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It's a Small World ... Or is it Big Karma?

By Master Eric Sbarge

I'm a mostly conventional and pragmatic person. I don't assume lights in the sky are from alien spacecraft, and when people tell me about their fantastic journeys through past lives or their amazing astral projection travels I smile and nod but I mostly just think they have a more vivid imagination than I do.

As a meditator, however, I can't help but be sensitive to various connections that exist that seem to transcend logic and can't easily be explained away as mere coincidence. I conclude that there are forces at work that I don't fully understand but that are meant to send us in certain directions with apparent guidance.

Anyway, I wanted to make you aware of some of these chance connections as they relate to your lineage and training, and as they relate to the fact that you are learning kungfu and meditation from me here in Charlotte. I'll let you make up your own mind whether these connections mean anything.

Meeting Grandmaster

In July of 1980 I was home for the summer having just finished college. I lived in the small, wooded town of Kent, NY, a good hour and a half north of New York City. I wanted to find a highly-skilled teacher to continue my martial arts training, and assumed I would have to travel into the city which I was willing to do. I began researching schools in Manhattan and Queens, looking through scores of martial arts magazines comparing styles and teachers.

Master Sbarge then and now.

During the week that I was researching schools I happened to start up a conversation with a drunken police officer at a local bar one night. He turned out to be the brother of a high school acquaintance of mine, and when I somehow mentioned that I was looking for a martial arts school he advised me that one of the best kungfu teachers in the country didn't have a school but lived in a small house in the woods in the town of Putnam Valley right next to Kent.

He said he knew of the guy through his sister or something, and he looked up the guy's phone number and gave it to me. I thanked him for his advice but had no intentions of calling that teacher: What could a drunken cop's sister in Kent, NY possibly know about who is or isn't a good kungfu teacher?

The next day a friend whom I had earlier trained with in karate called me and said he was going to check out a kungfu school, and asked if I wanted to come along. I joined him. It turned out we were going to see the same teacher that the cop had recommended. The teacher was now starting a kungfu class once a week at an old VFW hall. I wasn't enthused. When we got there we saw a few people doing slow-motion tai chi stuff which we knew little about and cared even less about because we wanted real martial arts. The teacher noticed us walk in but paid no attention so we sat in a couple of chairs and watched.

Suddenly, out of no where, one of the people flew across the room and slammed into the wall and crumpled to the floor. At that moment the teacher who had flung the student across the room looked over, and I suddenly recognized him as the man on the cover of the newest edition of World Karate magazine that I had just finished reading. I instinctively knew he was to be my teacher, and thus began my relationship with my teacher and your Grandmaster, Frank DeMaria.

As the years went by I learned more about Grandmaster's history. Of course he was the adopted son of one of the most famous kungfu masters of the 20th century, Ch'ang Dung Sheng, but he also had trained with other highly skilled teachers in New York City including Franklin Kwang, the monk Tsung Tsai, the late kenpo master John McSweeney, and the now world-famous ch'an meditation master, Sheng Yen. He never said much about these teachers or what had happened to them, just that he had trained with them.

Among the many jobs I've had over the years, construction work was something I continually dabbled in. Since I was thirteen I had worked on and off for a neighbor and local contractor named Francis Heitman.

One day in the early 80s Francis contacted me to tell me he was going to start doing work on the foundation for a building, and asked if I could help him. It turned out to be the foundation for the main hall of the Chuang Yen Monastery, to be the largest Buddhist center on the East Coast on a deeply wooded mountain in of all places Kent, NY, just five minutes from my house. I was busy with other things but helped him as I could.

At the time I didn't realize that the temple was being funded by the same person who had funded much of Master Sheng Yen's studies, including his doctoral studies in Japan, and who had brought Master Sheng Yen to the Temple of Enlightenment in The Bronx, the place where Grandmaster had studied ch'an meditation under him years earlier as part of Sheng Yen's first group of American students. And at that time I couldn't foresee how many hours I would spend meditating at that monastery.

Enter Debra

Fast forward a decade or so to the early 90s. I felt ready for a temporary change of pace from my life of working every day and training at the kwoon every night, so I decided to move to Taiwan to teach English and just do my own training for a year or so.

I needed a Chinese language tutor so I went to the library at the Chuang Yen Monastery to see if they could recommend someone. The person at the desk told me to see another woman who worked downstairs who might be able to help me. The woman downstairs agreed to become my tutor, and though she didn't do much for my Chinese she has been a pretty good wife and partner. And that's how Debra entered the picture.

At first Debra thought it was really strange that I practiced kungfu. In her mind kungfu practitioners were wicked, wild and weird. However, when browsing through Grandmaster DeMaria's book Ch'ang Shih Tai Chi Chu'an she looked at a photo and exclaimed, "Hey, I know that man well. He and my sister Mei's godfather (a Christian magazine publisher) were best friends."

