The Tao of Wu

by The RZA

Hollis also took us to church every Sunday. It was an old Southern Baptist church where the services bugged me out. I loved the Bible stories I was reading, but I didn’t like this room where people were falling out, catching the Holy Ghost, slobbering all over the place. That happened in a lot of black churches, and I could immediately see it was phony. The screaming and moaning just didn’t feel right. The spirit of God sounded beautiful to me, but I quickly separated the experience of God from church. I just couldn’t see God in the fake-ass preachers or people wallowing on the ground. But I could see him in Hollis, my first real teacher.

I spent my formative years on an island—Staten Island—which is a blessing I’ve taken with me through life. Many cultures consider an island to be the ideal home. First, because you’re surrounded by water, which is life. Second, because you’re isolated from the masses, which allows you to find yourself, to develop inner strengths you couldn’t find anywhere else. An island shows you the true nature of life itself. In Staten Island, Wu-Tang niggas were set apart from all the influences and fads that were happening in the other four boroughs. I believe that while everything else in hip-hop culture was in constant flux, this island was nurturing something ancient.

But right around that time, my cousin Daddy-O asked me something. He said, “Yo, you heard about those Twelve Jewels?” I didn’t know what he meant. Daddy-O was a street hustler, a cool guy, not a spiritual man. But it turned out he was also a Muslim, someone whose other name, his righteous name, was Born Knowledge. He explained that these weren’t physical jewels, like someone in the hood wore to display his wealth. They were mental jewels—principles, ways of life—and that by obtaining them you would find a different kind of wealth. He said the Jewels were part of something called “the Lessons”—teachings from the Nation of Islam.

The Jewels are as follows: Knowledge, Wisdom, Understanding, Freedom, Justice, Equality, Food, Clothing, Shelter, Love, Peace, and Happiness. Each jewel has its own profound meaning, and each one takes work and meditation to achieve, but they break down like a chain reaction. First a man gets Knowledge, which is knowledge of self. Then he gets Wisdom, which is the reflection of that knowledge. Then he gets Understanding, which is the power to act on Wisdom. With Understanding he sees that he has Freedom—that he has freed his dome from ignorance—which means he has free will. But Freedom operates under a law: the law of Justice. That means that I’m free to smack you in your face, but justice applies: There will be a reward or penalty for my actions. Therefore, I must deal with Equality, because all men are created equal. By showing Equality to one another we’re activating Freedom, Justice, and Equality—the fourth-through-sixth jewels. Now, those are all things that build a man’s character. And after you attain them, you’re able to strive for Food, Clothing, and Shelter—which also have both physical and mental meanings.

That’s poverty in this country—something that makes you small, shrinks your horizon, clouds your vision. But even when I was living like that, because of what Daddy-O told me, I had faith that my mind could transform my surroundings.

But in Africa, I saw these people living on dirt. They had nothing but food, clothing, and shelter—and a love of themselves. And so they had happiness, the Twelfth Jewel. It’s within all of us. Western culture just makes it harder to find.

The Gods were the next generation of the Nation of Islam, whose teachings had shaped giants like Malcolm X and Muhammad Ali. The newer school was founded in 1964, by a Harlem student minister known as Clarence 13X, who we now call the Father. He was looking for a quicker and more powerful way to bring those teachings directly to America’s black youth, so he condensed the Nation’s Lost-Found Lessons into a philosophical core called the 120, which formed the basis of the Lessons taught by the Five Percent Nation in New York—lessons that had transformed my cousin Gary into Allah Justice. After

Mathematics contains universal truths, but no one needed its wisdom more than poor black men at the end of the last century. So many of us were so lost—deprived of knowledge of self, of others, of the world we lived in. Even in the Islamic world, commentaries on Muslim books were teaching that the black man comes from the grandson of Noah, who was Ham—a man who was cursed, made to be despised, a servant, a slave. That’s a myth, but it was a myth taught in both mosques and Christian churches, a myth taught to the slaves as well.

If you were poor and black, Mathematics attacked the idea that you were meant to be ignorant, uneducated, blind to the world around you. It exposed the lies that helped people treat your forefathers as animals. And it wasn’t until someone like the Father came to actively disseminate this information to poor black men—saying, “Hold on, your people are the fathers of civilization”—that people like me were set free. I can now say that if it wasn’t for Mathematics, I wouldn’t have achieved anything. I never would have imagined that a poor black motherfucker like me would grow up to respect the world, his fellow man, or himself.

For one thing, Night of the Living Dead predicted the dawn of crack. If you lived in the hood in the ’80s, you saw that movie come to life on the street. There’s a reason Public Enemy titled that song “Night of the Living Baseheads.”

