Huineng and the Have-Naughts: the Zero-is-Hero Trajectory of Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers)

Although Rolling Stone journalist Touré’s 1994 review criticizes Wu-Tang's underground style, calling them “ciphers” who embrace the aesthetics of the “have-nots,” the cipher in fact signifies both zero and the whole within the context of the Five Percent Nation’s Supreme Mathematics, which Wu-Tang further correlates to the 360 degrees of a circle via the thirty-six deadly pressure points found in the Wubei Zhi (a Ming dynasty military treatise). This paper will examine Wu-Tang’s zero-is-hero trajectory and its parallels to the tale of Chan Buddhist patriarch, Huìnéng 慧能, the “barbarian” whose rhymes revealed a natural knowledge of dharma as no thing. In scripting a context for their own hero's narrative from Supreme Mathematics, kung fu cinema, and lyrical sword style, the Wu-Tang Clan has taken the blank canvas of the self and built a chamber, a cipher, and a sphere of enlightenment for themselves and their fans.