More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
travel to many countries, meet many people from around the world, but most of them cannot have that kind of open mind and open heart. A lot of people think that if they believe in Buddha, they cannot go to church. If they believe in Muhammad, they cannot be in a monastery. But there’s no difference. You are the monastery—always, wherever you are—and this is something the RZA has understood for a long, long time.
kung fu, martial art and philosophy are the same, no difference.
Imagine you’re eight years old, going to the store with thirty-five cents to buy a pack of Now and Laters and a bag of sunflower seeds. You get there, three teenagers choke you with an umbrella, take your thirty-five cents, and buy cigarettes. That’s the projects—math and economics class on every block.
Chili-Wop became an ally, a protector in a violent world. Finally, after I’d lived there for nearly two years, he told me something. “When y’all first moved in, I robbed your house, maaan. I never knew you was gonna be a cool family.” When he told me, there wasn’t much I could do about it, and by then he was like my best friend—or as they say in the hood nowadays, my big homie—so in a way it was cool. That’s just one hood lesson: Your allies can arrive as enemies, blessings as a curse.
Island. I apply Da’Mo’s wisdom to the projects. I believe the misery there brought forth a certain flower that wouldn’t have grown anywhere else.
Our crew had lots of meanings for the words Wu-Tang—“Witty, Unpredictable Talent and Natural Game,” “We Usually Take Another Nigga’s Garments”—in China, I learned another, the original one: “Man who is deserving of God.”
This is a book of Wisdom—an accumulation of songs, parables, meditations, and experiences to help manifest that truth in your life. Wisdom is what shows those in darkness the Light, what reveals the path or the Way. It’s what we all need to live. The sutras of the Buddha teach that without wisdom there is no gain. In the Bible’s Book of Proverbs, King Solomon chooses wisdom over all the other gifts that God offers him—long life, riches, fame—but through wisdom achieved these gifts and many more, including seven hundred wives. In Islam’s Divine Mathematics, we learn that Wisdom is the Two after
...more
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.
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
...more
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.
...more
Even Son Goku eventually learns how to develop chi on his own, to become Super Saiyan at will. And today, I believe we’ve all got a Saiyan inside us, because God is in each of us. That’s what we’re all trying to reach, through all the chambers of our lives.
In the kung-fu movie The Five Deadly Venoms, there’s a character named Golden Arms, who was also called the Toad, the fifth deadly venom. His style was simply to be invincible. No type of attack, not even blades or spears, could defeat him. You see a lot of Golden Arms kids in the hood—the place brings it out of you—and that’s definitely how June-June thought of himself. He was like Golden Arms: “I don’t need a weapon!”
Infinite beat many men like that. But eventually he was defeated by a lesser man. That’s because he’d already defeated himself. This was a man with one of the biggest hearts in all of Staten Island, but one day he challenged this young nigga with the heart of a coward. He dared this kid to shoot him, and he did. Infinite died. Even the kid who killed him was like, “Yo, I didn’t want to kill him. He made me.” I believe that. I believe it was Infinite’s heart that killed him.
If you’re a young man and have a lot of heart, that means you have courage. But then you learn the other meaning of heart, which is love. At first, love is a vacuum that takes courage from your heart. You’re scared around a woman you love. You’re not the same tough dude, the same thug. At first, love weakens you. But soon it makes you strong in ways you couldn’t imagine.
So love, like wisdom, dissolves you and then resolves you. It breaks down your ego and puts you back together again properly.
The universe will show you whether your ego is at the steering wheel or you’re using your talent the way God wants you to. It’s going to come to light. No matter how much heart you got, it’s love you need to survive.
—just to help make his point. You could say that this act made the battle literal. But we didn’t care. We were taking mescaline, drinking beer, and protected by Allah—invincible. So I started talking shit right back.
The laymen, the people who don’t know much and are easily misled—they’re the 85 percent. Those who know the truth but use it to deceive and exploit—they’re the 10 percent. You see the 10 percent everywhere today, in every news broadcast, on the front page of every paper. You know their names. And their crimes are only getting greater, the pain they inflict more widespread.
Find a form of prayer and do it—to enhance your life, build up your chi, to attract positivity. Studying lessons and reading great religious books is an excellent form of prayer. But whichever you choose, don’t pray to have something pop up under your Christmas tree. Pray to put yourself in harmony with God. Do that and your prayers will be answered.
Meditation allowed me to see what we already were in a new light. It brought me Wisdom—which is light. It illuminated how these seemingly unrelated areas of knowledge connected to one another.
The knowledge was latent—the Wu-Tang movie, the Bible stories, the kung-fu epics, hip-hop battles—but meditation allowed me to connect them all, to see their possibilities and apply them to my life. Knowledge is knowing, wisdom is doing.
In October of 1992, we recorded the single of “Protect Ya Neck” and started selling out of the trunk of my cousin Mook’s Mercury Scorpio—no record deal, no support. It wasn’t until December or January that New York’s WBLS played it, on Kid Capri’s show. Most of us were all on Morningstar Road, packing records up and listening to BLS, when it came for the first time. Raekwon jumped so high into the air—and he’s short—that his head almost hit the ceiling. I’ll never forget that moment. Our record was on the fucking radio.
