Excerpt from the Introduction to my book “Of Fire and Water” (forthcoming from Tambuli Media):
In recent years the Philippines, like the US, has been undergoing a transformation of sorts as eastern culture is becoming a part of the mainstream. Martial art of different styles, yoga, massage, acupuncture, meditation, even fengshui and astrology and a few others, are becoming more prominent. There are now healing centers operating under the law regulating them. Likewise there has been a conscious effort by some groups to revive and promote old indigenous traditions and arts and to adopt Asian culture. At some events you’ll see young men and women wearing indigenous clothes and playing indigenous music on indigenous instruments or doing Tai chi chuan and other Asian martial arts.
But back in the 1950s, largely because of our colonial education and upbringing, the Philippines did not have much connection to or knowledge of our culture. It was as if we were exiled from our own traditions and country: we consciously or unconsciously tried to mimic American ways and become Americanized. In many ways we even despised our customs and each other. We were also alienated from our Asian neighbors. I myself did not know much about Li-Po or Du-Fu until I heard Gustav Mahler’s Songs of the Earth/Das Lied Von Der Erde. I attended a Methodist Church, followed its rituals, believed the Bible and sang with the choir at the Sunday services. At one Good Friday, I was one of those who gave a sermon on the 7 Last Words in church. At the University chapel, during Reformation Sunday, I used to recite Martin Luther’s Here I Stand speech to the Diet of Worms. Back when I was in high school, I did not know any martial art. No hint of karate or kungfu. Like many kids, I played basketball, I danced boogie and rock and roll. In college I was into Hemingway, Shakespeare, Homer, Dylan Thomas, TS Eliot. I wrote in English, I joined oratorical and writing contests in English (and won awards), I spoke and read English in the classroom and outside. When I saw pictures of Hatha yoga asanas postures, I thought they were weird. I was a perfect colonial!
I was kind of thrust into training in Japanese karate when my brother Florante found a teacher in my hometown and passed on the knowledge to me in 1962. Later Johnny F. Chiuten, another student in university and a martial art master, asked me to study with him. Still later, when he went back to his island home, he recommended me to the former Fujian Temple monk, Lao Kim, jobless at the time, and the old man taught me privately. At this point, as the essays show, I became exposed to more eastern disciplines. My Chinese godfather Chan Tek Lao urged me to study Yang Tai chi chuan with his cousin Chan Bun Te in Manila’s Chinatown. Later Chan shifu took me to enroll in a Tai chi chuan class taught by the Taiwanese master Lao Yun Hsiao. I learned about Rabindranath Tagore, the basics of Zen Buddhism and Hindu religion. But there wasn’t any opportunity to learn more because the schools and centers for eastern studies were not there. Our education was patterned after the system of the US. During my four years of college, I did not have a single course in Tagalog, our national language.
It was when I went to the US in late 1970 that I encountered eastern training courses. Irony of ironies, for the first time, I started learning arnis de mano, a style of Philippine stickfighting called Arnis Lanada, with a young Filipino master Amante “Mat” Marinas in Elmhurst, Queens, NY. At LaMama ETC in the Bowery, as a member of a theatre group called Philippine Educational Theatre Arts League (PETAL) organized and directed by Cecille Guidote, I learned Philippine indigenous dances of southern and northern Philippines. I performed on stage as an Ifugao warrior wearing a colorful loincloth. I was the escort carrying the umbrella of the Muslim princess dancing the Singkil. I did a modern translation of the Tagalog prison poem “Kung Tuyo Na ang Luha Mo, Aking Bayan” from the book “Isang Dipang Langit” of Philippine poet laureate Amado Hernandez. As an indication of my ignorance, I also saw for the first time Indian dances performed by a blind man (we called him Mr. Duth) and a Monkey dance by a young woman who learned it In Bali.
