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

Summer vacation is nearly over. I did not travel, but remained busy, partly with interviews prompted by this program. The most common questions concerned contemporary spiritual difficulties.

The attitude I have always wanted to share is this:However unbearable life seems, solutions remain possible—not only by changing circumstances, but by changing the angle and depth of cognition with which we face them.The Buddha calmly faced material poverty and separation from loved ones, things we fear, while tirelessly sharing wisdom and compassion throughout life. This is awakening’s power.

Such wisdom cannot be achieved overnight. Buddhism says:“Though principle may be realized suddenly, practice must be cultivated gradually.”That is,even understood truths require long effort to embody.A Zen story records Bai Juyi asking Master Niaoke Daolin the Dharma’s essence. He replied:“Do no evil; practice every good.”Bai dismissed this as understandable by a three-year-old. Niaoke answered:“A three-year-old can say it; an eighty-year-old cannot practice it.”

Even Buddhist principle is not easily understood. Emptiness, familiar to everyone, is often deeply misunderstood.

Ordinary cognition gives emptiness negative meaning. Asked about Buddhism, many Chinese people answer, “The four elements are all empty!” Asked what that means, most cannot explain, or say life has no meaning or value. Like impermanence, it becomes consolation for hardship through nihilistic denial, not Buddhism’s intent.

Emptiness is perhaps Buddhism’s hardest idea. After Buddhism reached China in the Eastern Han, it took roughly five centuries to be understood fully. Pre-Qin thought had Laozi’s mutual generation of being and nonbeing, but this differed. Early translators rendered emptiness as “original nonbeing,” borrowing metaphysical language. Only in the Wei-Jin period did the great translator Kumārajīva creatively render:“Form is emptiness; emptiness is form. Form does not differ from emptiness; emptiness does not differ from form.”Emptiness then became Buddhism’s signature concept.