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July 01 the ultimate posersI really dislike posers... especially poser buddhists...
As far as posers go, poser buddhists are probably on the bottom of the poser food chain, way below poser academics and poser models...
I ran into quite a few poser buddhists today, who were hosting a political demonstration of some sort... The last time I checked, enlightenment didn't involve setting up propaganda displays, handing out pamflets and getting people to sign petitions. Upon seeing such marketing publicity stunt, natrually I wanted to go check it out.
"Help us defeat evil!" said one of the "volunteers" at the table with pamflets, "sign a petition! Chinese Communists don't allow freedom of religion!" He recited, waving a clipboard that had a sheet of paper full of random signatures.
"Whoa, wait a minute!" I had to step in to correct that statement: "I live in Beijing, and I believe in Taoism and occasionally practice Zen, I have friends who are devote Christians and Catholics in Beijing and they go to church on Sundays, what do you mean there's no freedom of religion in China?"
The "volunteer", who was a twenty something fresh-off-the-boat southern Chinese dude, gave me a stare that didn't involve very much compassion, quickly changed his slogan.
"Communist Government remove organs from political prisoners and sell for profit..."
The Chinese Government isn't that desperate for money. In fact, China right now has more investments going into it than it knows how to spend. With Hong Kong being the 4th most expensive city in the world to live in and Beijing climbing to 14th, while Shanghai, Taipei and Shenzhen all ranking in the top 50, things just don't add up for it to be a country whose government would need to conduct secret kidney selling operations to make ends meet.
So I switched the conversation to mandarin, which is my mother tongue, having born and raised in Beijing for the first 11 years of my life, and being a resident of Beijing for the past 7 years, I thought perhaps I should tell this guy what China is really like now.
"I'm from Beijing." I told him with my beijing dialect.
"How long since your immigration to Canada? More than 3 years right? This all happened recently." He questioned, using Mandarin, with a slight southern China accent.
"I live there now, I'm only here in Toronto to visit my parents who live here. I like Beijing, I think China is a great place right now... what's this organization about?"
The guy began to explain to me that his group belongs to an organization called "Fa Lun Gong" a religious establishment based on buddhism, which is being oppressed by the Chinese Communist Party because they don't allow freedom of beliefs, and mistreat political prisoners, and that all they want to do is practice their religion... etc.
It was a run on sentence and the dude talked very fast as though he's reciting some speech he had already made a thousand times.
I proceeded to ask him about his thoughts on enlightenment, but he did not want to participate in that conversation very much and said that he was very busy because there were more people who wanted to sign petitions even though I was the only guy there actually actively engaging him in conversation. He didn't seem to be enlightened enough to me to be considered someone that had anything to do with Buddhism, so I refrained myself from signing his clip-board and just took some flyers* and went on my way.
I've heard about this "religion"... It's called Fa Lun Gong,
considered a cult in China and has been banned for a few years... I remember seeing them on the news on Chinese TV a few years ago when they organized a protest in Beijing one morning, when 10000 people showed up and sat in silence around the office of China's then president Jiang Ze Min. At the time I remember admiring the organization of so many people in such a short time and thought it was probably the biggest "flash mob" event in the world.
I also remember coming across one of their books a few years back in which I read about some of their teachings. The religion claims to be based on buddhist teachings but says it is not buddhism. It introduces the idea of obtaining enlightenment through the practice of a physical exercise reminiscent of a lazy man's version of Yoga, and strives for 3 virtures: Purity of truth (Zhen), Compassion (Shan), and Beauty (Mei, in this case, the beauty applies not only to physical appearances of things, but also of the inner beauty of all things). Pretty good virtues right? But guess what, their fearless leader is this guy in a suit (here's a link to his picture on their official website... a picture speaks a thousand words... http://www.falundafa.org/Photo_ch.html), by the name of Li Hong Zhi, who lives in a million dollar house somewhere on the west coast of the United States and drives an expensive luxery sedan.
A quick search on wikipedia gave me enough information to make my own judgement(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_and_controversies_about_Falun_Gong)
and I preferred the layout of much better than their official website (http://www.falundafa.org/) which had a lot more anti-Sino-propaganda than information relating to the actual "teachings".
It pains me to see so many people are buying into their propaganda, and that on the streets of Toronto there would be such people talking smack about my home country.
*The flyers they were passing out had no information about the buddha's teachings or anything that was even remotely religious or spiritual, rather, they were all articles about how evil the communist part of china is... weird religion eh? Comments (7)
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