Gia-Fu Feng

Gia-Fu Feng (1919–1985) was prominent as both an English translator (with his wife, Jane English) of Taoist classics and a Taoist teacher in the United States, associated with Alan Watts, Jack Kerouac, The Beats and Abraham Maslow.

He was born in Shanghai in 1919 into a fairly wealthy family of some influence.

His father was a prominent banker, one of the founders of the Bank of China; his mother died when he was 16.

He was educated privately in his own home in the classics of the Chinese tradition and in private boarding schools.

He was for several months tutored by the wife of the British Consul-General.

His family members were Buddhist.

For the springtime holiday, they traveled to the ancestral tombs in Yuyao, in Zhejiang Province, for the spring festivals.

During the Japanese invasion, Gia-Fu went to Kunming in Free China to complete his bachelor's degree at Southwest Associated University in the liberal arts.

Gia-Fu once commented that he had become a millionaire three times in his life, giving his money away each time.

The first time was when he worked for the bank in Kunming.

After he returned to Shanghai in 1946, he left again in 1947, to go to the U.S. for a master's degree in international finance at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania.

After the communists took over China and the Korean War began, U.S. policy kept many Chinese students from returning home.

Then, when Chinese Communist Party policies made life for the Feng family less certain, his father advised him to stay in the U.S. During the Cultural Revolution, some members of his family were persecuted.

After this, he started wandering across the country “in an old jalopy”.

He spent some time in a Quaker community, lived in a Georgia commune during the time of the Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education, and in the mid-fifties moved to the West Coast.

There, he 'hung out' with Jack Kerouac and other Dharma Bums, and began teaching Taoism.

Initially he translated Chinese classics for Alan Watts at the American Academy of Asian Studies, the center where Alan Watts served as administrator and primary teacher.

Watts was later to state that Gia-Fu was “The Real Thing”, sending aspiring Beat-and-Hippie Taoists to him.

Watts' championing of Gia-Fu as a genuine Taoist Adept substantially abetted sales of Gia-Fu and his wife, Jane English's classic Taoist philosophy, coffee-table picture-books, which were published by Random House in many languages.

Gia-Fu and Jane's books contained Jane's artistic black-and-white photos in conjunction with his outstanding calligraphy and readily understood wisdom translations.

They initiated an important segment of what would become for the global book industry a highly popular, multicultural spirituality and philosophy genre.

They also foreshadowed a trend toward multi-media usage in an emergent, classy, holistic marketplace.

Gia-Fu became involved in the East-West philosophy and spirituality movement that occurred in Northern California, centered by the evolution of the AAAS, reformed as the California Institute of Integral Studies.

This was part of a core sociocultural transformation that became known as the San Francisco Renaissance. Regarding that, Alan Watts stated, “I know what it is, but when you ask me, I don't. I am too close to what has happened to see it in proper perspective.

I know only that between, say, 1958 and 1970 a huge tide of spiritual energy in the form of poetry, music, philosophy, painting, religion, communications techniques in radio, television, and cinema, dancing, theater, and general life-style swept out of this city and its environs to affect America and the whole world.”

Michael Murphy, a primary founder of Esalen Institute, was also a student at the AAAS during his Stanford student days.

From this network, including the community of the Sri Aurobindo Ashram in San Francisco, the seeds of Esalen were planted.

Gia-Fu was drawn to Esalen by his close friend Dick Price.

At Esalen, Gia-Fu served as accountant, “Keeper of the Baths” and Crazy Taoist, a few stories of which can be found in the entertaining and informative history of Esalen and birth of the Human Potential Movement, The Upstart Spring.

During the early and mid-1960s Gia-Fu and Fritz Perls, arguably Esalen's key resident teacher during that era, had a difficult relationship, with Perls being the primary reason Gia-Fu left Esalen only after creating the original Stillpoint retreat center on Bear Creek Road and Skyline in the Los Gatos/Santa Cruz Mountains, where he and Jane English translated the Tao Te Ching between 1968-1972.

This version is still the most popular English version with over 1,250,000 copies sold.

To illustrate how different people perceived Gia-Fu, one person writes: Toward the end of the 1960s Gia-Fu gained a great degree of notoriety as a Patriarch of the counter-cultural free love movement.

As a hippie-beaded, Chinese Guru and Taoist Adept, he became popular as a focus for newspapers and magazines around California.

At the time, Taoist-Buddhist yoga was not popularly known, and Gia-Fu effectively acted as the primary agent or Master in America teaching such.

He founded his own center of Taoist studies in the Sangre de Cristo Mountains and called it "Stillpoint", after T. S. Eliot's Four Quartets.

Gia-Fu and Stillpoint soon proved to be a magnet for aspiring Indian yoga-meets-Chinese Tao seekers.

His biographer views this phase of his life very differently, understanding that Gia-Fu shunned guru-type associations and yearned to create a community where people lived simply, honestly, together in nature.

He loved to call himself a charlatan.

There, Gia-Fu held Perls in high esteem, and was very distraught when Perls died in 1970.} Perls' Gestalt Therapy and method of enlightenment became a primary influence in Gia-Fu's later work.

Gia-Fu also viewed Virginia Satir, a famous resident teacher of Esalen, and her practice of Family therapy as a primary influence in his own advancement of such, which he termed “Cultural Therapy.”