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STORY
OF HAI TRIEU Charles
Phan Hoang
Hai
Trieu was born and raised on a lost island in the Pacific Ocean. This island
is small and far from the outside world but the scenery is dreamlike and life
is peaceful. On the island, there is only one hamlet where the inhabitants
live like an ancient tribe. There is no school, so parents teach their
children what they know and no one goes anywhere out of the island. In fact,
they know only a half of the island consisting of a long beach and a
semicircular piece of land where they live. Behind this place is a straight
mountain range that cuts the island in two separate parts.
Life
was peaceful, then one day a powerful storm hit the island and a tsunami
roared up. At that time, Hai Trieu was busy collecting firewood at the foot
of the mountain, and in an emergency, he hurriedly climbed up the high cliff that no one normally dares to
risk. Then he continued to climb up to the top of the mountain. Arriving
there he was exhausted and fell asleep. The next morning, when he awoke he
discovered that threatening circumstances often help people develop
incomparable strength as he did in climbing this high mountain. Standing on
the top of the mountain overlooking the ocean, his view was totally different
from the one he had standing on the beach seeing only the ocean at the horizon.
He discovered on this high mountain there were many kinds of colorful flowers
and countless birds that he had never seen on the beach. What was even more
curious when he looked down on the west side of the island, far away at the
foot of the mountain there was a rather busy fishing village. Oh, so there
are two worlds on this island: the Eastern world and the Western world. He
decided to slowly descend the mountain to explore that new place. In front of
him a new world opened up: in this village people often communicated with the
mainland, and they had a lot of things that he had never seen before.
Especially they had a large house full of children and they call it the
School.
After
staying enough time in this fishing village to learn many new things, he
decided finally to get on a merchant boat and go to the mainland. With
surprise he discovered there was not just one peaceful land when he arrived.
The land was split up into innumerable pieces, large and small, which are
called countries or nations. In each country people have different languages,
different traditions and rules. Countries are often jealous of each other so
they seldom live in peace. In the name of their country people engaged
themselves in war and can kill people in other countries they believe their
enemies. Faced with this reality Hai Trieu could hardly understand why
society was so complicated. Sometimes he wanted to find the way back to his
old island and live peacefully. But in the end he decided to prepare himself
for a long journey throughout the world. He traveled to explore the real
nature of the human kind to find why some people are so rich and others suffer
from crying poverty; why it is so difficult for humans to avoid war?
Wherever
he went, he lived with the local people and gained more and more knowledge
and became a wise person. He had been traveling through countless countries.
The rain forests, the rugged mountains, the vast deserts, the pyramids, the
ancient ruins, the magnificent and modern cities, all did have profound
impact on his live. In some places, the freedom of the individual is highly
valued and in other places, the people must absolutely bow their heads to the
leader. In some countries women have to wear veils and in other places women
can enjoy being naked on the beach. Although apparently each ethnic group in
the world does have its different life style and different
"cultures", but through his experience, it seems that the entire
history of mankind has been happening in a coherent way. Traveling throughout
the world he discovered that: People everywhere are separated from each other
not because of geographical distance as we usually believed, but indeed because
of the difference in time that marked their present position on the long way
of history. Today some countries are really in the 21st century
while some others are still at the time of the 15th century.
People often made war without knowing what caused their war. When time has
passed, all wars are meaningless. History is never repeating, it is
advancing; only people are repeating their old errors. But how could Hai
Trieu record the many things he has experienced through all these years of
traveling . . .
Then
one afternoon at a faraway beach, after over 50 years since the day he left
his island, he quietly created a quyen
called “Hai-Trieu quyen”, to entrust in it many things he had to say to the new
generation of martial artists. “Quyen” is a motion of a series of
choreographic movements. It is a living book in which symbolic gestures are
the languages that carry the encrypted teaching from the author. The quyen
Hai-Trieu consists of 14 sequences. In this quyen the number 14 suggests a
difficult mathematic problem expressed on the face of an ancient Vietnamese
bronze drum: How to divide a circle in
14 equal parts using only a straightedge and a pair of compasses. Also in
the ancient Vietnamese culture, there is a saying that said "Fourteen in One Heart",
which means there are 14 things to keep in mind for living a happy life in
harmony with others. In one word, this could make the following motto: Do everything with vision and sincerity.
After
creating the quyen Hai-Trieu at that beach, he continued going around the
world, not knowing if he could ever find the way back to his native island./.
Phan Hoàng
Canada, 2023-0423
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