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Saturday, March 10, 2007

Buddhas made of stone

Today I took a long walk through the streets of Shanghai. I was walking towards a shopping area that generally has a lot of good antiques. This time I took a direction that I have not taken in the past, and accidentally stumbled through a little bit of what remains of old Shanghai.

Shanghai is a city in transition. In the last 15 years, an explosion took place which erased a great deal of the old city. Shanghai today is like Manhattan. Back then it was a lot like it was in the 1930s, or earlier.

What I found on my walk was narrow streets; low buildings, only one or two stories tall. Old and dilapidated, façades made of wood, paint peeling from them like dandruff. The balconies and windows were festooned with laundry, no garment too intimate to conceal from the eyes of passersby. On the streets, Saturday morning market was in full swing. Everywhere there were vendors selling roots, vegetables, and fruits, straight from blankets spread out on the street, with no pretensions whatsoever. Things were dirty and earthy and real. In this world, Target and Kmart and Wal-Mart were just fairy tales of corrupted temptations. No gleaming aisles, no rigid regiments of perfect products here; instead, swinging stainless steel basins served as gongs and empty plastic bottles as mallets. In this way, one mother and her child became a Dragon Festival parade.

It was a community. People knew each other; there was bargaining and arguing and laughter. In the chill, damp morning air, an exchange was taking place as ancient as civilization itself.

Our modern culture has sterilized this, and is stamping it out as ruthlessly as a man crushes an ant beneath his shoe. Supermarkets and supermarts de-humanize the entire process of commercial exchange. We pay a little less; we get a lot less. We have become fixated on the idea that making something cheap makes it good, when all it really does is cause us to value it less. In the end we rape the planet as we talk about how great all these low prices are.

I walked through the crowd a little grateful for the fact that markets like this still exist. The low buildings reminded me of the adage from the Tao, "in dwelling, be close to the earth." And the market reminded me that the food we eat comes from the earth, raw and untamed. The miracles of our technology may be able to change the way cells grow and divide, but they cannot initiate it. In the same way, our technical skills may change the landscape and alter the ways that culture arises within cities, but it cannot create the culture itself.

What does it mean to dwell within a culture? In this brave new world where we deconstruct cultures and paste them together again with websites and broadband and advertisements and production lines, the process has become an object of worship, and the end result a moving target. We call it the information age, but what is being formed inwardly? Everything is outward. It is only in the vestiges of what used to be, in the small, narrow, and dirty streets that seem so unappealing at first glance, that we find what it means to still be human. We are forgetting what it means to be in community; it worries me. In the end, I suspect the result of it will be that we will just find it that much easier to kill each other.

And we are good enough at that already.

Every human contact I had today had nothing to do with technology. I spoke in my very rudimentary Chinese, bargaining and arguing and cajoling. At one shop, a plump, red-faced lady grabbed me firmly by the arm as we haggled, allowing no escape. Locked in the ancient art of hand-to-hand retail combat, we both cheerfully insisted one was robbing the other blind. Elsewhere, art-eyed cynic that I am, I picked up things that have been buried for thousands of years and decided I didn't like them; perhaps, I think, they should have remained buried. I bought other, improbable things that weighed far too much to take home, put them in my knapsack, and walked all the way back to the hotel (a long long way) with an appreciation of my body and of gravity, worrying about how I was going to pack them and get them back.

Perhaps none of this seems to convey any higher spiritual truths; it is just about ordinary humans in an ordinary world.

But if we are to find any higher truths, they reside within this ordinary world; they are born within the hearts of stone Buddhas, they draw their first breath in the soil and the sunlight, and they spill their blood into the biology of the planet, where one cell feeds another, and all of us -- from the smallest to the largest organism – are in relationship both in life and in death. Those truths make their way to stalks of celery on a city street; they find their place in pieces of cushioning foam wrapped around bicycle baskets; they sing to themselves, and all of us, from woodland thrushes, caged in city parks, where old men do the slow dance of Tai Chi, as though trying to freeze time and allow themselves just a little bit longer on this planet. They take to the air in plastic bags floating between skyscrapers and they dissolve in water splashed from buckets that pours across pavements, seeking a return to the roots of the planet through the sewers.

