Monk Yunrou

We tend toward negativity, self pity, jealousy, or fear. We see what we don't have instead of what we do. We think things that hold us back and dampen our spirit. But it's not just about thinking. Our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent, and creative effort to make a life worth living. This podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction, how they feed their

good wolf. Thanks for joining us. Our guest this week is Daoist monk un Row, formerly known as Arthur Rosenfeld. He's an author, activist, and a thirty five year master of Daoist arts. Unro was born in America and ordained a monk at the Pure Yang Temple in Guangzhou, China. Combining his spiritual focus with a Yale literary education. He's an author on the cultural, social, and spiritual dimensions of Eastern thinking for the Western world. And here's the interview

with you and Roe. Hi, you and Roe, Welcome to the show. So happy to be with you. I'm excited to get you on because one of my favorite books of all time. Hang on a second, we get a dog. Well, when my turtles start breaking wind in the background, I won't feel so bad. I'm excited to talk to you because one of my favorite books of all time is The Dowd Ching. But I've never really had a chance to learn a whole lot more about Taoism or talk

to anybody who was a Taoist. So I am excited to get into that book a little bit in some of your other philosophies. That'd be great. It's one of my favorite books to talk about, even though every word we say is not the tao that's right, that's right. But let's start like we always do, with the parable. There's a grandfather who's talking with his grandson. He says, in life, there are two wolves inside of us that

are always at battle. One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness, and bravery and love, and the other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And the grandson stops and he thinks about it for a second, and he looks at his grandfather and he says, well, grandfather, which one wins?

And the grandfather says, the one you feed. So I'd like to start off by asking you what that parable means to you in your life and in your work, and also what are some of the things that you do in your own life to feed your good wolf. So I should start by saying that I love the bad wolf, and and I love the bad wolf because

I love the dual non dual nature of everything. And as a Taoist, I tend to see things in terms of binary opposites harmoniously interacting, and we want to make them harmoniously interact, but sometimes disharmoniously interacting in order to define each other. And also the cycles of life, and without those cycles we would have much less to appreciate and experience. And without that bad wolf, there would be no good wolf. Right So with without you know, our

cloudy days, we don't see appreciate the sunny ones. And by the way, there's a I think, an important distinction between appreciating and experiencing. So I wouldn't say, for example, that someone who has never known heartbreak or disease or challenge is someone who doesn't experience joy or pleasure or satisfaction in life. But I might argue, I think coated lee, that the appreciation of that experience would be greatly diminished without something to compare it to. Yeah, So, I mean.

One of the lovely things about bringing traditional dao Is thinking into our high tech, quantum world these days is to see how very often in my wide ranging listening and readings, I come across a validation and confirmation in terms of science, basic science, tech, world exploration, universal exploration of of things that have been expressed very clearly, if not in the same language for thousands of years in Daoists,

in Daoists texts, in the Daoist cannon. So you know, to me there, it's not so much that you want to make a habit of feeding one wolf to the exclusion of the other. It might be that in one circumstance in your life you want to starve the good wolf, and in another you want to starve the bad wolf, and the many others. You want to feed one a little bit more than you feed the other. You want

to play favorites. You want to be conscious and active in this process of feeding, because what you see and experience and understand in the cycles and changes in your daily life ought to be queuing you to what you're doing with your kimmel. So would you give your summary of what Taoism is? This actually is a far more challenging question than you You may know. You may you may know how challenging it is, and you just did

it to make me squirm. But you may also but you may also not realize that it is to some

extent of debated issue in a broadway. Taoism is a is a cultural and social phenomenon, and it it is inextricably intertwined in traditional Chinese culture, and it is born of um life in China, the bitter life of the people in early China, the flooding of rivers, the conquests, the famines, the droughts, the difficulties, the invasions, the constant pushback against uh the people who nomads on horseback, who ringed China for for millennia and created a certain nucleation

of culture in that enormous piece of land, and without some understanding of the history of China and how things developed there, I would submit that a deep comprehension of daois thought is not possible. Now. You know, it's funny because I have two Thouist masters, and one of them is my martial arts master and another one is my abbot, and we could talk if it's if it's relevant, we

can talk more detail about that later. But but you know, they both always tell me that, you know, the ideas of Taoism, of harmony, of balance, they don't really depend on even calling it Thoism. They don't. It doesn't matter whether you know anything about China or you know anything. And although they say that, and I bowed to them and respect them greatly and love them both very much, I have to say that on this score I don't

