Master of Five Excellences

A great book telling about perhaps the best martial artist since Bruce Lee. Dr. Cheng Man Ching was such a humble man. Yet he could also express the beauty of Chinese culture in the five subjects all Chinese people are fond of.

as I want it Every thing as I wanted it. Fast and perfect (I hate to be forced to say more! If something is perfect I should be able to rate this and this should be enought. I am not going to take part in rating in furur because of this silly duty. This should have been enought.)

Everythingwas fine!

Master of Five Excellences is a wonderful book for anyone who wishes to learn more about the tai chi master Cheng Man-ch'ing. Cheng has always been an interesting figure to me, for his skill in tai chi, as well as for his skills as an artist and scholar. Hennessy's translation is smooth and easy to read. It gives readers a taste of Cheng's abilities in poetry, painting, calligraphy, tai chi and medicine. The work also includes color prints of some of Cheng's paintings as well as reproductions of his calligraphy. Perhaps most interestingly for me, as someone who has worked to mesh my academic studies with my practice of tai chi, it shows how Cheng incorporated all of his arts into a coherent world view.

This is a much better book than Cheng's Essays on Man and Culture, with the author expounding the arts of Tai Chi, calligraphy, poetry, painting, philosophy and medicine - in all of which he had received a traditional training in pre-revolutionary China. Beneath the conventional modesty ('my knowledge is very shallow and I await correction by the intelligent') there's a little bit of vainglory ('many people said it was a superb effort'); but beneath that in turn, you can sense a little bit of insecurity about the world's judgement of these arts and his standing within them. It's a shame, because truly to master a traditional art or skill and make it your own is one of the highest forms of creativity. Cheng was cultured and civilised in the best and fullest sense, and in the late twentieth century that automatically made him a man out of his time.Perhaps it was a strange decision to entrust the English version to a man who was primarily a classical musician, not a writer - I suppose there aren't too many people who can translate Chinese, and it was felt to be important to choose someone who had known Cheng personally. Mark Hennessy won't win any prizes for elegant prose, even in America; but his translation here is at least not an obstruction, as in the other volume (Cheng's estate adds a comment to the effect that 'it will do for now'). The book is as good a short primer on traditional Chinese culture as you could expect to find.