Off the Bookshelf

Off the Bookshelf

The Essence of T’AI CHI
CH’UAN The Literary Tradition
(Translated and ed. by Benjamin
Pang Jeng Lo et alia)

My copy is falling apart;
frontispiece with Chinese writing,
Preface, Introduction no longer
attached to the spine.

The soul of the book survives,
in calligraphy and esoteric wisdom.
“Be still as a mountain,” wrote Wu Yu-hsiang.
“Move like a great river.”

“Move like a cat,” he wrote,
but when I gently turn a page to read,
it detaches. “In discontinuity,” he wrote,
“there is still continuity.”

***

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