Ah, London summons the Chinese ambassador. Over what? A kung fu abbot jailed for embezzlement. One wonders if the Foreign Office has run out of actual diplomatic crises to fret over. Or perhaps this is a new low in our collective intellectual decadence: mistaking a temple’s pecuniary scandal for a geopolitical incident.
Let us step back. The abbot in question, Shi Yongxin of the Shaolin Temple, is no stranger to controversy. He has long been accused of turning a sacred Buddhist monastery into a commercial enterprise: selling franchises, endorsing products, and now allegedly pocketing donations meant for the divine. The Chinese courts have spoken; he is guilty. But why does London care?
We live in an age where every moral failing abroad must be filtered through the lens of Anglo-Saxon outrage. The Victorians would have found this amusing. They built an empire on opium and called it civilising. Now we summon envoys over a monk’s accounting errors. The decline of proportion is staggering.
What truly irks me is the hypocrisy. How many British charities have mishandled funds? How many Anglican bishops have lived in splendour while their flocks starved? Yet we point fingers at a Chinese temple, as if the East alone suffers from the gap between spiritual ideals and worldly realities.
The real crisis is not the abbot’s embezzlement. It is our inability to see that every civilisation has its sinners. Rome had its corrupt Vestal Virgins; Byzantium its simony; and now China its avaricious monks. This is not a diplomatic affront. It is a human story, as old as money and faith.
London’s summons says more about our own moral panic than about China. We are a nation that has lost its spiritual compass, so we project our anxieties onto others. The abbot’s jail cell is a mirror: look closely, and you see the reflection of a West that no longer believes in anything but its own righteousness.
Perhaps the Chinese ambassador should summon London to explain why we waste his time with such trivialities. But that would require a sense of humour. And humour, like virtue, is in short supply these days.
