Hello, I’m Cheng Qing. Welcome to Relief for Life: Forty Introductory Lectures on Buddhism.

In earlier episodes I introduced the Buddhist idea of dependent origination, one of the clearest ways Buddhism differs from other religions and philosophies. Can it also offer a Buddhist diagnosis of present-day problems such as alienation and loneliness?

The roles and meaning in a person’s life are often grounded in how their community is organized, its culture, its means of communication, and its transport. The rise of the internet and rapid development of virtual information technology have profoundly changed all this, overturning much of the tacit consensus once embedded in custom. Activities and relationships that formerly required real-world contact can now happen online, distancing us from traditional communities such as family, clan, neighborhood, and religious organizations.

In A Biography of Loneliness: The History of an Emotion, Fay Bound Alberti argues that loneliness is a psychological experience specific to modern society: “Loneliness is a conscious and cognitive sense of estrangement, or separation from meaningful others. It is an emotional lack concerning one’s place in the world.”This definition contains two key ideas: estrangement or separation, and one’s “place in the world”—how an individual locates the self within the cosmos, world, nation, society, and family.

Did people in the past suffer modern-style loneliness? Alberti notes that in earlier Western societies a person might seek solitude to commune with God; by the eighteenth century, one might withdraw from society to commune with nature. Though physically alone, they did not define the feeling as loneliness. Traditional Chinese recluses likewise lived apart yet were often content, without today’s familiar self-consuming anxiety. Even the emotionally expressive literati wrote of melancholy that differed from modern loneliness.

The poet Gao Shi, brought back to public attention by Chang’an Thirty Thousand Miles, traveled to the frontier district of Ji in 750. The year before, he had passed the imperial examination and become commandant of Fengqiu County. On New Year’s Eve at the desolate frontier, he wrote New Year’s Eve: