What would Guanyin do?

From today’s Mirror:

News has come from a Fengxian County, Shaanxi, tourist project publicity conference that Fengxian plans to invest 30 million yuan to build a massive outdoor statue of Guanyin in the Zibaishan Nature Reserve in an all-out effort to build the county’s tourist brand.

The legendary Bodhisattva Guanyin is a compassionate source of help to those in need. So I have to wonder, if you gave her 30 million yuan, what would she do?

I guess that she’d first help the very poor households in the villages. Reportedly, Fengxian ranks as a seriously impoverished area in both Shaanxi Province and the whole country; there are many poor families. According to the present standard of three- to four-hundred yuan in annual assistance money that some localities give to poor rural households, 30 million yuan gould help out many needy people.

Then, she might renovate the crumbling village school buildings to help students who’ve lost their schools return to classes.

Next, she would save people with serious illnesses. The difficulty and cost of seeing a doctor has become a knotty problem for impoverished areas, and it is even more common for ill farmers not to visit a doctor at all. 30 million yuan should be able to help a good number of sick people get to the hospital.

As for the outdoor statue, I would venture to guess that even with an additional 30 million yuan or 300 million yuan, the compassionate Bodhisattva Guanyin of legend would not build it, for Buddhism says, “Saving a life is worth more than building a 7-storey tower,” and a taller, giant statue is still no match for living in the hearts of the people.

So it’s a pity that the hands clutching the 30 million yuan are not the Bodhisattva Guanyin’s. Those people are happy to build the country’s, or even the world’s, largest statues of various things, for their own fame and that of the place they live.