She was looking at a photo of the most skilled old pakua kungfu master in Taiwan, Wang Gwo Jen, who taught at the Taipei Police Academy. The police academy was run by our Great Grandmaster, Ch'ang Dung Sheng, and it just so happens that Wang Gwo Jen was one of Ch'ang's closest friends. In fact at Ch'ang's request he had evaluated Grandmaster DeMaria's pakua skills on one of Grandmaster's visits to Taiwan and given it the thumbs up. Debra concluded that our martial arts practice must be okay if our grandmaster was close friends of a close friend of her sister Mei's godfather.

Debra was also put at ease when her friend, a Buddhist nun named Bao Lin who was on a winter-long retreat in the isolated hills of Delhi, NY, wrote a letter to Debra saying that whenever she thought of Debra during her meditation she saw an American man meditating, and asked if Debra had started dating an American. Debra wrote back that she had, and Bao Lin in turn replied that through her meditation she could see I was a peaceful and meditative person and everything would be fine.

This reinforced the message that Shakyi Trizin, the Tibetan Buddhist leader second only to the Dalai Lama, had given Debra a couple of years earlier when she was worried about how she could get a green card and keep her kids in America. He had told her she would marry an American and not to worry, which she thought seemed absurd at the time. How would she meet an American with her poor English and while working in the library of a Chinese Buddhist monastery all day?

Three Monks

Several months after we were married Debra came home one day and asked if I wanted to meet a Shaolin monk who had defected from China and was hiding out in Chinatown. I said no because I was skeptical, knowing that most Shaolin monks were charlatans and no longer really monks. She assured me that this monk had visited the Chuang Yen Monastery and the other monks there had proclaimed him legitimate.

At last I agreed to drive down to Chinatown, and there I met Guolin Shrfu for the first time. I invited Guolin to get away from the city and visit my teacher's school, and he accepted. He and Grandmaster DeMaria got along well. Back in China Guolin had known of Ch'ang Dung Sheng's reputation as a premier martial artist, so he immediately respected DeMaria's position as Ch'ang's adopted son. Shortly thereafter a ceremony was held where the ACCS became the official brother school of Guolin's Shaolin Overseas Temple.

A year or two later Grandmaster DeMaria invited his early Ch'an meditation teacher, Master Sheng Yen, to his school to give a talk on Ch'an meditation. Guolin was also invited. Upon seeing Master Sheng Yen Guolin bowed deeply. Guolin was well aware of Master Sheng Yen's growing reputation as perhaps the world's foremost expert on Ch'an meditation, considered among the highest ranking monks of the Ch'an order. It was a proud moment for Grandmaster to bring together one of the world's foremost Ch'an fighting monks with one of the world's elite Ch'an meditation monks.

Not long after that Debra and I were in Woodstock, NY visiting friends of hers at a small Tibetan Buddhist temple. When we left Debra asked if I wanted to stop and visit a Chinese monk she knew who had become a recluse and built a small house in the mountains outside of Woodstock. I said no, I just wanted to go home. A few minutes later we were driving up a winding dirt road and at last found the old monk's home.

He seemed delighted to see Debra, and invited us in for tea. We talked for several hours. It turns out that a couple of years before I had met Debra, Debra's mom had been very ill. Though there were numerous Chinese doctors in Chinatown and elsewhere, her friends at the monastery had referred her to this particular monk due to his unusual expertise in acupuncture and Chinese medicine. He took a liking to Debra and her kids and agreed to treat Debra's mom. Many times Debra took the hour and a half drive to pick up the monk, bring him to her house, then drive him home. He never charged for his services. We said our good byes and left the old monk's small home, and I didn't think much more about it in the years to follow.

Then just a couple of years ago one of our students here at The Peaceful Dragon, Brett, had the opportunity to join a two week retreat with Grandmaster's meditation teacher, Master Sheng Yen. He came back and said he had enjoyed it. Brett then asked if I had read the recently-published book Bones of the Master by George Crane, which I hadn't. He said it was about a Ch'an master and he thought I might enjoy it.

The book is the harrowing story of an idiosyncratic old Ch'an master returning to Mongolia to honor his deceased teacher. This hardcover Bantam book was well-received by the critics. Jack Kornfield called it the "Best Zen story I've read in years" and Robert Bly wrote that the story was "Beautifully recounted... It's hard to overestimate the astonishment of this book." I read the book and did enjoy it, but what I found astonishing was that the monk was the same hermit Debra had taken me to visit outside of Woodstock. The book is replete with photos of him and his home which I remember well.

But that's not the most astonishing part. The most astonishing part is that this monk is the same one who had taught Pakua and Hsing-I to Grandmaster DeMaria some thirty years earlier in New York's Chinatown —the monk Tsung Tsai—whom Grandmaster had occasionally mentioned but long since lost track of.

