Story of self-sacrifice and love
RAMANA SHIU
It was extraordinary that Dennis Bloodworth, writing in The Observer some fifty years ago, predicted so accurately the rise of China with the beginning of the new millenium. As a young man, that was where I learned of the term “Yellow Peril” for the first time. Yet there is no sign more ominous about China’s rise than the violent quakes of the earth in Wenquan and its surrounding regions as the Indian tectonic plate pressed northwards four days after the Olympic flame came down from the Everest. A week later, May 19, endless stories of self-sacrifice and love began to be told and were forever etched into the Chinese psyche as 1300 million Chinese stood together at the same time for a three-minute silence in memory of the dead. Such an event, the first in the history of humanity, should be forever remembered.
Polly Toynbee, who wrote about white American indifference in her article about Katrina, the event in New Orleans for all the world to know, ought to do some research on Wenquan and report in The Guardian once again about this new beacon of light diametrically opposed to the darkness that was New Orleans. She should also remember her grand father, who had made comparisons between all the civilisations of mankind, and what he did say about the Chinese.
Courage and heroism
“Yellow Peril” is no more than the white man’s projection of himself. It is he who has been aggressor par excellence for the last four long centuries. By the present century, he has run away with such a tendency. One does not have to go so far as to see how he bombs a foreign people into a “democracy” and tries to put in his puppet government, believing, without any reasons to believe, that it would do his bidding. We come to know the reasons for the state of the world in which we find ourselves today. The Chinese, on the other hand, have been influenced by the three life-affirming religions — Buddhism, Taoism, and Confucianism — for the last two millenia and more. The courage and heroism, the capacity for self sacrifice and love, shown not as isolated individual incidents, but as whole communities in Wenquan, and reaching far into other parts of the nation, tell us that the teachings have gone deep.
Any village old lady automatically remembers Amitabha Buddha, and there is no scholar worthy of the name who does not represent the sentiments of one of the three religions. Ideals of the present leadership, in the slogan of “Harmony”, are clearly Buddhist. The party oath “to serve the people” contains nothing other than the finest distillate of practice of any of the world’s great religions.
Sharing lofty heights
As a result, thousands who were touched by what they saw in Wenquan became party members almost as a religious conversion. Just as Wenquan was to the awakening of the Chinese spirit, so the northward movement of the Indian plate was to the birth of a new moral power amongst nations of the world. It is no coincidence for the Chinese Olympics medal count — 51 gold, 21 silver, and 28 bronze — to have found an echo in the precise hour of the tremors of our planet when The Great Mother began her labour pains : 512.128 - May 12, 1.28pm.
China shares the earth’s loftiest heights with India. The spiritual destinies of these two nations are inextricably bound. There are reasons to believe that other than Buddhism, Taoism also has its roots in the subcontinent.
It should be most interesting to watch how these two ancient cultures relate to one another in these times of political, economic and environmental crisis. These often are conditions for the birth of new life.
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