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It is my last day in Beijing and I’m in a reflective mood. How have the Olympics changed China? How has China changed me? What have we learned from one another? My first thought is that striving for excellence is a human universal—we all want to be the best, just as Homer said. But we have different ideas about what “best” is, and how it should be achieved. Luna tells me that the Games have really changed Beijing: they have improved the transportation system, cleaned up the physical environment, and taught Beijingers to accept and even welcome strangers. There remains, however, a certain superficiality to these gestures. The really ugly parts of the city were literally hidden behind walls, and people who presumably lived in shacks before the games have been warehoused in what looks like portable dormitories. Behind the walls and down the narrow lanes you can still see the other side of Beijing, and it’s a long way from Haier’s “house of the future” exhibit. The slick new buildings, high-tech transportation, and American style shopping malls send a mixed message when contrasted with the pockets squalor hidden behind the bright Beijing 2008 banners. Does covering up problems reflect a commitment to solving them?
I think that China’s cultural heritage has more to offer the world than its cutting-edge technology, so I dedicated this day to visiting the Lama Temple and Confucius temple. I had wanted to buy some Tibetan prayer flags, but it seemed as though none of the dozens of little shops lining the road to the temple had them. Indeed it seemed like theyall sold the same wares: Buddhist statues, beads, wall-hangings, and every possible incarnation of incense. I concluded that the flags were sacred and therefore difficult to buy, and it turned out I was right. I finally found a little shop run by a Tibetan, who sold me the flags but only after he |
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pressed them to my forehead and then blessed them in a ritual before a little altar in the shop. He pointed to pictures of the various deities that the prayers were supposed to reach, but I didn’t know enough about Buddhism to identify them. I do know enough about Buddhism to understand that distinctions between deities, and even between us and physical objects, are ultimately illusion because true reality is completely unified.
It is because I view Buddhism in terms of its philosophy that the religion is such a puzzle to me. The temple was full of altars before various Buddhist deities (including one statue of Buddha over 25 feet tall) where people were kneeling and sacrificing incense sticks, peaches, packages of butter and rice, even watermelons. Outside there were big cauldrons where people burned incense sticks resulting in plumes of smoke that you had to avoid if you wanted to breathe. I thought about comparisons with ancient Greek religion, where votive gifts were dedicated and smoke (in their case from roasted meat) was offered to the gods as a form of sacrifice.
What was even stranger was to see people worshipping Confucius in this way. I wonder what Confucius himself would have said about this. He was a Socratic-style educator who puzzled his students in order to teach them to think independently, while stressing individual virtue and social propriety. He himself was careful to observe religious ritual, but I doubt that he wanted to be the object of it. The Confucius temple was originally a school and there were excellent displays explaining the state examination system, inspired by Confucius’ philosophy, which used fair competition to distribute civil service jobs in an effort to establish meritocracy. The Chinese sport heritage may be different from the West, but the competitive exam system seems to have functioned much like the ancient Olympic Games to subvert social hierarchies and establish meritocracy.
For dinner I was invited to a feast of Peking Duck by Ren Hai, the professor who had invited me here for my March lectures. As the head of Olympic Studies in China, he has been very busy in these days, but he asked me to write a paper about my observations here and we had a nice discussion about our interpretations of the Games. I observed that the Chinese obsession with the medal count reminded me of my own country, and I wondered whether it really reflected interest in sport. It seems inspire interest in television more than anything, and in China televisions are ubiquitous: on the sides of buildings, in restaurants and shops, even in taxi cabs and subway cars. In order to learn from sport, you need to participate, and participating in these Games, even as a spectator, has been difficult for most Chinese. It’s hard to say whether all the money and effort the Chinese have invested in these Games will really pay off.
Even if the China wins the medal count (which they probably will), it won’t mean that they have earned the world’s respect. The measure of a country is not the performance of their athletes, but whether its citizens can achieve lives of meaning and fulfillment. On this score I wonder whether China may be throwing the baby out with the bathwater in their headlong pursuit to “catch up with the West. Sometimes they seem hell-bent on making our mistakes. In the end both China and the US need to see ourselves as members of a much larger, less fortunate world. What we do affects the poorest countries most of all; witness the demand for oil and its connection to hunger. I think these Games will give birth to an new Olympic rivalry between China and the USA; I can only hope that this rivalry might inspire shared responsibility for improving all of this rapidly shrinking world.
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