The Wounded Heart of China

You’re familiar, I’m sure, with those times when you’re suffering inside: You know you need to stop, go inwards, check yourself out and be present with whatever’s happening – but instead you almost brutally pursue whatever practical tasks are uppermost, as if you could seal up the pain and never have to touch it, or as if it was simply less real than your everyday practical tasks and goals.

Now imagine a whole country which operates on that basis, and you have something like modern China. People have to deal with a level of competitive pressure unimaginable in the West, and are offered as role models characters such as Lei Feng (left: a Maoist icon of self-sacrifice refurbished in recent years). Self-sacrifice isn’t really the correct term: it’s as if there was never a self to sacrifice in the first place – identity is still largely mediated through collective symbols and activities, certainly throughout formal education.

So the self that starts to emerge in the pursuit of material success which characterizes today’s China is a raw, unformed self which doesn’t really know how to speak of its interiority, of its pains and frustrations – which generally wishes them away or if it expresses them at all, does so in the most spasmodic and unconscious way. Such, for example, are the recent terrifying and near inexplicable attacks on children (which Marcus Anthony has written about in a very illuminating post: http://22cplus.blogspot.com/2010/05/killing-bliss-in-china.html).

And of course China’s wounds themselves are both individual and collective: not only is it much harder for a Chinese person than for a Westerner suffering from inner anguish to find any useful way of addressing it or external support in doing so, but the immense suffering inflicted by the Cultural Revolution and more recently by the Tiananmen Square events has been explored, if at all, only on a superficial and factual level. The tools to deal with such experiences are not generally available in China and in any case their use would threaten the Party’s monopoly of historical interpretation – as official ideology doesn’t distinguish between experience and interpretation, any individual testimony which appears to contradict the officially sanctioned account of events is instantly ruled inadmissible.

There is a way out of this crazy-driving impasse, as I wrote in my previous post; and I was interested to read that the managers of the giant Foxconn company which assembles iPhones and iPads in Shenzhen has actually called in monks from Wutaishan to help deal with a spate of suicides by employees. It may or may not be relevant that Foxconn is a Taiwanese company.

A turning towards spiritual practice is a notable feature of modern China, but it’s a matter of concern that the public debate about this is so impoverished. No serious discussion of anything resembling “superstition” is possible in the mainland media, while all but the oldest generations have been brought up without any kind of appropriate conceptual framework.

Unless the Party is willing to start progressively loosening its control of public discourse and interpretation, these individual expressions of intolerable anguish can only become more frequent, eventually coalescing into collective outbreaks which will become harder and harder to explain away.

Let go and let Dog

Wutaishan (五台山) in Shanxi Province, about 500 miles west of Beijing, is one of the five sacred mountains of China. Its rock-strewn hills, studded with over a thousand Buddhist temples, were still brown and bare from the long, cold winter when we visited during the May 1st holidays a few years ago.

Although the main street of the town was snarled up with cacophonous traffic and a handful of the best-known temples were overrun with bus-loads of tourists, only a couple of kilometers’ walk into those dry hills led one into a world as remote from modern China as if one had traveled in time as well as space.

On one of those walks we came across Shou Ning Si (the Temple of Peace and Longevity), almost deserted apart from the monk in the photo and a couple of resident dogs. Dogs are not unusual in rural China; usually employed to guard the home, they’re tied up on a short rope or chain, permanently outside, usually unsheltered against winter and summer alike and fed scraps of the owners’ food when they remember. They’re no more cherished than most other animals, in a country which generally sees them as a source of labor or food.

So it was particularly striking to observe these sleek, well-fed temple dogs bounding up to their keeper and wagging their tails while he patted their heads and held their paws, all as naturally and unselfconsciously as if they were friends he played cards with every day. There was none of the deliberateness and condescension of the Western “animal lover” singling out this or that class of creatures to be a recipient of his beneficence, just a joyful and spontaneous acknowledgement of the kinship of all creatures.

A famous Zen koan asks whether a dog has Buddha-nature; the monk at Shou Ning Si had no doubt about the answer to this question – and this is precisely and exclusively what we and dogs have in common. Not culture, nor language, nor possessions, nor thought, nor mind – there isn’t one of the attributes with which we commonly identify and in which we lose ourselves that we share with dogs.

The modern version of that koan might ask whether people have Buddha-nature – and if they’ve mislaid it, where they can find it again.

In the wind-whipped emptiness of Shou Ning Si and in the monk’s playful companionship with the temple dogs one could touch something of that reverence and non-attachment which one associates with traditional Chinese culture , but which is very little in evidence in modern China’s headlong pursuit of power and wealth. Yet one of the world’s most unbalanced countries has the potential within itself, in its own half-forgotten corners, to restore and renew its own spirit. I suspect that the desire to do so will become stronger and stronger over the next few years.