Pangu Shengong (Pan Gu Mystical Qigong) instructor who is certified to teach both the Moving Form and the Nonmoving Form.

Robert A. Anderson is a novelist, playwright, and editor. His novels Cooks & Bakers and Service for the Dead were both set in the Vietnam War. He is the co-author of The Cat, the Sun, and the Mirror, an illustrated story based on an ancient Japanese myth.

Robert’s comment about Pangu Shengong:

Although very different from any other qigong I had learned, I found myself receptive to it. The idea of an exercise—a ritual—grounded in myth—the figure of Pangu—especially appealed to me. Over the years mythology has become for me, a writer of fiction, more and more a field for the exploration of reality. Another attraction lay in its feature of inner alchemy: absorbing and then synthesizing the energies of the “golden sun” and “silver moon.” I left the workshop thinking, and saying to my wife, that this Pan Gu Mystical Qigong might be just what I had been looking for.

What happened next was that my wife and I began to practice the exercise on a daily basis. And what happened after that was that we both began “feeling things.” Among practitioners of qigong and taiji quan these are referred to as “qi sensations.” In my case it was strong tingling in my hands, like electric currents, curling my fingers; also heat. Then I began having these experiences when I wasn’t practicing the exercise. What is qi? you might ask. It is energy, the energy that animates the universe, that is in all of us, whether we consciously feel it or not; the energy that acupuncturists manipulate by using needles. I had had qi sensations before, but what I was experiencing now was new to me.

But there was something else going on as well, something more subtle and also more important: I began to feel better. That is the best and most concise way I can put it. Emotionally, psychologically, psychically, spiritually—I’m not sure which of those words or combinations thereof would be most accurate; perhaps all of them apply. Does it matter? My wife reported feeling better too. Perhaps in her case what was happening can be described more specifically: she had been experiencing some tough times, emotionally and physically, due principally to her brother’s illness and death and to past injuries sustained during her dance career; menopause amplified the depression and pain. She says that she doesn’t know what would have happened to her if she hadn’t learned Pangu qigong when she did.

It was at a follow-up class with Master Ou in the Boston area—with Vincent Chu interpreting, one of Master Ou’s senior students in the United States and also one of the foremost taiji quan teachers in the world—that I learned of the existence of The Path of Life and Master Ou’s wish to make it available in a decent English translation. Immediately I volunteered to help and have worked on it—on and off, initially with Vincent’s invaluable assistance, later with that of Master Ou’s daughter, Olivia Ou—ever since. That work, along with the exercise that arose out of it, has indeed, as my fellow Pan Gu Mystical Qigong practitioner Mary Beth Soares once predicted, changed my life.

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