I have enormous reservations about how best to encounter contemporary China considering their continuous repression of religions that don’t fit neatly under government control as much as for their jackbooted occupation of Tibet.
And, China is the spiritual home for all of us who walk the Zen way. Zen emerged out of the encounter between Indian Buddhists and indigenous Chinese culture and religion, particularly with followers of Taoism. So much about Zen is obviously about Chinese sensibilities and approaches to religion, practical mysticism, grounded in a real world perspective while looking deeply into the matter of heart and mind. So, everything taken together China remains one of the spiritual centers of the world. And for those of us on the Zen path, there is something of home about it, calling to us…
And, in the social-political realm, there appears to be little as powerful as actual people to people encounter. Nothing like communication to break down barriers. A dangerous game, of course, engaging in such projects. No doubt images of such encounters are used by the propaganda machine to show how “they” aren’t such monsters as one has heard. (One rarely sees the images of their prisons and gulags and who occupies them…) So the short term effect of these encounters can feel more supportive of the regime than anything else.
But I also suspect the long term effect is that breaking down. And while conflicted, I think in general these encounters are better taken on than not…
The attached video is from a tour of Western Zen Buddhists of principal Zen sites (yes, properly the word would be Chan, but its Japanese variant Zen has become the normative term in the English speaking world), mostly it appears from the images of priests and lay practitioners from the Vermont Zen Center (really good people), led by the American scholar Andy Ferguson, author of Zen’s Chinese Heritage and one of the organizers of South Mountain China Tours.
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