fully agree. And I think that the reason that they think that is that they are Chinese and their whole worldview is so colored by being Chinese that they may not see that from the same point of view as we do. So let's let's let's say it this way. Taois Um is a way of looking at nature. It is a way of understanding natural forces and natural phenomena, and a way of integrating what you see and feel, smell, taste in here so that you can live a healthier,

more compassionate, humbler, and more frugal life. As that that is a great start. Most of my exposure to Eastern Um, you know, philosophy or religion has largely been through you know, various schools of Buddhism. But like I said, I've always loved the doubt a change. But what does what does Daoist meditation look like? Is that is that something you practice? And if so, what is that? What? What how do you do that? How is that different or similar maybe

to some of the other meditation styles out there? So yes, I do it. It's a core practice. UM, I would say, you know, there's a there's a few things that come to mind because you mentioned Buddhism and what it looks like, UM, is that you may see Daoists standing or walking as opposed to sitting or lying down. Which is not to say that Daoist meditation can't also be conducted prone or in a seat, but we prefer, we prefer to stand

or walk if possible. And that is because there's a connection in Daoism, which I think is really quite different from Buddhist meditation, and I've some Buddhist meditation. In fact, one of my twin Daoist lineages is a version of Taoism which is sort of all encompassing um. It's called Longman Pie. It's also known as complete Truth as the sort of overarching idea of it. And this complete Truth sect, if you will, includes some Buddhist and some Confucian ideas.

So so there's there's some bleed over. But a core thing that I want to get to is that in in Dallist meditation, the notion is that in order to awaken the mind in order to achieve what what we would term enlightenment. We don't have that exact phrase, but what what what we might call it enlightenment in the West, to open the mind, to awaken the mind. In order to do that, we have to do a lot for the body, because it is the body that supports the

process of enlightenment. In other words, you can't have the strength and clarity of mind that you need without having a strong and healthy body. So for example, something like zazen sitting and zen where you damage your knees and hurt your back, and you use the strength of your mind to force your body into an uncomfortable position and ask it to stay there for a long period and then have to have a knee replacement later back surgery. But you can point to how strong your mind is

a triumphed over the flesh. That sort of Descartian dualism about mind body is not present in the house thinking. And in fact, we find it difficult to understand why I wouldn't want to do that, So we want to nurture the body in order to help the mind. And now back to the rest of the interview with you and Roe. In addition to being a Daoist monk and a prolific author, you are also I don't know what the quite the right term is, but I'll say a tai chi master. Um you teach a lot of tai chi,

which I think is a form of Daoist meditation. Is that accurate? It is somewhat accurate. It's not exactly a form of Daoist meditation, although taiji practice does include specific meditations that are by definition Daoist, since Daoism is the overarching idea, or maybe put a different way, I'm not aware of any system of movement anywhere in any tradition.

There may be one, but I'm not aware of it anywhere in the world from any period of history that is more intimately interdigitated with a system of philosophy and thought. Then tai tai chi is with Daoism. They are inextricable. So the practice of tai chi is one of the Daoist practices that I engage. It's my favorite one, it's

the one I probably spend the most time at. But it's importance to me personally and to my students because I run what I call martial arts rather a philosophy school with a major in martial arts, rather than a martial arts school that pays lip service to philosophy. The most important part of it is as as a Daoist practice.

So whether we are doing brush painting or landscape painting or calligraphy, or playing a musical instrum meant or writing or standing in meditation or practicing with a seven foot sword, all these things fall under the umbrella in my own life practice and teaching of of datost practice. Okay, here will be a geeky question. Do you have a favorite translation of the dow Day Chain, because I have one, and I'm curious if if they are similar, or what

you think of the one that I really like. I could almost reach out and touch from where I'm sitting sixty translation. Wow, alright, so mine is the Stephen Mitchell translation. Right? That was a pretty good guess, I guess if it might be um and I think it's good. You know. I like Mitchell's writing style. I like I like the poetry of his prose, so from a from an esthetic point of view, I like that version too, but it's

not that alone. Because I'm a fan of the science fiction and fantasy writer Ursula Lagwyn, who also did a translation which was based on so body else's translation. I don't I don't believe that she reads Chinese, but uh, I don't care for that one. As much as I like her other writings. I didn't care for that one, and I mentioned that in in the Connection with Mitchell, because I think Mitchell has some grasp of what's going on and has a point of view which I respect.

