CHINA NEED TO BRING BACK THE TRADITIONS OF SCHOLARSHIP AND
KUNGFU -- 文武
Many believe people would be evil no matter what. But this is
only so if we
persist on holding onto our present notion of life's priorities.
We need
to bring back
the old Chinese tradition of scholarship and kungfu, or 文武.
The rank of status would go from top to bottom:
scholars,
kungfu
masters, farmers, labors, techies, businessmen, politicians, actors and
monkeys. In short, monkeying, acting, spinning, money grabbing,
machine worshipping would be replaced by scholarship, fitness, food
producing
and home building. Thus, there will be no need to do evil,
especially when
the warring and religious monkeys are out of the picture.
In old China, beyond raising a family, a Chinese could either pursue a
life of
scholarship, or that of kungfu, or both. Besides the kings and
queens and their subordinates, who were normally worshipped when alive
but historically remembered as overindulging assholes, all people were
equal except for the scholars and kungfu masters. They had
special social statuses that provided a generic scale upon which all
people were measured. For example, Confucius examplified
scholarship
and Kuankung, the spirit of kungfu. But all these are no more.
Modernization has found scholarship a hindrance. We are in a time
when "small persons can go far"(小人得志). Modern weaponry has
made fakers out of kungfu masters. They are now reduced to the
ranks of circus performers and movie actors. The extermination of
the Boxer
Rebellion snuffed out the long standing belief in the mythical power of
kungfu, which had been the standard bearer of public fitness in
China. New fads of fame, fortune and
power take center stage. And the couch potatoes, video
games, marjun marathones and fast foods are here to stake out the
obesity
epidemic.
As we
enjoy the materialistically
enhanced environment, we also become its slaves. Humanity has
lost its direction. The neutron bomb says it best when it
professes to kill all humans but leave the buildings intact.
China's rising could reverse this trend. Scholarship could
bring back the cultural developement that can unify people of the world
through cultural conversion rather than military domination and
economic regionalization.
Kungfu could insist on the principle of righteousness through direct
personal, physical confrontations rather than remote, blind mass
destruction. In short, scholarship synergizes similarities in us,
while kungfu settles our differences -- this time, on a one-on-one
basis so as not to
harm
the innocents. Naive
as it seems,
this social paradigm had by far the best track record among all other
sugar-coated systems in the human experiences, especially in our
present-day countdown to Armageddon.