Also of interest, at Guolin's workshop that we just completed Guolin told us that he too knows Tsung Tsai, and in fact had helped Tsung Tsai with some chi sinking exercises. Tsung Tsai had offered to teach Guolin his medical knowledge in return, but Guolin had to refuse because he is too busy running his temple. And as one more aside, it turns out that like Guolin, Tsung Tsai had spend time training at the Shaolin Temple in his younger years.

More Connections

Many of you know that a few years back I started training in Pakua with Master Park Bok Nam. Apparently my martial arts skills were okay because he quickly took me under his wing and trained me intensively and spent a good deal of time talking with me.

In our discussions he learned who our great grandmaster was, and when I showed him pictures he instantly recognized him as the chief judge at one of the tournaments he had brought his Korean students to in Taiwan. Ch'ang Dung Sheng was often the chief judge at Taiwan's tournaments, and in fact Ch'ang first met Grandmaster DeMaria when he judged one of his fights.

At one of Master Park's summer Pakua camps in Baltimore an older Chinese student of his came up and introduced himself as Alex Chu from Athens, GA. He complimented me on my movement and said it was clear I had been training for a while. I told him that I had been training for some time but that if I had any skill at all it was because of my main teacher, Frank DeMaria.

When I mentioned that name he replied, "Do you mean the same Frank DeMaria who learned tai chi from Master Franklin Kwang?" I learned that Alex had studied tai chi from Master Kwang at the same time as Grandmaster, in the early 70's. He didn't actually know Grandmaster because Grandmaster was a private student and Alex only attended the group classes, but he knew of him. We compared our Yang Style San Shou form which I knew Grandmaster had learned from Kwang, and it was identical.

Alex has since come to visit me at The Peaceful Dragon a couple of times. On one of these visits I asked him where Master Kwang was now, since Grandmaster didn't speak of him much and hadn't seemed to stay in touch with him. Alex replied that Kwang had died a few years earlier, and that he periodically went to pay his respects at his burial spot. When I asked where that might be, he replied, "The Chuang Yen Monastery in Kent, NY."

Now it might seem like a long time had gone by from when Grandmaster trained with Tsung Tsai or Franklin Kwang, but an even longer time had gone by from when he trained with his kenpo teacher, Master John McSweeney. Master McSweeney had moved away from New York in the early 60s and they had lost contact thereafter.

Then, just a few years ago, a chance contact was made through the internet when one of Master McSweeney's students contacted Grandmaster. Master McSweeney and Grandmaster were at last reunited when Master McSweeney came to do a seminar at Grandmaster's school. Master McSweeney had become a 10th degree black belt and one of the highest ranking kenpo masters alive. At that time with Grandmaster's support I invited Master McSweeney to come to Charlotte to lead a seminar which he agreed to do. He came, led an exciting and dynamic seminar, and we felt fortunate to have one of Grandmaster's first teachers here at our school.

Master McSweeney died of a heart attack a month later. His seminar right here at The Peaceful Dragon was the last one he ever gave.

Coming to Charlotte

Now just why is The Peaceful Dragon right here in Charlotte?

After Debra and I had been married for a year or two we decided to move south. Debra had never seen snow before moving to New York, and the New York winters were rough on her. We took a two-week tour visiting dozens of cities from Wilmington to Savannah to Atlanta to Asheville. I had recently earned my certification as a school teacher, so I turned in applications at each of these city's school districts.

When I got back home my Dad asked me what I though of Charlotte. I replied, "Where's Charlotte?" I honestly had never heard of it. My Dad gave me an article from The Wall Street Journal saying it was the biggest city in the Carolinas, and it was a generally favorable article. I forwarded an application to Charlotte Mecklenburg Schools, and they were the first to offer me a job.

I think it's interesting why I was offered the job in Charlotte. I had sent a personalized cover letter and resume to every high school and middle school principal in Charlotte in addition to filling out the application form for the education center downtown.

It turns out that up until two years earlier the principal at South Charlotte Middle School, Dr. Maureen Cockerline, had been the principal at a high school in Newburgh, NY which was located about a half hour from my home in Kent. Next door was Newburgh Junior High School, the school that I randomly got assigned to for my student teaching during the same time period.

When she got my personal letter asking her for a job she immediately invited me down for an interview, thinking I wanted to relocate here to work for her because of all the good things I must have heard about her in Newburgh. Of course I had never heard of her in Newburgh and she laughed graciously when I told her this. She offered me the job anyway. Debra came down to see the city, we both decided it seemed like a nice place to live, and we moved here.

Now this story keeps unfolding, but since each of you are now characters in it let's together observe the connections as they appear ... and enjoy our chance to train together at this moment and place in time.

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