Gary Zukav and Chungliang “Al” Huang on Masters

Unknown aboriginal artwork featuring two goannas.
Image credit: The Art Begins: Aboriginal Artwork - The Dreaming is the Foundation

I was trying to find out what a “Master” is. The dictionary was no help. All of the definitions involved an element of control. This did not fit easily into our image of the Dancing Wu Li Masters. Since [Chungliang] Al Huang is a Tai Chi Master, I asked him. “That is the word that other people use to describe me,” he said. To Al Huang, Al Huang was just Al Huang.

Later in the week, I asked him the same question again, hoping to get a more tangible answer. “A Master is someone who started before you did,” was what I got that time.
— Gary Zukav in The Dancing Wu Li Masters: An Overview of the New Physics, (New York: William Morrow and Company, Inc., 1979), p. 7.