A12 EZ RE THE WASHINGTON POST.WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 7 , 2019
The World
YEMEN
Reopen Sanaa airport,
aid organizations urge
The Saudi-led coalition’s
closure o f the airport in Yemen’s
capital, Sanaa, has prevented
thousands of sick civilians from
traveling abroad for urgent
medical treatment, two
international aid groups said in a
joint statement.
According to the Norwegian
Refugee Council and CARE, the
Sanaa airport’s three-year closure
has amounted to a “death
sentence” for many sick Yemenis.
The two groups appealed this
week for Yemen’s w arring parties
to come to an agreement to
reopen the airport for commercial
flights t o “alleviate humanitarian
suffering caused by the closure.”
“A s if bullets, bombs and
cholera did not kill enough
people, the airport closure is
condemning thousands more to a
premature death,” said
Mohammed Abdi, the Norwegian
Refugee Council’s d irector in
Yemen.
The Saudi-led coalition,
backing Yemen’s i nternationally
recognized government, has been
at w ar with the country’s Shiite
rebels, k nown as Houthis, since
2015 and has imposed a blockade
on ports that supply Houthi-
controlled areas.
The Iran-backed Houthis
overran Sanaa in 2014, prompting
the Saudi-led coalition to
intervene the following year to try
to restore the government to
power.
The stalemated war has killed
tens of thousands, thrust millions
to the brink of famine and
spawned the world’s m ost
devastating humanitarian crisis.
— Associated Press12 injured, 1 missing in fire at
Russian military depot:
Powerful explosions at a military
depot in Siberia h ave injured 12
people, left o ne missing a nd
forced m ore than 16,500 p eople
from their homes, o fficials said. A
fire erupted Monday a t an
ammunition depot n ear the city
of Achinsk in e astern Siberia’s
Krasnoyarsk r egion, triggering
massive blasts that continued for
about 16 hours. Russia’s Defense
Ministry said t hat the e xplosions
ended early Tuesday a nd that 10
heavy-lift transport p lanes and
eight h elicopters dropped w ater
on the depot. Officials did not
immediately disclose t he cause o f
the f ire.Libya intercepts 3 boats
carrying 122 migrants: Libya’s
coast guard s aid it has
intercepted 122 Europe-bound
migrants off the country’sMediterranean c oast over the
past three days. Spokesman
Ayoub Gassim said the m igrants
were intercepted in t hree
operations. L ibya s lid into chaos
after t he 2011 uprising that
toppled dictator Moammar
Gaddafi, who was later k illed.
Armed g roups have since
proliferated in the country, and
Libya has emerged as a major
transit p oint for migrants fleeing
war and poverty in Africa a nd the
Middle East for a better life in
Europe.Teen charged after 6-year-old is
thrown from London gallery: A
youth court in London o rdered a
17-year-old h eld on a n attempted
murder charge f or allegedly
throwing a 6-year-old boy from
the t op of the British c apital’s Ta te
Modern m useum. T he French boy
was o nly a short distance from h is
parents Sunday when he w aspicked up and t hrown over the
railing of the museum’s 10th-floor
observation deck, an action
“carried out extremely swiftly and
in one movement,” prosecutor
Sian Morgan s aid. The boys h ad
no prior connection to each o ther,
police said. The 6-year-old is in
critical but stable condition with
a sustained brain b leed and
fractures to his s pine, legs and
arms, prosecutors said.Former Indian foreign minister
dies at 67: Sushma S waraj, India’s
former e xternal affairs m inister
and a leader of the r uling Hindu
nationalist B haratiya Janata
Party, d ied at a hospital in New
Delhi. The 67-year-old s uffered a
heart a ttack, the Press Trust of
India r eported. Swaraj was the
external affairs minister i n Prime
Minister Narendra Modi’s c abinet
from 2014 t o 2019. After
undergoing a kidney t ransplantduring her t enure, Swaraj
decided n ot to run for t his year’s
general e lection, citing h ealth
issues.Israeli police recommend
charges against deputy minister:
Israeli police a re recommending
criminal charges against t he
deputy health minister, including
fraud and breach of t rust. Police
said that among the charges,
Yaakov Litzman is suspected of
obstructing j ustice b y attempting
to prevent the e xtradition o f a
woman accused of sex crimes in
Australia. Australia s ays Malka
Leifer sexually a bused c hildren
while w orking as a teacher t here.
