100227- A joke

.....I'm sure many of you are a bit confused about why a huge powerful country like China throws a conniption fit whenever anyone mentions the Dalai Lama. The short, obvious answer is that he's a living testament to their half century effort at ethnic genocide of the Tibetan culture. If you're going to invade a country for completely illegitimate reasons, it would behoove you to make sure the leader was a thoroughly unsympathetic son-of-a-bitch whose subjects wouldn't dream of smuggling to safety at the risk of their own lives (what? I never mentioned Iraq; did I mention Iraq?) and not a pacifist who devoted his life to better understanding the human experience.
.....No, I believe China's apoplectic temper tantrums have something to do with koans. Koans have been described as zen riddles, questions that have no answers... or infinitely many answers. In fact they're intellectual disciplinary exercises. The eternal bane of dogmatic ideologies like Maoism and fundamentalist religions, koans aren't meant to be answered. They're meant as mental training for approaching any question no matter how difficult by posing one that can't be answered definitively. More is learned by the pursuit of the answer than would ever be learned by the actual answer, had one existed.
.....At some point, the Chinese communists became convinced that Buddhists were simply tricking everyone; that there were answers to all of those questions, and the Buddhists were hogging them all to themselves. By their reckoning, the slaughter and/or enslavement of millions was a small price to pay for knowing "how high is up". The clue that tipped them off was the lifestyle of the monks themselves. Many were brought to the monastery as young boys, got their heads shaved and wore a simple robe every day into adulthood. The communists refused to believe that anybody who spent their entire puberty in a remote temple surrounded by other boys didn't know what the sound of "one hand clapping" was.