Shortly after meeting Master Larry Sang in the early 1990’s, he would sometimes laugh and refer to the type of Feng Shui that Americans practice as “chop suey.” This was not a complement and if you read the history of chop suey on-line, the literal translation is “miscellaneous leftovers.” There are many colorful stories about upper class Chinese people not eating this hash of leftovers, which may have originated in America, by American-Chinese chefs, wanting to create a dish that Westerners would eat and/or as a way to not let the old food go to waste.
In the context here, Master Sang’s observations indicated that he was not impressed with the mish-mash of styles and pseudo-Feng Shui practices that were being lumped together into a kind of “chop suey.”
To date, there is still no unified or standardized way to evaluate the skills and training of any one practitioner from any one of a myriad of different Schools. And as I have pointed out in other articles, some of these Schools that go into the “chop suey” may be in direct conflict with another School that the same practitioner has incorporated into their practice . This makes me wonder how one justifies professionally what they are doing.
As one of my first teachers, I am reminiscing about Master Larry Sang since he has not taught any classes on U.S. soil since about 2010 and has returned to China to teach a whole new generation of people there. He had many funny and enlightening stories to share with us and we created our own legacy in the time when he was personally teaching through the School he created.
We had a field trip to Las Vegas and many locations where the Feng Shui circumstances of the place we were studying turned out to be quite ironic. As an example, one of the hotel casinos had an entrance with energy associated with theft or robbery. We laughed about how virtually everyone who enters the casino is “robbed” since they lose their money gambling. This is just one example of how we can also extrapolate from a more literal flying star definition into a modern context.
Master Sang used to say that he never heard of a crystal ball until he came to the United States. This was in the hey-day of the New Age spin-off versions of Feng Shui, where hanging a piece of lead crystal glass in a house was supposed to create good energy. While I am a big fan of natural crystals, I don’t think the lead crystals do a whole lot except that they can be used like any other hanging light or mobile, to buffer qi flow when there is a problem with the air currents moving too quickly or directly from one exit point to another.
Master Sang, whose lineage came from one of the original four Feng Shui families, the Tseng family, was also not a proponent of using the Ba’gua mirrors that many people use out of fear and superstition. There is a lot of interesting information about the history of mirrors, invented by the Chinese, and the mystical Ba’gua mirror housed in a plaque, surrounded by the images of the Eight Trigrams.
Used excessively and without any real knowledge of their origin as a talisman, Master Sang thought they were most revealing in that whoever was hanging them above their doorway was just advertising that they were worried about having bad Feng Shui. We know through more extensive training in Form School, that there are much better solutions to “sha qi” than the band-aid use of these misunderstood mirrored plaques.
Author: Kartar Diamond
Company: Feng Shui Solutions (R) Since 1992
From the Myths and Misinformation Blog Series
