Saving Fish from Drowning - Heal Burma

SAVING FISH FROM DROWNING
paperback, Stephen King’s Misery, which held as its ignominious
bookmark a page of the notes I had worked on so laboriously.
Stone Bell Temple lay ahead. I had hoped my friends might learn
about the importance of its holy grottoes and their carvings, many
created in the Song and Tang dynasties, with the more recent ones
completed in the Ming, several hundred years in the past. By seeing
a medley of ancient Nanzhao, Bai, Dai, and Tibetan images, they
might have sensed how streams of minority tribes’ religions had
joined the dominant—and often domineering—Chinese river of
thought. The Han Chinese have always been good at absorbing mot­
ley beliefs yet maintaining their own as paramount. Even the Mon­
gols and Manchus, who had conquered and ruled them since the
thirteenth century, had assimilated Chinese ways and had virtually
become Chinese themselves. Think about this, I would have said to
my charges: as we go into this temple, think about the influences of
tribes, invaders, and rulers upon one another. You see remnants of
their effects in both religion and art, in essence those areas that are
expressions of the spirit.
The bus rumbled on. The tribe they were about to meet was the
Bai, and my twelve friends would have a profound effect on them,
and vice versa.
“Hey, Dad,” Rupert called out, holding up the page from my
notes, “get this.” He began to read what I had written: “‘One of the
shrines is most aptly named the Grotto of Female Genitalia.’” Ru­
pert snickered through his nose in an unattractive way and neglected
to read further, where I had written the following: “Many tribes
in this region believe that creation begins from the womb of dark­
ness. Thus, there is a profound reverence for grottoes. This particu­
lar grotto is unspectacular but delightful, and contains a rather plain
and small shrine, about twenty inches in width and twenty-four in
height, and carved simply in the shape of a vulva surrounded by
labia onto which have been inscribed tributes over the centuries to
75