One of the main lessons I’ve learned as a skeptical investigator is to always keep my eyes open for what pseudoscientific services are out there, because even relatively innocuous leads can be followed to surprisingly serious conclusions.

Take, for example, an exhibition booth at the Get Well Show, the alternative medicine conference that took place in London in June. The stand promoted Master Sha Tao Centre, and was staffed by devotees who happily explained to me and to Deputy Editor Alice Howarth about the wonderful calming influence of practicing Tao Calligraphy. Sadly, their efforts to persuade us to sit in on a demonstration were in vain, given that every session seemed to take place at the least convenient time possible, but I was persuaded to sign up for their mailing list, in exchange for a bag of promotional materials.

The Master Sha Tao Centre is run by Dr Zhi Gang Sha, who qualified from Xi’an Medical College with a medical degree in 1983, and in 1986 with a degree in acupuncture. He became the lead acupuncturist for the World Health Organisation – at least, according to his Wikipedia page. However, at the time of researching this article, Wikipedia could only source that claim to an interview he gave to Western Australia Today during his 2014 tour of Australia, where his interviewer, Sarah Berry, writes:

Yet, Sha’s credentials are far from shonky. He is a doctor of Western medicine and traditional Chinese medicine. He is also a grandmaster of Tai Chi, was the lead acupuncturist for the World Health Organisation, has been named Qigong Master of the Year and in 2006 was awarded the Martin Luther King Jr. Commemorative Commission Award for his humanitarian efforts.

It is unclear where this claim came from, as there’s no sign anywhere else on the internet of Dr Sha performing that role for the World Health Organisation, or even of that role existing – certainly, the WHO makes no mention of it anywhere on their website. Keen to get to the bottom of the claim, I called the media department of the World Health Organisation, and I spoke to Dr Fadéla Chaib, who told me that, to the best of her knowledge, no such role has ever existed within the WHO. I also contacted Sarah Berry of Western Australia to ascertain where she heard of the lead acupuncturist claim, but received no response.

Sha’s other credentials seem equally erratic. He did indeed win Qigong Master of the Year, as his own website claims:

He is a grandmaster of several Asian arts and in 2002 was named Qigong Master of the Year at the Fourth World Congress on Qigong.

However, somewhat curiously, a cached version of the website for the World Congress on Qigong has Dr Sha taking home the presumably-coveted gong in 2004, rather than 2002, at the fifth World Congress on Qigong and TCM, rather than the fourt (joining such illustrious company as Humanitarian Award of the Year winner, Deepak Chopra):

How concerned should we be that Dr Sha misremembers when he won an award so prestigious that he references it in promotional interviews? It’s hard to say. Just as it’s difficult to ascertain whether Dr Sha did indeed receive “the Martin Luther King Jr. Commemorative Commission Award for his humanitarian efforts” in 2006 – again, outside of references on websites controlled by Dr Sha, there appears to be no corroboration of this prestigious award, and I await a response from the Commission to confirm it.

What is unequivocally clear about Dr Sha is that he is a prolific spiritual guru: according to his Wikipedia page, he has written twenty-four books, twenty of which have been published, and ten of which have been New York Times bestsellers. His own website suggests this is out of date, claiming that he’s penned thirty books (it doesn’t specify how many of which were published), eleven of which were New York Times bestsellers. Whatever the numbers, he has undeniably written a lot of books, many of which have sold very well – and at least one of which he was happy to give away, for free, to me.

Greatest Forgiveness

“Greatest Forgiveness: Bring joy and peace to your life with the power of unconditional forgiveness”, was published in 2019 by BenBella Books, and consists of 127 pages, with fewer than 130 words per page. It’s unclear if this bitesize format of under 17,000 words is indicative of Sha’s broader work, but if it is, it’s easy to see how it might be possible for one man to pen 30 books – especially given how impressively repetitive Sha manages to be within Greater Forgiveness’ limited wordcount.