By 1989, everyone at the projects was into kung-fu films, and a lot of us had VCRs. So one day, when a bunch of dudes came over to my crib to get high and watch flicks, I pulled out a tape of Eight-Diagram. Before we were an hour into it, something strange happened in that crib. People got real quiet, some niggas even started crying. Because that movie is real—it’s a reflection of the reality we were all living. A general betrays a family. A father gets killed. All his sons are killed except for two. One goes crazy. The other shaves his head, becomes a monk. You see this kind of thing happening in the hood every day. We were living in a place torn apart by wars—neighborhood against neighborhood, dealer against dealer—a place where you see people get killed or go crazy every week, a place where the bonds you make are almost stronger than blood. When someone has your back in a situation like that, it’s a life-or-death thing—a real brotherhood. I

Studying with Sifu, I learned that kung fu was less a fighting style and more about the cultivation of the spirit. What made a Shaolin monk so tough was his mastery of chi—the fact he could make contact with the Earth and draw the energy from it through him. He’s using his body, his breath, and his mind to align himself with the Tao—which is pure energy, the energy that sprang from a primal stillness called wu-chi. Tai chi translates as “the grand extreme” and breaks all ideas, forces, and objects into opposites, yin and yang. But wu-chi, which translates as “no extremes,” came before tai chi. It’s infinite, the source of all power, and it’s all one. A

In hip-hop and in the streets, a boast is a projection of strength—a threat that is itself an action. Labor unions act by threatening to strike. Rappers act by threatening to destroy. In fact, whole careers have been based on pure projection. That was definitely the case here because, in reality, that bag didn’t have anything in it but my lessons and a screwdriver. Even so, my projection backed that dude down. He started saying, “Nah, nah, nah—we cool, homie!” We backed him down with the force of the word. That

In the Divine Alphabet, Z stands for Zig-Zag-Zig, which means Knowledge, Wisdom, and Understanding. It’s the last letter of the alphabet and represents the final step of consciousness. So finally I just thought of the name as letters, as a title, not just a word. R-Z-A. It stands for Ruler-Knowledge/Wisdom/Understanding-Allah. In my life, I was zigging. I was going right but I zagged. I zagged and I almost died zagging. So I zigged back. I became the RZA. Rakeem Zig-Zag-Zig Allah. Later, people came to call me the RZA-rector—like I bring people back to life. But that year I found out the truth: The first person you have to resurrect is yourself. Forces in the world will tell you you’re a victim—of your family, your race, your past, your history. Don’t believe them. They don’t know you. Look inside and find your true self. It’s there. Give it a name.

Fast for a few days. Don’t have a lot of people around. Be alone and quiet. You’ll start to hear yourself, feel yourself. You’ll hear from the you that’s not the you your family, society, or history created. You’ll hear from the you that’s beneath that, the one that’s always there with you—the you that contains the God particle. Take time. This country fills up every second of your day with noise. That’s

Be by yourself. Yell out asking God for help until you’re almost crying. Let all those chemicals inside you come rushing up to your brain and ask for whatever you’re looking for. This is prayer—it’s opening your heart. Martial arts are a form of prayer—they’re why Da’Mo taught the monks kung fu. The monks were getting tired and sleepy and couldn’t pray properly, so Da’Mo taught them certain postures to strengthen their bodies.

For example, I’d been reading the Bible for years. When it says that Peter cut the guy’s ear off in the garden, I figured that Peter had to be a martial artist. To cut a guy’s ear off with a slice that precise you gotta be nice. That’s on a physical level. But on a mental level, his words were that nice. He must have said something that wrecked this guy with his knowledge. That kind of knowledge could work in hip-hop.

When I bought my first house, in Cleveland, Ohio, I sent my family there, but I stayed in New York to live and work. I didn’t come out of that basement for years, literally. Scientists have said that it takes ten thousand hours of practice to become a master. I’d been making hip-hop music since I was thirteen, but down in this laboratory I probably rounded out the last few of those ten thousand, recording, mixing, studying, creating—learning.

Gangsta comes in many forms. You can watch a movie like Die Hard, which is full of violence that’s in your face. But if you watch a movie like The Godfather, the violence is subtle—it’s in a word, a nod, a gesture. I think you walk out of Die Hard and leave something in the theater. With Godfather, you walk out with something put in you. Hip-hop is the same way. The smooth gangsta shit puts it into you—which is cool, in a way. But the hard-core shit gets it out of you, and I think that’s better. Otherwise, you have it all bottled in—you go to your car, drive home, and kill your wife.

Up to that point, I believed I owned hip-hop. If you read my old interviews, you see it. Hip-hop belonged to me and my crew. It belonged to the East Coast. It belonged to New York. It belonged to the black man. Then I realized something. Hip-hop didn’t belong to us. It belonged to the world. In a sense, I saw the larger flow of the world; I saw the harmony in it. I saw that no one could control these forces.

If you live through defeat, you’re not defeated. If you are beaten but acquire wisdom, you have won. Lose yourself to improve yourself. Only when we shed all self-definition do we find who we really are.

Even so, the computers are catching up. That’s why I feel that man has to become digital. The way things are going with computers and technology, we can’t get so that we rely on them completely. We’ve got to be able to have a concept of digitality within our own selves as well, so that we’re always the masters of it. What man has to do is apply wisdom to his own unpredictability. Right now, man is not always using wisdom. He’s letting computers do it. And when a computer can logically outthink a man—that’s a frightening step.

This is the hip-hop generation, and that generation now has a black president. To me, that means it is time for us all to be men. Not to be kids, not to be boys. It’s time to recognize the true value in a man—aside from his loot, his color, his chemistry. And to realize that each man has that same value, that same potential within him.

The world is filled with lies and illusions. Billions of people are living in illusion—they are mentally blind, deaf, and dumb. Yet each possesses the qualifications to build or destroy. Our thoughts are the governing, dominating power on this planet. Each thought is like a bomb. It could either save you or kill you. It has been said that words kill faster than bullets. Yet both words and bullets are created by thoughts. In fact, all you see around you comes from the thoughts of people. So who can man blame for the condition that the world is in besides man? Who can change the world besides man? As