Memoir of a private retreat with Master Nan mentions elite attendees like Ben Bernanke, Colin Powell, Warren Buffett

It is often said that during the days when Master Nan’s Lake Tai campus is open for training, when hundreds of rich and connected elites from all over the Chinese- speaking world converge there, it is the best networking spot in the country. But on the weekend of my first visit, the Tai Hu center was closed to outsiders. Only about ten of us were present. We were all, together, students. On our first morning we walked to a large hall overlooking the lake and sat down quietly on benches and meditated for three hours. And on our first evening, Master Nan sat with us during dinner, looking young and vital and 20 years short of his 92, barely eating. Above the bridge of his nose, I noticed, was a small marble-sized bump. This is the mark that emerges, according to Buddhist tradition, when your self-cultivation and meditation has led you to deep breakthrough, when energy begins to slip out of your head at that “third eye” spot and into the world, leaving a little bump as evidence. As we finished dinner, Master Nan turned the conversation to me and asked me to speak about what was on my mind. In later years I would learn this was his habit, to hand the floor over to his guests for a bit - whether they were politicians or industrial titans or innocent visitors - before entering into his own reflections. He pursued me with careful questions, his voice purring with a thick coastal accent. The questions seemed removed sometimes from my main points, but I quickly came to see them as needles. (“When he uttered a phrase,” it was said of Yun Men, “it was like an iron spike.”) Many of those present were jotting notes: Whatever Master Nan thought important, his students felt, must be worth putting down. I knew that the records of Nan’s lectures and discussions were often circulated by email. With subject lines like “Understanding This Chinese Generation” or “Master Nan Answers Questions About Chinese and Western Knowledge,” they were real- time maps of the usually invisible dance our daily lives do with history and philosophy. We live now, of course, but Nan was always aware that we lived within an historical flow too, in a particular moment amidst constant change. Remember that the foundational text of Chinese civilization is the 2500-year old Yi Jing, The Book of Changes. If Westerners are accustomed to consistent historical, Chinese begin with the idea of a flux of forces as the only constant. A world of ceaseless change means that valuable, useful education is less about facts than about the training of a vigilant instinct for reaction.” It was a version of this same aim that was at the heart of Nan’s teaching, and that made his ideas so magnetically appealing. The circulation lists on his lecture notes were the Chinese equivalent of a roster that included Ben Bernanke, Colin Powell, and Warren Buffett. They reflected the breadth of curiosity about his ideas, and the hunger to understand and digest changes in China and the world. “I just had a very senior leader here,” Nan told me during a visit several years later. | had seen the high security at the compound and 2 A world of ceaslesee change: See Francois Jullien, The Silent Tranformations (London: Seagull Books, 2011) 70, and David Hall and Roger T. Ames, Thinking from the Han Self, Truth, and Transcendence in Chinese and Western Culture (Albany, N.Y.: State University of New York Press, 1998) 150 HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_018241