The latest dispatch from the People's Republic reads like a lost chapter from Gibbon: the former head monk of China's legendary Shaolin Temple, a bastion of Buddhist discipline and martial arts mystique, has been sentenced to jail by the Crown Prosecution Service for embezzling a cool £12 million. Shi Yongxin, the once-revered abbot, has fallen further from grace than the Temple's famed Jet Li in a poorly subtitled film. The man who presided over the global branding of 'kung fu' as a spiritual commodity now faces the secular justice of the state.
The CPS, ever the pragmatic hand of British law, here acting in a Sino-British joint effort, has ensured that the fruits of corruption are not whisked away to some Swiss vault. Yet the real story is not the crime itself but the decadence it reveals. The Shaolin Temple, once a fortress of asceticism, has become a theme park of commodified enlightenment.
Its monks, no longer meditating on the sutras, now hawk merchandise and patent moves. This is the final stage of intellectual decadence: the reduction of a spiritual tradition to a cash cow. Compare this to the Victorian era's missionary zeal, where the West exported religion to civilise the East.
Now, China exports a sanitised, commercialised version of its own heritage, and its guardians are more interested in the bottom line than the Dharma. The CPS, in jailing the abbot, has done the Western equivalent of slapping a fine on a corrupt CEO. But the deeper malaise persists: the Temple is now a brand, and the abbot was merely its most egregious shareholder.
As Rome fell to barbarians, so does Shaolin fall to barbarism of a different sort: the barbarism of capital. And we, the spectators, watch with the same morbid fascination that attended the fall of the Roman Empire. The show must go on.
