Master Jiang Feng passed away

[TheDustAutumn]

I just been informed of the sad news that dr. Jiang Feng passed away. It's a sad news for everybody, may he rest in piece. Here is the story as one of the master's western students, Grady, tells it:

 

[...[genuinely don’t know how to write this down. It is all still so unreal to me, like a horrible dream that I just can’t seem to wake from. I have no way to call everyone here, so I am going to try and type this somehow.

I’m so, so very sorry to be the one to share this news.

On the evening of July the 1st I received a phone call in my hometown in Alabama from Brother Wu in China that our beloved Shifu had passed away early that morning in China.

After the shock & disbelief began to shift into sorrow I quickly booked a plane ticket to China leaving early the next morning and about 24 hours later I was at Shifu’s home in Jixi with Shifu’s relatives and our extended family.

It wasn’t until after I arrived there that I was told in detail what had happened. Shifu, in an effort to save a dying Chinese patient’s life, pushed the qi too hard and deeply injured himself.

Those who were there say that he collapsed and passed away almost instantly, without the chance to speak a single word. The Western doctors are calling it a massive stroke. Brother Wang who was with him says there were tears in his eyes.

I don’t really have the words to describe how things have been here the past few days. I don’t think I’ve shed as many tears in the past thirty years as I have in the scant few days since this happened. Everyone around me is in total shock and devastation. Shifu’s wife & daughters are inconsolable.

There was simply no warning. One moment he was happy and full of life, and the next moment he was gone. By our Western reckoning he would have been only 51 years old this October.

The funeral rites here have taken three days, during which we stayed up at night with the body, and there were multiple intense ceremonies each day. He was finally put laid to rest in his tomb yesterday morning, July the 5th in China, after a huge procession on foot with his coffin through the city.

Hundreds came here from all over China to honor his life and work.

I truly wanted to let all of you know sooner, but out of respect for Shifu’s immediate family’s wishes for privacy I was explicitly prohibited from doing so until today.

Because Shifu left no explicit instructions on the matter of his successor, that topic is being decided by a conference of the uncles and the brothers quite literally as I write this. I will let you all know when I know more.

They have asked me to let everyone know that Shifu’s work will absolutely continue uninterrupted. We will continue to teach our family’s practice, and we will continue to treat the sick and suffering.

I know you all want to know more, but I will ask you all to bear with these days, as I am just not myself. It is going to take some time.

Again, I’m so, so very sorry to have to be the one to share this news.

 

[小梦想]

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Edited August 11, 2018 by 小梦想

[grady]

I think it would be best if you removed this page and quote until you have spoken to grady about it. His words to fellow students should be not be openly posted without his consent.

It is true that these words were written for Shifu's students, and it is true that this was posted without asking me.

 

That being said, the words are true, and I doubt I am going to be able to say them any better than I have here anytime soon, so let them remain.

[Jox]

R.I.P.

[joeblast]

Sorry for your loss guys

[JohnC]

On to the next journey. Condolences on your loss.

[Infolad1]

My condolences.

[Gerard]

More about this master as many, including myself, are wondering what he did or who he was:

 

Dr. Jiang Feng

 

[Truth Seeker]

Jiang Feng's passing is a jarring tragedy on many levels. The simplest, he was only 51 and a father, husband, and founder/leader of two hospitals with staffs and hundreds of patients who respected and admired him. The broader view is that he was also Shifu to dozens of students worldwide, to whom he embodied a potential of human development that would otherwise seem the half-believed wish of legends or fantasy. He made the impossible possible simply by being able to do it himself. In a still broader view, this is an incredible loss to the world because of the knowledge he had attained and the skill he had developed - considering both in combination, he was sincerely among the rare few in human development. His traditional knowledge gained from a decades-long apprenticeship with the monk Xuan Kong, combined with his university education, his long professional experience, and his clear-sighted individuality, forged him into someone who routinely achieved the incredible. I've lost count of the testimonials I've been told or read about how he quickly diagnosed an ailment, or healed someone who had been suffering for years and couldn't find relief through Western medicine. It was only a few years ago that he opened his first hospital, which was a major victory in his long struggle to openly practice Classical Chinese Medicine inside China. Perhaps the greatest loss is the influence he could have had on the spread of this knowledge in the world - the influence of a practitioner whose qi development and demonstrable skill ultimately forces a rethinking of the nature of what we are and how we can be healed. Lastly, we can't fail to miss the evidence of his compassion, in that in trying to save a dying patient he pushed himself so far and so selflessly that it cost him his life. His death, an incredibly painful loss, is made still worse in the realization that this deficit will never be made whole.

Edited July 8, 2016 by Truth Seeker

[Aeran]

Quite sad to hear this, I've corresponded with a few people who trained under or visited master Jiang, and by all accounts he was a great teacher and a genuinely compassionate healer.

 

I know he had several students who had been training under him for a long time and reached decent levels of attainment in his system, I sincerely hope they can keep the hospital open and continue the teachings of his lineage, it would be a huge loss if either of those disappeared from the world.

[Kung]

Hi guys! I'm new here but I've been following both this and neigong forum for severl years.

 

To me: Compassion is something that you use or have, when you give something to somebody as a favor or with nothing in return.

 

As far as I've read your statements in other discussions and forums, this healer charges lots of money for healing process. 

 

So where is the compassion here?

[Truth Seeker]

Hi guys! I'm new here but I've been following both this and neigong forum for severl years.

 

To me: Compassion is something that you use or have, when you give something to somebody as a favor or with nothing in return.

 

As far as I've read your statements in other discussions and forums, this healer charges lots of money for healing process. 

 

So where is the compassion here?

Even if you're new here, you should recognize the rudeness of raising this question in a thread dedicated to the deceased person. Would you show up at a eulogy and start questioning the deceased person's ethics? If you have questions about charging money for health services, that could have easily been brought up in a new thread.

 

In addition to being thoughtless, you also did not do much research. He did not charge his students for exams or qi treatments, only herbs/pills IF they were needed (not everyone needed them). The medicine was expensive because the ingredients are expensive - large quantities of high quality wild rare herbs, for which the market in China is highly inflated. So he had to pass along his costs in the medicine, as well as make a living, support his family, build two hospitals and employ several staff members. All that said, his lifestyle was much less lavish than that of the typical US doctor, even though his skills and knowledge were exceedingly rare.

 

So to answer your question, his compassion lay in dedicating his life to a system of medicine little understood by any culture (even his own) and one that is open to constant skepticism; curing patients who sometimes could not find success anywhere else; teaching his art openly when most masters are very selective in who they teach; and literally giving his life in the effort to try to save a dying patient - and after all that, to still be second-guessed by anonymous people on internet forums who know little yet are quite sure masters shouldn't be allowed to make a good living.