Freedom from Fear

A few days ago as I was enjoying Teaching Company CDs on my car radio during my commute to work, 24 lectures on Buddhism (having already finished a course on Comparative Religion), I was taken by the lecturer's reference to Aung San Suu Kyi as an example of the connection between religious (particularly Theravada Buddhist) and political values. There was talk in the media just that day about her possible release after so long from detention in her home in Yangon, Myanmar (or Rangoon, Burma, if you are an old fart, wherever, it is the same place no matter what we call it). So it happened today, but I doubt it is permanent and wonder if it will matter in the long run. (And I suspect not a lot of people care, as her name is not among those "Trending" in Yahoo searches. "Trending Now" are Pat Sajak, Katy Perry, Hulk Hogan, Eating Disorders and Type 2 Diabetes. Which says something. Disturbing. Who is Katy Perry?)

I'm not much interested in or involved with politics in my own local world...condo associations, neighborhood boards, the strange redundant tensions among the governor, mayors and congressional delegations in Hawaii (home state, more or less, like Indonesia, of the president). Like so many of us, I tend to take my freedom for granted, and its exercise in the voting booth sometimes seems like a futile silly thing. On the larger scale, freedom isn't much of an issue, unless we are trying to justify our war efforts and defense budgets. Or civil rights. Or free enterprise. Well, I guess freedom IS a big deal. I just don't think of it much in my day-to-day activities. Because we have it. Well, except for freedom to do what I want in the face of oppression of employers. We are all wage slaves.

Back to the righteous Buddhist democrat Aung San Suu Kyi, (the lectures taught me to pronounce her name with grace) who I first heard about in Amnesty International pleas in maybe 1990. The TC lecturer points out that she is a classic Buddhist example of the values of a righteous leader, like King Asoka and King Mongkut. What lineage! (If you don't think Buddhism is politically activist, remember those self-immolated Vietnamese monks, the Dalai Lama, and ...I was going to say Gandhi, but of course he was Hindu. Like the Abrahamic traditions in their pot, Hinduism, Buddhism and Taoism all are ingredients in a unified simmering soup.) The point in the lecture was that fearlessness, along with other traditional Buddhist values of courage, patience, tolerance and nonviolence, is what the world needs to be released from suffering.

The lecturer cited Aung San Suu Kyi's famous speech which perhaps we all might do well to read, if we haven't already. (Who IS Katy Perry?) "It is not power that corrupts, but fear," she says. Ripping off FDR just a little?

Such pretty words. Who among us puts them into action? I know this is a Buddhist reference, and I'm more intrigued by Taoism, but really, sometimes, it is hard to tease these things apart. The Tao Te Ching has much to say about leadership. Although my Tao teacher said it is 90 percent meditation manual (in the same curious way Chinese say Mao was 70 percent right, 30 percent wrong, or my Chinese painting teacher will tell us to do something when the ink is 80 percent dry) , the TTC also promotes the righteous leader. You can argue over what "righteous" means, but ultimately those same values that Aung San Suu Kyi talks about are Taoist as well.

Big Socialist Buddha

I just finished an intriguing little memoir, "Socialism Is Great!", by Lijia  Zhang, a Nanjing woman who came of age in post-Mao/pre-Tiananmen China, eventually escaping her iron rice bowl job, inherited from her own mother, as a "pressure gauge tester" at a missile factory, to become a successful journalist and commentator.  It's a good story, well worth reading, historically later than the important but depressing and ubiquitous Cultural Revolution memoirs.  I could relate to the characters and setting, having been in Beijing for a period the year before Tiananmen. The book is full of angst and courage (and surprisingly more than a little sex) and suggests what it was like in China in the '80s, when Deng Xiao Ping had given the people a new lease on their lives, or at least loosened the leash.

But what struck me most in the book was one of the photos among the requisite dozen pages of black and white testimony these memoirs almost always have.  The image was of Lijia, looking like the eager students I met in 1987, sporting a short denim skirt, casual white shirt and scarf, flesh-colored stockings to just below the hem (the style then), posing, pretty and perky, in a factory in front of a massive Buddha head with workers on scaffolding putting finishing touches on it.

"That Buddha looks familiar to me," I thought.  (Of course, all Buddhas look alike, but not really.  In the Temple of 10,0000 Buddhas in Hong Kong, not one of the images is the same.)

But I did know this Buddha. Lijia's ICBM factory had successfully won the bid to cast the giant statue to complete the "world's largest, outdoor, bronze, seated Buddha"(which it was up until 2007, according to Wikipedia; bigger better Buddhas just keep coming, but I'm not sure where this larger one is). It was to be delivered (FedEx? UPS? ICBM?) to Lantau Island in Hong Kong.  This was well before 1997. Despite a worldwide bid for the Tian Tan Buddha, the Nanjing military factory won it, with some reference to China's 3,000-year history of bronze casting work. (Fortunately it was not to be made of poured concrete.)

I had seen the development of the Buddha park over some years through the '80s in Hong Kong, when it had no political obligations to the motherland. Then even in anticipation of the 112-foot, 250-ton statue,  Po Lin monastery boasted the world's largest Buddha BASE. (Which sounds like some kind of instant tofu soup.) For a time you could walk up the 268 steps to the platform, sans Buddha, to gaze around the mountaintop area, sea to one side, temples and mountains to the other.

I enjoyed seeing the installed Buddha again a year and half ago, although I was not happy at the commercialization of the monastery area.

Big Big Buddha

We used to get to Po Lin on a bus that took a scary switchback road to the top of the mountain, like the bus to Wudangshan without the comfort of trees. This time we approached from the airport side of the island, on a gondola sky rail. (Yes, that's smog; I don't like to think about landing at Chek Lap Kok. Although I miss landing at Kai Tak. And check out another great landing. Apparently a lot of pilots on that run do too. A chance to really use skills. )

Some years ago, I walked down the trail from Po Lin to Tung Chung, which was then a sleepy village with the ruins of an old fort to explore.  I could see that they were shaving off the geological features of an island to make way for the new airport which would replace the much beloved, but obsolete Kai Tak, more or less in the middle of the city. Now, 20 years later, there is a full fledged city at Tung Chung to support the airport infrastructure with train terminals and a shopping center.

Trail to Tung Chung

I'm glad I took that hike back then. As I'm glad I had the opportunity to bicycle on Chang An Boulevard in Beijing in 1987, sharing the route with horse carts and other bicyclists. I didn't recognize that street in 2007 until I actually reached the Forbidden City and the infamous square. From Beijing to Hong Kong, change has been the constant.  We used to think of China as a backward country.  Now it seems like the Chinese invented development. And the irony of a Big Buddha produced in a missile factory, something that was lost on Lijia until she wrote her memoir.