You know, I have to say that if you had asked me this, I've been I've been involved in this quite some years now, and if you had asked me this five years ago, or ten years ago or fifteen years ago, I might have been super eager to give you a list and say, hey, these are the ones, right, read these these And what I've what I've come to over time and with some thousands of hours of practice and meditation about these things, is that it's such we

we are so far from really understanding what the context of that book was, who wrote it, um, what is purpose was, and what it might have sounded like in the language of the day. My guess I can tell you what I guess. I can tell you what I surmise about that book's origins. Um. Before I go there, I will tell you that I think for most people, Guy Leakly's version L E K L E y is probably a great place to start. It's a wonderful addition.

Um Mitchell's is good. Jonathan Star, It's got a good one. Um. There there are and you know we we can maybe email and you can put up if you wish, a list of some others I like. But but let me go back to the sort of the point about the whole book. Whether or not the putative author of the data Jing was a real historical personage is an open question, as indeed is the historicity of a lot of other

things that people say about that book. Um. I choose because I have a romantic heart to believe that Louds was a real person, but intellectually I doubt it, um And, And in fact, the book that I wrote about Louds that is going to be released tomorrow is predicated on the decision that I was just going to embody him and envision him and indeed tell a love story about him as a sage who is in search of a soulmate and the difficulties of being such an enlightened personage

and finding somebody with whom you can have that kind of connection. But I think that historically, probably um, he was a creation of a coffee clatch of guys who were responding to the Confucian, Draconian, highly regimented, and ordered society of China at that time. So maybe you could think of it this way. If you believe that Jesus Christ, for example, or Moses or actual historical personages, you could see and become attached to their message with greater avidity

and warmth and enthusiasm. Then if you found out that Um, you know, Jesus was really an amalgam of a bunch of rabbis who were writing at the time, and they were pretty much fed up with being told what to eat and you know, with whom to sleep, and uh, what to wear, and you know how to pray and so on, and so his message of release and freedom and forgiveness is in some ways analogous historically and socially to the message of loud Zo at the time, whether

he was a real single person or whether he was a construct designed to put forth a point of view

that was like just a great relief to people. Um. So, you know, Confucian society was quite regimented, as early early Orthodox Judaism was it is, and and so, you know, being offered a way to still be considered a good person, a religious person in the case of Christianity, a god fearing person, and yet have some personal freedom and have the ability to be bacchanalien and go into the mountains and meditating the cave if you want, and drink wine and write poetry and do all those things, but still

be considered a worthy person. This was the attraction of that early Daoist message and maybe the power of the data Jing and why both the data Jing and the Judaeo Christian Bible have become a from from what I hear, the two most widely translated works in the world. Yeah, we had a guest on Edwards Slingerland who wrote a book called Trying Not To Try, and he talks about

a lot of ancient Chinese philosophy, Confucianism and Daoism. And but he has a funny line in there where he refers to the dowd Ah Ching is possibly the book that more joints have been rolled to than any other book in history, which I thought were funny. The minute you say that, I think of Taichi joint locking of course,

and rolling the shoulder over his uncle. Different joint here. Yes, well, you know, I actually corresponded with Professor Slingerland once or twice, um, and I did hear his interview on your show, and I liked it. It It was very interesting. So I'm going to read a section from The dowd Ah Ching and just kind of ask you to elaborate or you know, talk about kind of what it means to you. And

this will be from the Stephen Mitchell translation. It is number forty four Fame or integrity, which is more important, money or happiness, which is more valuable, success or failure, which is more destructive. If you look to others for fulfillment, you will never truly be fulfilled. If your happiness depends on money, you will never be happy with yourself. Be content with what you have, Rejoice in the way things are when you realize there is nothing lacking. The whole

world belongs to you. Do you see how deeply revolutionary and rebellious that is? Oh? Yeah, yes I do. I read it as an eighteen year old, probably in a suburban town. That was you know, it's it in my view of the world. That's all anybody cared about at that point. But it was money, which was not true, but that was my that was my view of it. So I do recognize that this was for me. This was very revolutionary, um, and I'm sure are more so in in a age like the one you're talking about