Prosecutors say she is feigning
mental illness to dodge
extradition to Australia. Litzman,
an ultra-Orthodox party l eader, is
a key ally of Prime Minister
Benjamin Netanyahu.
— F rom news servicesDIGESTBY ANNA FIFIELD
IN HANGZHOU, CHINAT
he students were lined up
in rows, listening intently
as their professor, Li Wei,
explained the periphrastic future
tense.
Among them were monks with
shaved heads, a yoga teacher sit-
ting cross-legged at her desk and
a man in a suit who had rushed in
late.
In the rat race that is modern
China, it is not uncommon for
ambitious types to study coding
or business English in the hope of
getting ahead socially, financially
or, ideally, both.
These students were different.
At a temple here in Hangzhou,
China’s e-commerce capital and a
place some call the “city of entre-
preneurs,” they were learning
Sanskrit, the ancient Indian lan-
guage in which most Hindu and
some Buddhist texts are written.
It’s a pursuit with no practical
application — the Chinese equiv-
alent of studying Latin after-
hours in Silicon Valley.
“I just come here out of interest
and for some quality time,” said
Zhang Weifu, the late arrival,
who works as a German transla-
tor at a company here. “Hang-
zhou is booming, but this is a
quiet place, and it’s so relaxing to
come here and study. Your heart
rate slows down.”
Like Zhang, more and more
people are looking for ways to
wind down as the country speeds
up around them.
During more than three dec-
ades of breakneck growth and
round-the-clock labor, China has
transformed from a relatively
poor, mainly agrarian nation into
the world’s second-largest econo-
my. The urban middle class,
all ambition and conspicuous
consumption, now numbers
some 400 million people.
But the Chinese economy is
beginning to slow. At a little more
than 6 percent, its current quar-
terly growth rate is the weakest in
a generation.
Leaders in the new tech econo-
my in particular have urged lon-
ger work hours to increase output
and take China to the next level.
Jack Ma, founder of the Hang-
zhou-based e-commerce giant Al-
ibaba, sparked an outcry this year
when he advocated the Chinese
work practice known as “996” —
working 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. six days a
week. People who did that, he
said, would reap the “rewards of
hard work.”
Another tech titan upped the
ante, declaring that the 996 work
culture is for slackers. Richard
Liu, chief executive of Alibaba’s
e-commerce rival JD.com, said he
works “8116+8.” That’s 8 a.m. to
11 p.m. Monday to Saturday, then
a mere eight hours on Sunday.
A small number of Chinese
have responded by opting out of
modern life altogether, retreat-
ing to the mountains to live as
hermits.
But others — such as Zhang,
or Jenny Li, who works in inter-
national trade — have found in
Hangzhou’s famed Lingyin Te m-
ple a less radical source of respite.
“In this program, I get to slow
down and find a deeper meaning,
reflect on what is important,” s aid
Li, who has studied Sanskrit for
more than a year. She started, she
said, partly to develop her con-
sciousness and awareness and
partly because she is Buddhist
and wants to read religious texts.
She said her friends often ask
her why she’s s tudying something
so obviously lacking in earning
potential.
“Sometimes you need to do
things for your inner needs,” she
said. “For us in the millennial
generation, we don’t need food or
money as much as we need more
spiritual sustenance.”
China’s ruling Communist Par-
ty doesn’t make it easy for people
to find spiritual sustenance. Es-
pecially in the six years since Xi
Jinping became president, au-
thorities have clamped down on
organized religion.
