The Master, Part 4

The Healing Art of Qi Gong : Ancient Wisdom from a Modern Master
by Master Hong Liu, Paul Perry

(Page 4 of 4)

When the player and his trainers arrived, however, Master Kwan did not act honored at all. As the group came into the living room, he turned his back on them and began to talk to his apprentices as though the sports people had not come into the room. Then he talked and joked with me and my brother as the sports entourage stood awkwardly behind him, waiting to be noticed.

Finally he spoke to them. "This athlete has been hurt for some time," he said. "You should have taken his pain more seriously when it first started."

"We did everything we could do," said one of the trainers. He described a litany of treatments that the athlete had gone through, including physical therapy and cortisone injections.

"You missed one," said Master Kwan, turning to face the entourage. "You did not bring him to me."

Standing up, Master Kwan raised his arms slowly over his head like a graceful diver and addressed the athlete. "Do what I am doing," he instructed. The boy raised his arms slowly from his side but got no higher than three-quarters of the way before he grimaced and lowered them again.

"What can you do? What can you do?" pleaded one of the trainers.

"Calm down," demanded Master Kwan. "l tell you he will be fine."

He turned the boy around and touched several spots on his back and shoulders. He did not press hard, but merely put his fingers on particular spots and held them there. As he did this, the tension left the player's face and he appeared to be comfortably asleep.

When the master finished, he stepped back and asked the athlete to raise his hands. This time he raised them over his head. When he experienced no pain, the table tennis player began moving his shoulder through a range of motion that obviously would have been impossible when he first came in the door. Now he was laughing and pretending to play table tennis. He was jumping around the room and swinging his arms like a player at the table.

"No pain?" asked Master Kwan. "Do you feel pain anywhere?"

"None at all," the athlete said, continuing to roll his head and twist his neck.

What I saw shocked me. By this time I had already gone through much of my medical training and I knew that the doctors in charge of the athlete's treatment had done everything by the book, yet it had only served to make things worse. What I was seeing was hard to accept.

Master Kwan left the room and soon returned with a hot herbal patch. He taped this patch on the player's lower back and pressed it against his skin.

"Take that off tomorrow when you get back to Beijing," he told him. "Then just continue to train."

There were literally tears in the trainers' eyes as they saw what had happened. A few weeks later the athlete won the competitions.

That night I could barely sleep. In fact, I did not want to sleep. What I had seen was too exciting to ignore. World-class athletes are treated by the best doctors in the country. We call them the "specialists' specialists" because their knowledge about the human body is so extensive. Yet all of their good work cannot heal this table tennis player's pain. Then in comes a man who claims to draw energy from the universe. He touches the player's neck and back in a few places and the athlete is suddenly healed. How could this be? I wondered. How could I ignore this man and his methods of healing?

The desire to control disease was the reason I was becoming a doctor of medicine. Could this energy medicine be combined with my Western medical knowledge to create a superior form of treatment? Was it, as it appeared to be, a combination of isometric and isotonic exercises, combined with meditation and guided imagery as well as a number of other interventions and techniques that were not yet even recognized by medicine? Was it truly a unifying principle of medicine that had been downplayed in favor of a more mechanical interpretation of the human body?

As I started to doze I was left wondering if seeing this night's demonstration was a blessing or a curse. Should I follow my own intuition and learn more about Qi Gong? Or should I keep my focus on the proven, scientific, Western method of medicine I already understood? I was confused.

I fell asleep for a few hours that night but awoke well before sunrise. My mind was full of the mysteries I had seen that night. I thought more about Qi Gong and how it might relate to my life. I was in the army at this time, which exercised control over everything from my training to my living arrangements. Maybe it was futile to even think that I could study under Master Kwan.

Unable to sleep, I got out of bed and quietly began to pace around the house. We had a hallway with big windows that looked out onto a courtyard. On this particular night the windows were open, and even though it was chilly I could feel puffs of warm air, which puzzled me.

As I reached out to close the window, I saw the source of the warm wind. There in the garden was Master Kwan. He was practicing martial arts, twirling his arms in graceful sweeps that made him look like frothing waves pounding the shore. With every movement of his arm I could hear a crack as though lightning had struck. There was some kind of force that seemed to produce a maverick wind. I don't know how else to explain it. As he performed his graceful routine, winds blew and swayed the plants and trees around him.

It was impressive, exhilarating, and frightening all at the same time.

I must have been leaning very far out the window, because I gasped and almost fell out when a hand touched my back. It was my mother.

"Do not disturb the master when he is practicing," she said.

She reached past me and pulled the window shut. Still I stood there for a long time.

There was no longer any question in my mind. I had to learn Qi Gong from Master Kwan.

© 1997 by Master Hong Liu

About the Author

Master Hong Liu became a medical doctor in China with a specialty in the treatment of cancer and an advanced degree in herbal medicine, and he is one of only a small number of Qi Gong masters in the world. He trained for thirty years with renowned Taoist and Shaolin masters, including eight years under the Qi Gong Master Kwan, and treated high-ranking Communist Party members in China. Master Liu served as a distinguished professor of Qi Gong at the Emperor's college of Traditinal Oriental Medicine in Santa Monica and Samra University of Oriental Medicine in Los Angeles, and currently maintains professional offices in suburban Los Angeles.

Paul Perry is the coauthor of three bestselling books, including Saved by the Light. He lives in Scottsdale, Arizona.