Chungliang Al Huang

Chungliang Al Huang grew up in China in a family of scholars and learned tai ji, kung fu and brush calligraphy as a boy. His family moved to Taiwan in 1949, and he moved to America as a student in 1955, taking up architecture, anthropology and dance. With his wife Suzanne Pierce he ran a modern dance company before turning back to the Chinese arts he had grown up with. He has taught at Esalen every year for more than five decades, and he worked closely with Alan Watts, who wrote the foreword to his first book, Embrace Tiger, Return to Mountain, and with whom he wrote Tao: The Watercourse Way.

His own approach, which he calls Living Tao, treats tai ji as a creative and playful practice rather than a fixed sequence, mixing movement, the five elements, calligraphy, poetry, music and storytelling, and drawing on Taoist, Buddhist and Confucian thought. He founded the Living Tao Foundation, based in Gold Beach on the Oregon coast, and directs the Lan Ting Institute at Wu Yi Mountain in China. Alongside his books on tai ji he co-wrote several titles with the coach Jerry Lynch on Taoist ideas in sport. He still teaches seasonal online sessions and in person.