Throwing in the Tao

The woman's coins go kerplunk. The turtles stare into space. Overhead, bell-shaped coils of yellow incense gently turn to smoke. I'm beginning to sense that on this side of the world there's less of a dividing line between the holy and the everyday. It all seems interconnected. I want to feel connected, too, but my traditional Christian reverence, automatic and hushed, is out of place. My wallet is filled with nothing but large bills. I've never before felt so tall, so pale, so entirely unable to blend.

MACAU IS A TINY CITY-STATE, nearly half a million people on one peninsula and two islands, all of them small. Their entire land mass adds up to about one-tenth that of the District: no pastures, no woodlands, no arable land whatsoever.

The crooked streets of Macau's old Portuguese neighborhoods are lined with Mediterranean architecture from its colonial heyday, back when it monopolized trade between China and Europe. Macau lost its monopoly in the middle of the 19th century, and the trading business promptly moved 40 miles across the water to the British colony of Hong Kong. Abandoned, Macau fell into gambling, which might seem like a bad thing, except that Macau turned out to be pretty good at it. Casinos take up a lot of the available space, casinos and hotels in sleek glass towers, and pits filled with construction cranes from which more towers are rising.

In the late 1990s, Britain and Portugal gave their capitalist colonies back to communist China. This created an obvious problem: How could these tiny islands of entrepreneurialism be made to fit into the Five Year Plans of the mainland? Luckily, the solution was simple, summed up in a new slogan: "One country! Two systems!" Hong Kong and Macau could keep right on doing what they'd been doing, raking in enormous amounts of hard cash, only now for the Chinese motherland instead of for their old colonial masters.

This solution has been lucky for Macau. Last year, it surpassed Atlantic City as the second-biggest gambling market in the world. Now it's gunning for Vegas. Inside the casinos, the roulette wheels will spin until Macau is No. 1.

While the Buddha claimed all of life is a revolving wheel of pain, the optimistic Chinese put a more positive spin on it. More than 2 1/2 millennia ago, the result was Taoism, which is both a religion and a philosophy. Today, mainland China is officially atheist, but in the former colonies of Macau and Hong Kong, nine out of 10 people still practice Taoism, Buddhism, Confucianism or Chinese folk religions; most of the remainder are Christian. Religious Taoists who visit A-Ma's temple in Macau believe the goddess provides prosperity and protection, especially for children.

For the more philosophically minded, Taoism is "simply a particular way of appreciating, learning from, and working with whatever happens in everyday life," writes Benjamin Hoff in his popular introduction to Taoism, The Tao of Pooh, aimed at beginners like me. "From the Taoist point of view, the natural result of this harmonious way of living is happiness."

Random everyday lessons = happiness. Good to know.

BACK DOWN IN THE COURTYARD of A-Ma's temple, I am drawn to the jade trinkets offered for sale by a one-legged man. Ingrid and I have been joined by a Chinese friend of ours, who taps at his BlackBerry while I pick out a small, flat wheel of jade.

I turn it over in my hand. "How much?"

"One hundred Hong Kong dollars," says the man. About $12 U.S.

For 12 bucks I can break a large bill into small ones, some of which I can then go back and give to the old couple and the silent cigarette man, plus get a nice little memento out of the deal -- a wheel, a circle, a symbol of all things in balance. "Okay," I say.