From Gene Ching’s excellent article in the e-zine Shaolin Trips, Episode 2:
When traveling alone, television often becomes my constant companion. It made my first China morning into a rude awaking, time for the red horse to gallop in. The news was filled with images of Iraq, but not the patriotic coverage we were getting back in the states. These were images of civilian amputees, of babies in fragments, the cries of children and the other songs of war. It was the sick and awful side of “shock and awe.” No matter what your stance is on the war, if you don’t see suffering, you aren’t seeing the real war. War is hell.
Here in San Francisco, we used to say “Make love, not war.” It may surprise you to learn that Buddhists deny love as another delusion. In the Flower Adornment sutra, love is compared to nine things: an unpaid debt, a rakshasa (demon) woman, a wonderful lotus flower whose roots are hiding a poisonous snake, disagreeable food, a prostitute, a mleccha (barbarian), an infected sore, a destructive wind and a comet. However, if love is defined as compassion, compassion is the cornerstone of Buddhism. Passion comes from the Latin passus, meaning “to suffer.” In essence, “compassion” means “to suffer with.” While our country maintains a right to free speech, our free press chooses to waive that right, focusing almost entirely on the strategy of our attack instead of engaging in substantive debate. Americans did not see the war like the rest of the world. We didn’t see the suffering so we couldn’t “suffer with.” We weren’t given the chance to be compassionate. Even with our digital widescreen TVs, no one here saw the big picture, and to this day no one really knows what that big picture might have been.
But despite the niceties, the war haunted my trip like a whinnying banshee, rearing up and kicking whenever I thought I’d left it behind. Whether it was running into a group of Old German ladies who asked me if I had heard any recent news, or the smartass remarks of a shopkeeper asking if I’d like a ticket to Iraq, once anyone discovered that I was American, the topic would turn immediately to war. It’s alienating to be outside your own country while it is at war, but you get a better perspective.
Ironically, the Chinese pronounce “Bush” by combining two characters “bu” (clothes) and “shi” (rare.) This is a phonetic translation, so those parenthesized definitions are meaningless. But due to the inflections of Mandarin, Bush sounds a little like “bullshi.” All it needed was a final consonant, one that might fit to a “T”, and it could have expressed the opinion of much of the rest of the world.
It’s only a small part of the overall article but I thought they were two very powerful passages.
Good on ya, Gene.
