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Back to Spirituality Issue July 2005 :: issue 21   GUEST EDITOR The RZA THE RZA RECOMMENDS: Hagakure by Yamamoto Tsunetomo The Sword and the Mind by Yagyu Muenori The Art of Peace by Morihei Ueshiba The Spirituality Issue For this month's Spirituality Issue, we welcome the RZA as our Guest Editor. The mastermind behind the Wu-Tang Clan and author of the recently published Wu-Tang Manual — a unique megamix of Buddhism, comics, kung fu, and Islam — RZA offers much wisdom in his introduction and in an interview about what spirituality means to him. The first book I really read was the Bible, and I must have read my kids' version of the Bible stories over 50 times. I was raised Baptist down South, but it was never the Jesus stories that really did it for me. It was the Old Testament: Samson and Solomon, Sodom and Gomorrah. They drop some deep truth, those stories, and they also taught me to start reading in a way that I was looking for truth — for the purest reality, not just the day-to-day reality of the streets — in myths, stories, and literature. When I was 11 years old, my cousin GZA started to teach me about two things: MCing and the Supreme Mathematics of the Nation of Gods and Earth, otherwise known as the Five Percent Nation. A lot of the Supreme Mathematics is about teaching you to see meanings in words and numbers that you wouldn't otherwise see, about teaching you to read differently. That's when I took the name RZA. In the Supreme Alphabet, Z stands for Zig-Zag-Zig, which means knowledge, wisdom, and understanding. So the name RZA stands for R (Ruler) Z (Knowledge, Wisdom, and Understanding) A (Allah). The Supreme Mathematics is still the foundation for much of the way I think — you can see it all over Wu-Tang Clan. And it taught me how to live righteous, but the idea that was truly a revelation to me was to look for God inside myself, not up in the sky. The fundamental lesson is that everyone has the potential to become God — it's within you.

The Art of War by Sun Tzu OTHER RECOMMENDATIONS: The Thirty-Six Stratagems by Unknown Tao Te Ching Translated by Stephen Mitchell I Ching by Hua Ching Ni The Bible The Qu'ran The Egyptian Book of Living and Dying Translated by Joann Fletcher I've always been a reader, but my next big spiritual introduction for me didn't come from books. It came from kung fu movies. In 1993, I saw a movie called Zen Master that told the story of Da'mo, also known as Bodhidharma. A lot of us got into kung fu movies, but it sparked something deep in me. I started reading the Tao Te Ching and the I Ching, and learning about Buddhism, Taoism, and Confucianism. At the same time, I started studying martial arts — and I mean studying. First, I read The Art of War. Everybody reads that, but for me it went deeper. It's a beautiful book, and it led me to The Art of Peace, The Sword and the Mind, all the ninja stuff. And finally I got to this one book, The Thirty-Six Stratagems: Secret Art of War. Thirty-six is an important number in Wu-Tang, so I knew it was going to be special. It was written after Sun Tzu, near the end of the Ming Dynasty. It can seem obscure at first, like it's just a book of tips about fighting battles Chinese warlord-style, but when you read it closely you begin to realize that it's full of wisdom. That book brought things together for me, spiritually and practically — it really guided the beginning of my career. One basic element of the lessons of Eastern spirituality is that all religions are part of a whole. You have to see beyond the opposites to find the real unity among all things. Today, I'm not a Muslim. I'm not a Buddhist. I'm a student. Like Solomon said, "He sought wisdom out from the cradle to the grave." You have to realize that you can never put a circle around the truth and say that it belongs to one specific way of thinking. My way of life is Islam. But there's an acronym I like to use: I Stimulate Light and Matter. You have to realize that you stimulate everything around you. If any of these books can help you realize that, then you know you're reading something real. — The RZA Back to Spirituality Issue back to top