when he when it was originally written. So if I, if I may, I want to just talk to you about at this from a personal point of view, please. I was raised in a home with a very very successful, famous father. My dad Isadore Rosenfeld. He's still with us. Was you know, one of the most famous heart specialists in the world for many years, and he had as his patients, and not only but among his patients he

had many luminous individuals, people who ran the world. Um, you know, captains of industry and Hollywood stars and powerful politicians and heads of state and so on. And I watched as a as a young man, as a boy, I watched a parade of these folks through the lives of my family. I saw, you know them in our home. We we would take holidays on their islands and their

yachts and and travel the world and their company. And probably because like you, I was born with a certain gene which made me a real pain in the ass. And my parents, Um, I had my doubts about all this. And I had my doubts that if these things that I was being told were true, were in fact the

way the world really did work. And if fame and wealth and power and beauty and notoriety and all the rest of it, if all all that was really the be all and all the purpose, the thing for which we should strive, and so on, then how come so many of these people that I saw growing up were so miserable. Right, how come you know they threw their wives down the stairs, or they went to jail, or their parents or their their children hated them, or or

you know, they were just assholes. And you know what, this is not true of This was not true of all the people that I'm talking about. There were many wonderful people among them. But I was I was able to, I think, at that tender age, separate, to tease out the good characteristics of the people that I thought were great, um from the ones that I didn't think we're so good, and to realize that there was no connection there too, uh to their fame and and and the rest of them.

So I think you know early on what what you what you have alluded to, I believe, and what I experienced I know was, you know, sort of the path a seeker, the secret and as the calling of the seeker, the personality of the seecret whatever whatever you like. In fact, Guy Leakally is doabtaging that I recommended to you earlier. Unfortunately, Guy Legally was a good friend of mine and he passed away just a short while ago. Very sad to lose him, because he was a wonderful scholar, and writer

on the dataging. But anyway, you know, I think if those things weren't true, what else wasn't true? I think of God because he titled his doabtaging, you know, a version for all seekers, So you know, people who are listening, I would get I would guess. I would bet that you know people who listen to this podcast of yours, And I know a few, and I'm an ardent listener myself. You know, I think that people who listen to are seekers.

I mean you and you obviously must be a seeker, one or both of you, otherwise you wouldn't have this

the show. So you know, I think, knowing knowing that you have this steep suspiciousness, knowing that you recognize that the speed in Greek culture in which we live, which is guided very much by our corporate masters, their lobbyists, um, their control of media and so on, happily not this medium um yet uh is is is a you know, is a relief and and and the dotaging for me, and I don't know if it did this for you.

I don't know how early you discovered it, But for me, when I discovered this book, you know, thirty or forty years ago and began to read it. I realized that I was I was too young and insecure to have confidence in my own way of looking at the world,

and I didn't. I wasn't sure about what I saw, I wasn't sure about what I believed, and just finding out that there was this entire body of thought which so completely validated that, you know what I was seeing in the world, You know, the questioning of our capitalist, materialist society and its values, but also a lot of

other things in our Judeo Christian tradition. For example, you know the biblical notion of hegemony for human beings over the natural world, something that has written and spoken of often these days an environmentalist and climate change circles. Right, that if we didn't have a point of view, that this is all here for us, and that you know, we can we can kill all the rhinos we want to grind up their horns um so that we'll perform better in bed. We can do kill all the bears.

We want to do the same with their gall bladders. You know, we can take all the deer we want for the same reason. We can cure cancer by grinding up the shells of every endangered turtle in the world and all that if we, if we, if people didn't really somehow think that, And you know, I used a lot of examples there from Chinese medicine. But this is a thread that goes through from our Western culture to

um to the east. Is the idea that if if we, if we didn't believe that we were somehow more important and it wasn't that we were not so special in this whole actual world something that that was and doesn't exactly believe at least not the same way, and our environment would look completely different. The whole world would look different.

So these are big important ideas. Yeah, it's that whole idea that it's that it's not connected, that this thing over there does not connect to this thing over here. You know, we don't connect to the environment. I think is what's missing from so much of modern thought. So this business of connecting is very interesting from a dahouse perspective because it can be interpreted and it should be two different ways, or not two different ways, but on

two different levels. The first is the non duel, which is to say that you know, everything is one, everything is connected um and and you know we were talking, I'll come back to the other in a second. We were talking about loudso a moment ago and about this you know, lads, of means the old Boy, the Old Master, the great sage um. And it's it's really a title more than it is a name. He had a family name,

but who knows if it's real. But you know, his job, this, this putative author of this book that we both love so much. His job at the time of the Eastern Joe dynasty, so let's call it five or six b c uh, maybe maybe a little bit later. Um. His job was he was a fortune teller. He was a librarian and an oracle. This is how I render him, by the way, in my novel in and I had great fun with it. But years long years, right, yeah, which by the way, probably refers to his Burmese origins.

