The Search for the One Who Knows Everyone
Tid-bits Category
Return to the Peach Blossom Spring (Chapter 2)
When Jin passed through the long passage, he noticed that he could not see light from the village behind him when he turned his head back to look. A current seemed to propel his boat quickly through the tunnel, and he shot out the other side with a splash, finding himself in the ocean, with a rocky shore on one side and the wide, wide ocean to the other. The sun was still over the water, so he knew that north was to his left. He struck out in this direction, but was quickly exhausted by the effort, his hands aching as he maneuvered the rough oars. He wrapped his hands in the cloth that wrapped the bread, ate the bread and drank the water, realizing that he hadn’t eaten anything since the day before. And went back to his rowing with renewed zeal. The hot sun beat down, and his water supply quickly ran out, but he kept at it, encouraged by the changing scenery of the coast.
The Cult of Prosperity
A Goddess of Mercy becomes a Goddess of Fortune
I wandered into a Buddhist Temple in the famous water town Zhujiajiao in the Qingpu district of Shanghai municipality. People were charged admission to the main temple grounds, a fee of 10Y, but in the annex worshippers got a freebe. Before paying the fee, one could kneel on a padded bench before a glass-encased Laughing Buddha (Maitreya Buddha) covered in gold paint, with a mischievous-looking Haibao peeking around the corner of the case. The little blue mascot for the Shanghai World Expo and the golden Buddha are emblems of the same aspiration among the Chinese: conspicuous wealth and a global showcase of modernization.
The Lifecycle of the Village
Zhu Xi’s Canonization of the Life Cycle of the Village in “Family Rituals” (家礼 Jia Li)
In the 10th Century, the famous philosopher, Zhu Xi, undertook the task of gathering the rites and rituals of passage, and recorded them for future generations. Little did he know that this book would capture more than just the customs of the day; the “Jia Li” went on to become a classic in its own right, and would dictate almost a thousand more years of custom in China, Korea, Japan, and Vietnam. It was mainly the adherence to its code of conduct that defined the particular lifestyle of “Neo-Confucianism”.
Mahjong
The New Faith of the Chinese Elite
In the past, the peasants looked to the fate of the fortune-inscribed stick to communicate the will of Buddha; now, the Chinese businessman looks to another inscribed stick to divine the sacred will of the Party. It is the classic scene from the Joy Luck Club; white tiles, clicking and clacking together, as the women gossip about their families, cementing the bonds of a lifetime friendship that would tie the fates of generations together. This ritual has replaced the similar ritual that used to obsess the more religious generations of China – the fortune telling joss sticks and the mysterious predictions of the Book of Changes. No one believes in these superstitions anymore, but they certainly believe in the use and necessity of playing Mahjong with the leaders!
What the Chinese Want
What do the Chinese people want out of life? Many have tried to determine this, but no pattern has immediately appeared from the mass of contemporary literature or from the key phrases in the public forum that sufficiently defines the Chinese desire for a lifestyle direction in Chinese terms, apart from those without context, like “Modern” and “Contemporary”, which are derived more from China looking at other nations than looking at itself. The concept itself seems so abstract that many on the outside have been daunted by the possibility of finding it, but the tendency towards high abstraction is a characteristic of the Chinese people as a whole, and something to be admired rather than scorned. Like the figures in a painting, which suggest nature but retain their unnatural proportions, or like the meaning of a Chinese character, which is only a suggestion of a previous hieroglyph, so the abstractions of the Chinese dream cannot take form by compiling lists of contemporary manifestations. It is a compound idea that can only be grasped by those who can hold the qualities of Chinese philosophy on one hand, and balance the realities of an economically charged and internationalized China on the other. It is far subtler and more rewarding for those who find the silken strands of the Chinese cultural pact between man and nature pulled through two thousand years of literature, and tangled in the free-form bonsai trees of great philosophers’ thoughts, like strings that lead to the tales of shattered kites. When these strands are followed to the end, they lead to their source in an otherworldly paradise in an immortal’s peach garden.
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