Christians, Muslims, Bud-
dhists, Ta oists — all have found it
increasingly hard to practice
their faiths. Churches have been
shuttered, temples have had to
raise Chinese flags, and mosques
have been razed or put under
surveillance as part of a crack-down on Uighurs in Xinjiang.
But the Lingyin Te mple, or
Te mple of the Soul’s Retreat, is
clearly in the party’s good graces.
It remains a tourist destination
and has been allowed to keep
training Buddhist monks and of-
fering Sanskrit classes to the pub-
lic.“There are a lot of people who
come here because they’re look-
ing for inner peace,” said Jun
Heng, the deputy abbot. “They
might be addicted to technology
or stuck in the rat race or de-
pressed by life. They are living
with a lot of stress, so when they
are up here with the Buddhist
monks, they can find quiet. They
are not necessarily Buddhists.”Despite the growing restric-
tions on religion, Sanskrit seems
to fit into Xi’s wider campaign to
promote traditional culture.
There are some historical links
between the ancient tongue and
Mandarin Chinese. Mandarin
borrowings from Sanskrit in-
clude the words for “conven-ience” and “free oneself of.” One
of the Foreign Ministry’s favorite
phrases — “wang xiang,” or “delu-
sion” or “wishful thinking” —
comes from the Sanskrit word
“vikalpa,” found in Buddhist
sutras.
Li, the professor of Sanskrit,
began teaching at the Lingyin
Te mple’s Buddhism Academy in
2015.The first class was so oversub-
scribed that fewer than half the
380 applicants could be admitted.
They included a 10-year-old, a
yoga teacher, an architect and
several pensioners. At the begin-
ning, some had to stand. But only
50 made it to the end of the
semester, and of them, 20 en-
rolled for a second.
About 30 students were in the
classroom on the night The Wash-
ington Post attended. When the
three-hour lesson began, they all
had their textbooks out while Li
stood at the green chalkboard
and drilled them in grammar.
While Chinese is a complicated
language in that it has four dis-
tinct spoken tones and thousands
of written characters, it has a
relatively simple structure.
There is nothing simple about
Sanskrit grammar. Nouns have
three genders, three numbers and
eight cases, like German or Latin.
Then there’s the script, a swirl
of loops and lines.
“It’s a big puzzle, but I think
that’s why I like it,” said Zhou
Meiying, an electrical engineer in
her 40s who’s been learning San-
skrit for three years.
The students repeated the lines
after Li and read from their text-books when called on. It did not
seem like a particularly leisurely
pursuit.
But the students insisted they
found it enriching. Ni Jiajia, 26,
described herself as a recluse and
said attending the class forced
her to get out. Thomas Shen, a
25-year-old law clerk in a Super-
man T-shirt, simply said it was
fun.
“People have different hobbies.
Some people might play basket-
ball or play PC games or chase af-
ter pop stars,” Shen said. “For me,
learning languages is my hobby
because I can understand differ-
ent cultures and how people live.”
And, against the odds, the stu-
dents are finding some practical
uses for their newfound language
skills.
When a group of them visited
India together, they were strug-
gling in the heat. So one of them
went up to some police officers
and asked, in Sanskrit, where to
get water. It was as though they
were speaking Shakespearean
English on the streets of London,
but it worked. They got their
water.
[email protected]Ly ric Li contributed to this report.Leaving
the rat race
to move at a
monk’s pace
At a Buddhist temple,
China’s workaholics
find refuge in old ways
— and an ancient tongue
PHOTOS BY YAN CONG FOR THE WASHINGTON POSTCLOCKWISE FROM TOP: A monk strolls through the arts
department library of the Buddhist Academy at the Lingyin
Temple in Hangzhou, China. Many students taking the
academy’s Sanskrit class say they find the work and the
mountainous site, a quiet spot away from the bustle of the city,
calming. Master Hui Chang, left, watches a monk paint.“Sometimes you need to do things for your inner
needs. For us in the millennial generation, we don’t
need food or money as much as we need more
spiritual sustenance.”
Jenny Li, an international trader who finds refuge at Lingyin Temple