practising maybe four hours a day on the roof, doing meditation and all the Qi Gongs I knew from the past. Some of the things I knew from the past were starting to fall away, because Li was saying, ‘you don’t need to do that now because you’re doing this. So do this.’ So there was a period of transition which in Taiji terms became quite easy for me, because I had a teacher, I was following his instruction, I was giving up everything else I thought I knew, so that was not easy but… I was ready for that. Because at that point I’d had too many years of not knowing this, or knowing a little bit of that, but not knowing the root of it, or how to reconcile all the different parts together, and I was really wanting the bigger picture, the bigger understanding of what it was all about… so when I met Master Li I got this feeling all of a sudden that he’d be able to fill that out and correct me and get me on the right path. And he did. So, forever grateful. So I was lucky. As Master Li would say, a lucky chance, and it really was. And that’s how he himself described meeting Master Ma and becoming his student. He said, lucky chance.”
And how about your own practice? I ask.
“Well, we moved to Shanghai as soon as we could, and I started training with Master Li and his group in the park every morning. I got a bicycle and cycled there for about 6am, or in the summer, more like 5am. Master Li had put one of his senior students in charge of my training. It was serious, rigorous and demanding. He was very hardcore and liked to fight, so I got knocked around a lot. Master Li’s Qi Gong and Taiji students would all be there among the trees, dotted around doing their personal practice. When Master Li arrived we would all do exercises and Forms together, learn new material like weapons and practice Tui Shou, after which those who studied Qi Gong would stay and carry on. Often Grandmaster Ma’s disciples would turn up, or students from other teachers, and Master Li would ask them to push hands with me. It was always relaxed, but I had to work hard. Everybody watched me and commented. I was the only westerner training in the park so I was under a lot of scrutiny, and often people would just have a go at me to prove their boxing skills. It was always interesting – and exhausting! I was accepted by everybody though, well, almost everybody. Those mornings in the park were a wonderful experience.”
Many years later, in terms of Michael’s own journey to teaching, I wonder how he came to continue this branch of the Wu Style lineage. At a basic level, he replies that Master Li asked him to, “in his polite, non-assertive way.” But as we get deeper into the discussion, he hints at a more intricate relationship between teaching and learning.
“When you’ve learned a lot of stuff, if you don’t want to forget it you have to give it to somebody, and in giving it to them, you learn more about it, but you also know that somebody else has got some of it. It’s less to do with generosity than it is to do with a kind of transmission idea, that there’s no point in learning a load of stuff that you keep to yourself, so what do you do? And that was Master Li’s point really.”
Michael notes the current plethora of teachers, methods and courses available to today’s students, returning again to the concept of authenticity, provenance, what makes a real master, and how knowledge passes from master to student.
“I think there are people out there now who are putting themselves out as Masters, who can’t be Masters. Because although they like to exhibit certain boxing skills, a Master is a more than that, a Master is a bigger entity than somebody who can punch somebody well… transmission from a teacher to a student is not what they tell you, it’s about the sensations that they allow you to participate in… people allow you to participate in their experience or their knowledge, and in so doing you become tied into them and you receive stuff from them that is not necessarily verbal communication. You gather sensations and awarenesses, atmospheres, nuances and small intricacies of your engagement with them that stay with you, that somehow stick to you. And then you suddenly discover that you know something you didn’t know, some pieces fit into place, and that really very strongly describes my experience with Master Li. I mean he showed me a lot of stuff, I saw a lot of stuff, I learned a lot of stuff, but it wouldn’t have been any use without the transmission of his perception of it, how he felt about it, how he understood it. It would only have been things. Pictures you can stick on the wall and say this was my holiday, look this is that beach, that’s that cliff, here’s a nice café, here’s somebody I met, and it would just be bits. Whereas a real Master is able to bind those parts, those single pieces that he allows you exposure to into a picture that comes into a whole thing. And it may be after their death, it may be while they’re alive, if you’re lucky… it will become a whole thing, and then even after they’re dead, you’ll still be receiving that knowledge, because it’s still coming through in the voice or the atmosphere they shared with you.”
It makes me think of one of those magic tricks where you pull silk from a hat and it keeps coming out, and I offer this idea.
“That’s a really good simile, because it is like that. That’s the way it happened, and it’s been carrying on ever since like that, so his root, his seed if you like, growing, informing my growth, guiding it.”
I ask how Michael thinks about his relationship with Master Li now, ten years after Li’s death. Does it continue?
“Totally continuous. I still hear him, I feel him, when I do things the way he did it… I do something and all of a sudden I’m with him. So that’s important. And for me that’s a transmission. An irreplaceable, remarkable, unique transmission from one teacher to a student. Now many of his students may have that as well so I’m not claiming it’s unique to me, but it’s what I came away with and what I still have. And that’s my credential, not whether I can shout the loudest, or do the most beautiful form or the best expression of Taiji or talk about it in the best way, it’s whether I still have the experience of him with me.”
Michael also builds on what he received, explaining that the lens he sees Taiji through now is as much his own lens as Master Li’s. And that after Li’s death, when Master Liu came on the scene another layer was added, another way of seeing things. We pause to discuss Master Liu, who Michael met during his final visit to China to see Master Li when he was dying.
“Liu had a very strong impact on me straight away. He said to me, ‘I invite you to be my teaching brother,’ with all the students who’d gone from Master Li to him, as he had swept up the lost souls of Master Li to carry on teaching them. And all his students… said yeah, but he’s the big brother! And I said of course, how could he not be! They were very keen that I understand the hierarchy!”
I ask him what Liu was like, and what was different about him.
“Liu was able… there were things I’d seen but I couldn’t express, I couldn’t articulate what they were. I knew there were gaps, there were bits I couldn’t explore, and when Master Li went, I realised I wasn’t going to be able to get them anymore. I couldn’t go to him and ask him to sort those out, but then when Master Liu came, he showed it very quickly. All of a sudden, a lot of Master Li’s teaching immediately fell into place… some of those things that Li had said – all of a sudden, clear!”
We return to this idea of each teacher as providing a different lens through which the teachings can be seen, felt and understood.
“That light shone through Li and Liu, and other people that I trained with in China who had come through the same route, but when it refracts through their lenses, the colour rainbow has a little bit different emphases in different places, but still the same source. And that makes you feel happy as a teacher, because you never can copy them, nobody should ever try and copy a teacher, it’s a total mistake. But you listen and you learn and you work through your own stuff and then you become the repository of that knowledge and you can interpret it through your own lens, and then you have an understanding. And then it’s yours and not theirs, your craft, your knowledge, your clarity, your wisdom, your skill, your achievement.”
Michael laughs and adds, “You might be on that path as well!” I’m doubtful of this, having not practiced much lately. “Ha!” he retorts. “The more you practice, the more you’d be surprised.”
It is a reminder of Michael’s three-word motto, distilling forty years of practice, learning and teaching. An exhortation to the dozens of students of the Wu Shi Taiji Quan & Qi Gong Association, and perhaps to any student, anywhere, who wants to progress.
Practice. Patience. Perseverance.
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Interview by Esther Cann, member of the Wu Shi Taiji Quan and Qi Gong Association