After all those years of being confined to Staten Island, developing talent, going through the training of the chambers, this was our moment to share our wisdom with the world. That’s why we chose the name Wu-Tang instead of Shaolin. Shaolin is a holy place—there’s no violence or crime in Shaolin. Wu-Tang are the people who studied at Shaolin and left. Some of them joined the government, some became killers, others bandits; in some movies they’re good guys, but mostly they’re bad. I thought we were the bad guys but that we were bringing this Shaolin chamber to the world. That’s why I named
...more
Today, making music, making beats—it’s like breathing for me. I have thousands of beats I’ll probably never release, but I can’t stop making them any more than I can stop breathing. You’re a vehicle for your breath, and I’m a vehicle for the music breathing through me. If you look at more of your daily creativity like that, it helps you to be more productive. You get out of the way. The kung-fu principle of wu-wei teaches us how to act without action. In the phrase, the word wu translates as “without.” It means that you use the power of the universe but use it without effort, bring yourself
...more
You and your life—it has a consistency, no matter what you go through. You just have to be detached enough to recognize the good and the bad in yourself and not judge either one. You are a 64-track recording—the tracks are always there, they’re always with you. Sometimes the harsh tracks are cranked up and the rest are rolled down to zero. Other times the sweet tracks are high and the darkness is low. But it’s all you.
If the music sounds violent—like “Bring the Mother-fuckin’ Ruckus”—that gives the listener a chance to get his violence out into the air. But if you have a violent lyric on a smoothed-out beat, that violence goes straight into your mind. If you’re saying, really quietly, shit like “So I saw the motherfucker and I shot ’em . . . And I knew when he dropped that I got ’em . . .’ all with a smoothed-out flow? Over R&B beats? You’re not getting it out, you’re not releasing that chi. You’re getting enticed, the pressure is building.
Even when we were recording the album, I realized the Clan was no longer a dictatorship with me telling who to get on what song and what to do. It had become more free, a democracy. It had to—it was just nature, the Way.
When the Shaolin temple was burned down, Shaolin was infiltrated by outside forces. In their case, it was the Manchus. In our case, it was money, fame, and ego. In both cases, the masters scattered—some left with intentions to rebuild; others took different paths. Shaolin would survive, but it would never be the same. And neither would I.
It’s a basic hip-hop lesson that’s tough to learn. The second you pick up a mike, it’s about you. You’re telling people who you are, where you’re from, how you dominate and control. But Taoism says that to remember the Great Way means to remember your connection with all of creation. It teaches you to harmonize your personal will with the natural harmony of the Way. That is, don’t take your car keys and hand them over to your ego. If you do, you’ll crash.
Until that morning, I’d had success, but I was small and twisted inside. Even though I had wealth and fame and knowledge of self, I wasn’t free from ego. I was secluded, antisocial, aggressive, conceited, and mean. On 9/7/97, I became humble. And ever since then, the person people meet named RZA is all right. Ever since that day, I’ve been able to talk to people about my life, to tell them I’m not a Muslim, a Buddhist, a Christian, a gangsta, a thug, or a prophet. I’m not any one of these things, although in a way I’m all of them. On that day I became me: a humble warrior, a student again. I
...more
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.
In a way, he even says the same thing to God—which just shows how powerful Jesus’s spirit was. He’s getting crucified, and in his last moments on Earth, he looks down at his killers, sees they’re all pawns in the larger scheme, and tells God to forgive them—because they don’t know what they’re doing. This is a man who told God himself, “Don’t hate the player; hate the game.”
Jewels are minerals, compressed pieces of earth, stacks of crystalline carbon. What gives them shine is their history. It’s the same with man. When a man recognizes himself, he recognizes his true jewel, and his body expresses that wisdom. He becomes a jewel himself. If his mind is sharp, the way he walks and talks has a certain beauty about it. Attain wisdom and you have all the bling you’ll ever need.
It’s been taught that your worst enemy can’t harm you as much as your own wicked thoughts
The first I never want anyone to forget: When you enter the path of wisdom, of knowledge, of life—don’t turn off that road.
For ODB to say in his last moments “I don’t understand”—that makes me say I don’t ever want to feel that. I want to always understand. I always want to have faith. But faith can leave you if you don’t practice it, don’t exercise it—if you let it die inside you. Practice your faith.
Equality is the responsibility of every man to one another. If you really want equality and freedom and justice for all, you got to be able to say, “Yo, son. You’re drinking too much. You’re free to do what you want, but it’s gonna kill you.”
My cousin ODB died because we didn’t pay enough attention. We let him do what the fuck he wanted. I tell my friends now, “Don’t ever not stop me if I’m fucking up. If I’m being a dickhead, let me know, please.” You have to do that, especially if someone is family. Especially if you love them.
It’s like they said in the Civil Rights movement, if one man is lynching a man in front of twenty men—all twenty men are guilty. They’re allowing it. They’re guilty of a negligence of righteousness. You have to care for others.
I used my new knowledge to create Wu-Tang Forever, but it’s not as critically acclaimed. What does that tell you? To me, it tells you to cultivate the novice inside you. Attack each chamber as a novice.