The book promises to help the reader “experience inner peace, true freedom, and joy”. Having read it cover to cover over the course of an hour or so, I have to admit I felt unmoved. Sha explains that “every system, every organ, every cell, every DNA, and every RNA in the body is made of Shen Qi Jing”, with Shen being the soul, heart and mind. Chi being energy. Jing is matter.

why do people get sick? Why do people have relationship challenges? Why do people have financial and business challenges? White people have challenges in various aspects of their lives? In one sentence: challenges in any aspect of life are due to negative Shen Qi Jing

Given that every bad thing in your life is attributable to negative Shen Qi Jing, the reader might be understandably keen to know how to improve one’s Shen Qi Jing – the answer, at least according to this book, is radical forgiveness:

Research studies have shown that forgiveness reduces stress and can transform health. If we cannot forgive and are bound by our resentment, bitterness, desire for revenge, and more, it is we who suffer. When we say stuck in our pain and negativity, we can very easily create even more negativity through our thoughts and words… There is an ancient saying before you embark on a journey of revenge dig two graves

To be clear, the advice to “dig two graves” does not mean that if you do kill someone as part of a revenge plot, make sure to take out any witnesses.

The book explains that if you want to be well, you have to immediately forgive everybody for everything at all times, or you won’t heal. Which is to say, if you don’t forgive everything immediately, you are therefore complicit in your ill health or poor finances or mental ill-health or anything else. If you are ever reluctant to forgive someone, it’s your own fault when something bad happens to you.

Dr Sha’s radical forgiveness is achieved via five “power techniques”. The first is Body Power where you place your finger on a certain part of your body in order to unlock energy. The book, in a move a cynic might suggest is designed to pad out the page count, includes diagrams showing exactly where that finger must be placed.

Alongside the Body Power, readers are guided on activating Tracing Power: the process of connecting with and tracing Tao Calligraphy in the air. According to the book, unnamed scientists and unreferenced clinical researchers have found Chinese calligraphy handwriting has positive effects on behavioural and psychosomatic disorders:

depressive symptoms in cancer patients, psychiatric and cognitive disorders in elderly people, stress levels, hyperarousal symptoms after earthquake, changes in theta waves, and diseases such as hypertension and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder.

To make it work, you make a gesture with your hand in a shape like a hand puppet, with the four fingers pinching together at the thumb:

And then you use your hand in that shape to trace out the calligraphy of some Chinese characters:

All the reader then needs to do is chant a special mantra, and trace this path for at least 10 minutes. The longer they chant and trace, the better the result they could receive. If you have chronic serious anger issues, the book specifically advises tracing for a total of two hours per day while chanting: “I forgive you unconditionally. You forgive me unconditionally. Bring love, peace, and harmony.”

Tao Chanting

Chanting and signing forms a big part of the Dr Sha methodology – so much so that his free promotional pack includes a CD of music and chanting, designed for the user to sing along to.

Specifically, the free CD was the “Love Peace Harmony: Chanting for World Peace” refrain – part of Sha’s project to bring about world peace by having 1.5 billion people regularly chant this specific mantra for 15 minutes every single day by the year 2030.

Keen to hear the chant that was destined to bring peace to the globe, I popped the CD into my computer – at which point iTunes popped up and recognised the disk as a 1980s German spoken-word sci-fi radio play called Perry Rhodan Mutaten.

Fortunately, the chanting on the CD wasn’t actually in German – but nor was it in English, Mandarin, or Cantonese. Instead, the chant was written in Sha’s own soul language, as follows:

Lu la Lu la Lee
Lu la Lu la La Lee 
Lu la Lu la Lee Lu La 
Lu la Lee Lu la 
Lu la Lee Lu la

While Sha’s soul language bears none of the hallmarks of traditional language, he insists this translates to:

I love my heart and soul
I love all humanity 
Join hearts and souls together 
Love peace and harmony 
Love peace and harmony

Calligraphy for abundance and health

World Peace isn’t the only thing that can apparently be accomplished by chanting Dr Sha’s magical mantras. According to the New York Times’ Bestselling Author, you can improve your personal finances by engaging with his various self improvement practices and course. The website for the Master Sha Tao Centre – the organisation who exhibited at the Get Well Show in London – features a “Spiritual Way for Financial Abundance” Zoom course, promising people that they could “take action and finally be in charge of financial flourishing” and “Discover the secrets of manifesting the financial success you wish for to increase the positive difference you can make in the world.”

Times are hard right now, with the cost of living crisis, and people are struggling to feed themselves and pay their mortgages, which is why it might seem odd that Master Sha is willing to sell the mystical chant to solve financial hardship for just £180 per level, across the two-level course.

