Master Fu-Yuan Ni was born in Ningbo, China (south of Shanghai) on July 1, 1914. We, his tai chi students, have been given only sparse details about his background by Master Ni, who is not overly talkative. In 1950, immediately after the communist take-over of mainland China, he moved to Taiwan. In 1974, at the age of 60, he moved to Santa Barbara, California where he taught tai chi for many years. In June 2002, one month before turning 89, he retired. Today, Master Ni is a healthy and vigorous 94-year-old living in Santa Barbara, in a neighborhood which over-looks the Pacific Ocean. This web page will be under construction as more bits and pieces of his life surface from private conversations with his students. I have published one such conversation in my book on Art and Tao called Crazy Devil Sweeping:
I practiced tai chi chuan regularly with Master Ni and his pupils, with meditation in Montecito on Sundays. The difficulty is in the simplicity of his teachings. One need not search for their essence – they are near at hand from birth. The taoist adept Ch'en Hsu-pai said this of his teacher: "Just settle spirit and breath, letting them be natural. This is my teacher's clear explanation. Night and day, through difficulty and darkness, emulate nature."(29)This is Master Ni's teaching as well – be natural. Many years later I wrote from Sweden to one of his advanced tai chi students, saying that I was writing a book on Art and Tao dedicated to Master Ni, and that I would like to know more about his background. My friend wrote back and said he would pose some discreet questions, for we both know that Master Ni is not talkative. This is the dialogue as best as my friend could remember:
- Theo is writing a book and would be interested in the names of your teachers.
- They’re all gone.
- Should I tell him they’re all gone?
- Tell him not to get off on a side track.
- What do you mean?
- Focus on nose tip, toes tip and sword tip and not necessarily in the form.
- So I’ll tell him your teachers are gone?
- You’ve heard of show, like carnival? I prefer not to show. It’s bad for meditation. Time for class.
(Claps hands)Both my friend and I were charmed by his response. We both learned something from it, even though I proceed on this side-track, this carnival, which is Crazy Devil Sweeping. My friend wrote that Master Ni sometimes calls himself a taoist, but one time he said: "While I teach taoist meditation, I not taoist. I free."
29. Vitality Energy Spirit, A Taoist Sourcebook, tr. and edited by Thomas Cleary, Shambhala, Boston, 1991.Not long after this conversation, Master Ni surprised the above friend, Don Lehman, Jr., and unasked gave him the name of perhaps his first teacher, Chen Shaio Peng. (This information and more is to be found under "Ni Transmissions" on Don's website Master Ni's Santa Barbara Tai Chi.) Chen Shaio Peng was a well-known colleague of Yang Lu Chan's grandson, Yang Cheng Fu. Don asked Master Ni if the 132-movement Wutang Sword Dance that we practice - his favorite - was learned from Peng. Master Ni laughingly replied: "Oh no, he only taught me the beginning forms when I was a child." We experience the very long and entrancing Wu Tang Sword Dance as coming, not from the Yang family tradition, but the tradition of Wu Tang Mountain.
When he was in his 20s Master Ni trained with a teacher who also taught self-defence to the Shanghai police. His next teacher belonged to the taoist tradition of Wu Tang mountain, although he didn't mention his name. From what Don was told, Master Ni belonged to the Kuomintang on the Chinese mainland at the time of the communist take-over. With the nationalist army he retreated to Taiwan in 1950, and is still today virulently anti-communist, hoping that they will fall from power as they did in Russia. He may have held a high postion in the nationalist bureaucracy on Taiwan, since he was given the job of organizing banquets in the department of energy, which included water and electricity. (Master Ni knows much about energy.) His income enabled him to send all of his seven children to prestigious universities, as well as buying a house in a coveted neighborhood of Santa Barbara.
He moved to the USA partly because he disliked Taiwan. With his family he drove across the continent looking for a place to settle. California's south central coast was always in the back of his mind. It is one of the loveliest regions on the entire Pacific coast, which also attracted my wife and myself, when I first became his student. Master Ni grew up in the coastal town named Ningbo, south of the big port of Shanghai. After many years in Taiwan, he ended up on the opposite side of the Pacific Ocean, in a coastal town to the north of the big port of Los Angeles. He now watches the sun set over the same ocean where he for his whole life had watched it rise.
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