Every impression is a stone Buddha: one immutable truth after another: resolute, irrefutable, eternal.

Take the time today: celebrate this life. Celebrate every moment; celebrate every breath; celebrate every contact, every person, every sight, every sound, every touch.

Go with God, and may God bless each and everyone of you today!

Sunday, March 11, 2007

Sunday in Shanghai

This morning I spent some time walking through the older parts of Shanghai again. I was in neighborhoods that tourists do not go to, surrounded by hundreds, in fact thousands, of ordinary Chinese people.

These are not the beautiful Chinese people who stroll along the Bund in Shanghai wearing designer clothes and sporting designer sunglasses. (I saw them today, too.) These are the people who wear the same clothes several days in a row and eat a bowl of fried rice with a little bit of pork and some vegetables at lunchtime. The neighborhoods are tear-down neighborhoods (see the picture); all around them, the brave new world of expensive apartment buildings is encroaching, and in a few years they will be ousted so that rich beautiful people can live where they are.

Where will they go? The rich, beautiful people do not care about such things.

These people strike me as a rich and beautiful too, but in a way that has nothing to do with designer clothing and expensive real estate. They are living their lives, and have an earthy honesty to them; no pretensions to designer grandeur would find a comfortable home here. The faint smell of urine from chamber pots wafts through the streets in the morning; fingers are red and chapped from peeling vegetables, and coarse cottons in shades of blue and black make the garments of choice. I walked past women chopping scallions, holding babies, selling flowers. A moment of eye contact and a smile over bundles of daisies transcended every language barrier. The flower seller and I knew what we were feeling, we were feeling it together, and that was all that mattered.

That was wealth. The small joys of life are the same in every language.

It amazed me to see that I was completely comfortable and relaxed in this essentially alien environment. I have been coming here for so many years that to walk down a foreign street in a foreign city filled with people of another race seems totally normal. There was no fear, no apprehension, no hesitation. There was just me and all these other ordinary people doing their ordinary things.

Tonight I am back at my five star hotel surrounded by technology, widescreen TVs, computers and voice dictation software. I am looking out over the People's Square from the 35th floor; a vantage point these people are unlikely to ever have. And yet they are here with me, in me.

How to explain that?

Somehow, in this act of consciousness, we all contain each other; everything blends into one harmonious whole in a manner we are unable to see and cannot even faintly taste most of the time. And now, a little tiny bit of them is in you, for as you read this, the chain of experience is transmitted, traveling from one organism to another through impulses magnetic and electric, ephemeral and yet completely material.

Mysteries abound. We are vessels into which the world flows.

Once again, on this trip, I am struck how the important moments are the ones where there is a bit of human contact. The woman who served me at the restaurant twice and recognized me, for example; she is not like the younger girls here at most of the hotels. She is a bit older, you can see it in her eyes. She understands the value of a bit of personal contact and she gave it to me. I really appreciated that; when I left we said goodbye to each other and to have a nice day, and we really, really meant that.

What kind of substitute is therefore an exchange like this, where there is heart and soul in a single sentence?

I contrast that with some of the more depressing human contact I had today; on Nanjing Road, at least 10 different young girls no older than my daughter must have approached me with the suggestion that we "spend some time together." The time, no doubt, to be spent with me paying for their sexual favors.

It was so sad. I wondered whether their parents knew what they were out doing this afternoon. I was tempted to give some of them money and ask them to take the day off without having sex with strangers. But of course that would have done no good. This reality that we shared together was their reality, and no wish of my own was going to change it for them.

Nonetheless, this was real contact that had an impact. Sobering, disconcerting, enough to jar me for a moment and take me out of imagination long enough to see where I was and what was happening.

All of these contacts, all of these moments, remind me of something my teacher said to me a number of years ago. "Life is so daily," she said. "So ordinary."

Certainly that has been the theme of this trip for me. I dwell within the ordinary. No matter where I go, no matter how exotic a location appears to be, it is still ordinary. What makes it extraordinary, if anything, is my relationship to it: the way that I receive it.

As Henri Trachol once said while I was present, "Life is an experiment. If we wish, we are invited to participate."

In this endless blending of impressions and molecules and energies, how miraculous it is that this thing called consciousness appears. How privileged we are to share it.

Be well, my friends, until tomorrow.