I became passionate about learning the culture of Asia. For a period of time I wrote haiku every day. I read the poetry and life of Basho and the fu/prose poems of China. I studied Wu style Tai chi chuan with Master Leung Shum in Manhattan. I went to China to train in Wu-Shu in Chengdu, Sichuan Province in 1983; among the styles I learned was Monkey Boxing with the famous Xiao Yingpeng known as Monkey King, after the character in the epic Journey to the West that took me two years to read. When I read about Mantak Chia’s Healing Tao, I signed up for his courses in Chinatown NY; later I attended week-long retreats and then trained and got certified as an instructor. (I was also chosen as Instructor of the Year 1989.) Eventually I became his assistant and wrote and/or edited four of his books on neidan/internal alchemy and two on healing (Taoyin and Chi Nei Tsang internal organs massage). I studied different healing, meditative, shamanic and spiritual methods. It was not enough. When I returned to the Philippines after the February Revolution of1986 I studied Lapunti Arnis de Abanico in Cebu and was certified as an instructor. Johnny Chiuten, my teacher in Dragon Tiger Fujian Temple Kungfu, and I made a documentary film about the style on Mactan Island. Johnny took me around to meet arnis de mano masters, including the legendary Guiling Tinga of Bantayan Island. I observed Philippine healers in Cebu, Manila, Baguio and Mount Banahaw. I refused to be like those Filipinos who wanted to cultivate and promote Philippine culture but paid only lip service to it and did not practice any of its traditions.
It was a serious way of intensive immersion in Asian culture. Perhaps it was a kind of rebellion against colonialism and the legacy of a western lifestyle. Perhaps I was making up for lost time or trying to get rid of my colonial life or finding a Filipino identity that was encrusted with centuries of meretricious western influences, I cannot really say, but I had a great thirst for Asian traditions that could not be quenched, I just wanted more and more. And learning Chinese culture was like resurrecting my Chinese family’s past that was obliterated by Spain and the US.
I moved to Boston to study Chinese and Japanese acupuncture and Traditional Chinese herbology at the New England School of Acupuncture and Classical Yang Family Tai chi chuan at the Gin Soon Tai Chi Federation in Chinatown in 1989. I passed the national exams, got certified as a diplomate in acupuncture by the NCCAOM and licensed in Massachusetts and later in Hawaii. I became faculty for NESA and as a senior instructor of the Healing Tao (now Universal Healing Tao), I pioneered a course in Inner Smile, 6 Healing Sounds, Microcosmic Orbit, a meditation on the 12 regular meridians and Tai Chi Chi Kung 1. I apprenticed to the Japanese master Kiiko Matsumoto and became her “moxa boy” applying and burning thread -like and sesame-size moxa on the indicated acupuncture points of her patients. I studied Pangu Shengong Qigong with Master Ou Wen Wei. I taught seminars in eastern healing arts in the US, UK, Cyprus, Egypt, The Netherlands, Philippines, and Thailand. I read the translations of The Mahabharata and the Gita, Dao De Jing, Zhuangzi, Upanishads, Sunzi’s The Art of War, the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali , the Philippine epics Aliguyon and Lam-Ang, read scholarly materials on Quanzhen and Longmen Pai and built a library of eastern books. I listened to chants of the Heart Sutra and Upanishads on CDs and online, the recordings of sitar masters Ravi and Anoushka Shankar and the Indonesian gamelan.
My life revolved around eastern culture since then. I took lessons in Thai massage in Chiangmai, a few with the famous master Chaiyuth Priyasith. Later, I studied Thunder Path with David Verdesi in Bali and Java, Thailand, Istanbul, Rome and China. (David became the subject of the documentary “Superhumans” emceed by my friend, the famous Qigong master Lee Holden.) He introduced me to the Magus of Java in 2006 and the hermits of Huangshan in 2007 and we sat at the feet Hindu priests in Bali in 2012. While teaching English as a Second Language in Hangzhou, China in 2010, I took courses in Mandarin and Chinese calligraphy. I acquired rare statues of Shiva Nataraja and the Fasting Buddha. I followed the seminars of Taoist priest Jeffrey Yuen through Maryland, Massachusetts, New Jersey and North Carolina and online. It was, well, immersion in eastern arts with a vengeance!
Rene J. Navarro
Easton, PA 18045
2/10/23