My name is Philip Chu. I was born in Burma, (now Myanmar) in 1933. During the second world war, my father took us all (the whole family) back to our ancestor’s home in Kuangtung China.
There was no formal school during the war, back then in our ancestor’s village in China. So my father hired an old Chinese teacher and gave me private tuition to learn Chinese. All he did was made me recite old Chinese literatures without explaining the meaning of the words. All I had accomplished was to recognize a few simple Chinese characters. At the age of 12 I happened to come across the book called the Tao Teh Ching. The first sentence said; “the Tao that can be explained is not the real Tao”. So I said to myself- if the real Tao cannot be explained, why should I read it at all? So I closed the book and forgot about it for a quarter of a century. |
After the second world war our whole family returned to Burma. I started to learn English and Burmese till I graduated from the university.
One day I casually strolled into a Chinese book store in San Francisco and I accidentally picked up the book of Tao Teh Ching. The very first sentence struck me as awe-inspiring. I finally understood what that sentence meant. Whatever Lao Tzu wrote in there had a deeper meaning than the apparent superficial words. What he wrote was the wisdom of the world and the wisdom of nature. Understanding wisdom is unlocking the secret of success in dealing with the world. The purpose of my website is to explore the wisdom of Lao Tzu’s writing which may be beneficial to people in their daily life. |