It is tempting to suggest that anyone who is willing to pay hundreds of pounds in order to learn how to chant away their financial woes can’t have had many financial woes to begin with, but the sad reality is that in desperate times people will make ill-advised sacrifices in order to afford something they’ve been promised is the miracle they’re looking for. This is a reality that might be hard to understand for someone who can pop together a book of under 20,000 words and watch their international followers bulk-buy it until it reaches the New York Times’ bestseller list.

If that sounds distasteful, the health claims made in Sha’s books will leave an even worse taste in the mouth. The Greater Forgiveness book has a whole list of things that can be fixed by chanting, including depression, anxiety, worry, disease, pain, tumours, and cancer. It explicitly says in the book:

for chronic and serious for example life threatening conditions chant and trace for a total of two hours per day.

In fact, the large pamphlet I was given in the promotional pack contains a testimonial from a cancer patient who had lung cancer in 2017, and a month after diagnosis they started reading some of these books and doing the chanting and the tracing of calligraphy. A year later, the tumour had shrunk to a third of its size, so their oncologist decided they no longer needed further treatment.

A calligraphic cure for cancer?

As remarkable as these claims were, I had to check them out for myself, which is why I gave a call to the phone number on the Master Sha Tao Centre’s website. In a ten-minute phone call, I explained to them that I’d seen their exhibition stand in London, and that it came to mind now that a friend of mine had cancer, and that I was curious to know whether Tao Calligraphy could be as helpful for her as it had been for the people in the book.

Immediately, the person on the phone asked me, “Is she prepared to do some work? And by work, meaning tracing… because if it’s a serious condition, we’d recommend 2-4 hours of work that you can do. So if she can do it herself as a schedule to have these hours and then bonus hours as well. So, doing tracing, plus forgiveness practices, plus also attending Tao Calligraphy sessions on the webcasts”.

I asked if she was referring to the free webcasts. “No, these are the paid ones. £60 per month, you get about 12-15 sessions a month… 3 times a week… Obviously we don’t give promises and guarantees that she’ll recover, because that depends very much on how much work she’s also putting in. It’s like if you go to the gym and expect instant results within the first day, it’s not going to happen. You have to put in some work, dedicated hours. If it’s cancer I’d truly recommend 2-4 hours practice every single day”.

It surprised me how willing representatives from the Master Sha Tao Centre were to advise over the phone on how to chant away cancer. It seemed I wasn’t the first person to have asked her about it: “Even in London last year somebody had stage cancer – fourth stage – and they put in four hours [a day] minimum and they recovered I think within six months. But they still continue their practise, probably not four hours every day, but maybe two to three hours a day, because it keeps it away. Because even if you recover you could still be hit by something else, so we’d always recommend don’t stop your practises, even just one hour a day is recommended.”

As well as chanting, she told me that to really heal from cancer, I’d need to buy some spiritual treasures. “You buy some spiritual treasures, invoke them every day, and they jumpstart your healing, they’re like a rocket ship….”. She told me that these spiritual treasures were divine, and specific – if someone had cancer of the intestines, there is a specific spiritual treasure that could be purchased and invoked to heal the intestines, which would transmit positive information. This, she explained, was because “cancer is negative information… not just from this lifetime, but past lifetimes as well, of our souls – they carry all this negative information”.

Unsurprisingly, I was keen to understand the pricing structure of this divine healing. Basic treasures, I was told, started at £60 each, but “if it’s a gong healing blessing that’s recommended, that’s a higher fee, because gong healing is the highest blessing right now”. She did, however, explain that it wasn’t a one-off purchase: “Some people can get 6 treasures, some people get 12-30 treasures, depending on how much heaven wants to release”.

On top of the prospect of a £360-£1800 spiritual treasure bill, there were of course other costs to consider: “first off I’d recommend a consultation, that would help the person to understand, because the master will relay something else… and I know that the calligraphy session would be a priority as well.” The consultation, I was told, would cost £420 per hour. Plus £360-£1800, plus £60 per month – the cost of this spiritual healing for a prospective cancer patient was really adding up.

And, of course, if Dr Sha’s miracle healings never takes place, and if his promises of wealth and abundance turn out to be nothing but hot air and flim flam designed to sell books and expensive ‘spiritual treasures’, at least he’s his followers are trained to believe in radical forgiveness. And, according to Sha’s own philosophy, anyone who doesn’t forgive him has earned whatever bad things might befall them.