Albuquerque, NM – Students of Guru Changpu Huang love being in the presence of their teacher, who instructs with humility, grace, and humor. The only downside is Guru Huang does not speak English and his students have never known what he is telling them.
Students of Guru Huang gather on weekday nights at their local center to receive his words of wisdom. He is always there by the time they arrive and has typically already begun talking. So they quietly file in and sit down. For the next three hours they listen to him discourse on what they assume are the Buddha’s teachings, but ultimately they have no way of knowing.
Some of his students have tried to learn Chinese to better understand anything he is saying, but his dialect is apparently not on the map. “It’s not Mandarin and it’s not Szechuan. We even brought in a chef from a local Chinese restaurant to help, but he had no idea either and just said ‘very old, not real language no more’,“ said Steve Milken, a long-time student of Huang’s.
Nevertheless Guru Huang’s students feel more at peace than before they started listening to him. “Words are just constructs anyway,” said Heather Pierce, “Guru Huang’s voice is the real teacher. We receive his teachings vibrationally, at least I do.”
No one wants to let him know they don’t understand anything he says so if Huang laughs his students laugh along with him. They match his facial expressions in an effort to respond to him the way they think he is expecting them to. “He usually stops talking after about three hours,” said student Keith Gregory, “at which point we back out of the room slowly just in case he starts saying something again.”