He may have come from, well, he was supposed to have come from the state of Chew and in those days before there was a China. Um. China didn't come around for another three hundred years or so. Um. And and that area is what now we would call me Nimar. I just came back from there anyway, So, lads, it was a fortune teller and and his job might have been, and this speaks to your question or your point about connection to the world. His job was likely to advise

the king. I remember, this was not an emperor. This was a hedgemon, a a a a ba. He was a strongman, a local king, one of maybe uh some hundreds that existed in the area we now called China. These were fieftims, small kingdoms, and and so his his king was likely to have said to him something like, Hey, I don't have enough troops to protect our entire border, but I'm worried that we're going to be attacked by a neighboring kingdom or somebody else. Tell me where should

I put my troops. And this is an example of this that I often used talking about this, and you know, so Lauds. It would have gone down to the river and the capital of this this dynasty was at that time and and low young, and an early capital of China. And and he he would have watched the river, and he might have seen, for example, some mica in the

sand at the bottom of the clear running water. And he might have known that that micah or some other little glimmering mineral that he saw on the sand came from the high morain, high up, uh, you know, in the mountains above this kingdom. And he would know that if he saw those little shimmering bits of rock in the water, it meant that they were being washed down from the mountains, which in turn meant that the snow

was melting. And if the snow was melting early, that meant that mountain passes that might be normally impenetrable at a certain time of year would now be available possible. And so he might rush back to the king and say, hey, put the soldiers to the north, that's where the mountains are. And in fact, there's going to be a surprise attack.

Get ready, you know, for ambush them. And so the king, you know, would listen to him, because he would trust him, and though he was wise and observed nature nature and human nature, and make the artificial distinction, just to make the point. And and so the king would go ahead and put his troops there, and you know it would

work out. These bad guys would come through the past, they'd be slaughtered, the kingdom would be saved, lots would get another hundred concubines and some tales of gold, and right, right, So so one sense of connecting with nature was to be watchful and sensitive to it, right to see our own fates in the melting of the snow and the

sign of the river. But another very very specifically Daoist idea which is regrettably absent from the Judaeo Christian model, although there are certainly some Jewish and Christian people who espouse this idea is the idea of stewardship. So the idea that we would not be given this world as our sandbox are playpen, but rather we would be given by dint of our intellect and our abilities, we would

be given stewardship of it. And this isn't This is an idea that goes back to Neolithic tribal you know pro too religious times, goes back to the South Pacific Islanders and their chieftains and their chiefdoms. It goes back

to a lot of Aboriginal society. The Aboriginal people of Australia still have these ideas very clearly about you know, our our role in things, not just that we are connected and will suffer at the hands of nature with a capital end, but that there is a binary back and forth flow of traffic between us in nature and that we are so actually part of it that to say us in nature is to create a dual structure that doesn't even exist. Our role in the play is

to be stewards. I love that about daasand and it's and it's very clearly connected to deep ecology and other things that have come about much more recently. And by the way, there are Dallas scholars who don't like this idea at all and think that what I'm saying is very much bushful thinking on the part of an American guy living at the you know, on the edge of environmental cataclysm. But there are other scholars who's support excellent. Thank you so much for coming on the show. This

has been a really enjoyable conversation. I think we'll keep in touch of the email because I've got a bunch more questions for you over time. Your your book comes out tomorrow. Now when listeners listen to this, it won't be tomorrow. It will already be out. So it's called Yen and it's uh, it's it's a novel that weaves a lot of these Taoist concepts in And I really I'm not a percent finished. I'm about of the way

through and I have really enjoyed it. I think it's a it's a love story, it's got the Taoist concepts and uh, and it's got some humor in it, so it's a it's a really well written and I encourage the listeners to check it out and we'll have links to that as well as the Doubt, a Ching and other things on the show notes. Thank you so much for having me up. Thank you. I really appreciate it. Take care bye. You can learn more about un row and this podcast at one new feed dot net slash

un row. That's why you n R O U. Thanks