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

Last Monday I joined Diandian from Vistopia Roundtable at the newly opened Naive Lixiangguo in Shanghai, where many listeners shared their reading experiences and thoughts on public space. It suddenly occurred to me that I have seldom visited bookstores or public cultural events in the past decade. I had turned toward the relatively obscure field of Buddhist history and paid less attention to politics, economics, and society. Meanwhile, many public cultural spaces familiar to my generation have closed, and scholars and cultural figures my age seem to have retreated into their studies.

Yet that evening’s conversation showed me that many young people, as I once did, are searching for meaning in Shanghai through reading and sharing. As I often say in this program, viewed through dependent origination, we cannot sever our relation to others, society, or the world. Even as my generation’s ideal public spaces faded over the last decade, new forms have reconnected people in other ways. We can never suppress dependent origination. As the poem quoted in Hayao Miyazaki’s The Wind Rises says:“Who has seen the wind? Neither you nor I. But when the leaves hang trembling, the wind is passing by.”

Now let us return to the Diamond Sutra.

 

Previously I discussed how Subhūti opens the sutra by candidly asking the Buddha:He, a śrāvaka, already understands non-self and will no longer suffer rebirth. Yet beside the Buddha his wisdom and compassion still seem inadequate. Why?

His question reflects two paths of Buddhist practice. Nāgārjuna explains in the Great Treatise on the Perfection of Wisdom:“The Buddha-Dharma has one kind and one flavor: liberation through the ending of suffering. This liberation has two kinds: one acts only for oneself; the other also acts for all beings. Though both seek one gate of liberation, they differ in benefiting oneself or others; hence the distinction between the Lesser and Greater Vehicles.”Although all Buddhist paths aim to resolve suffering, they differ. The so-called Lesser Vehicle seeks personal liberation; the Greater Vehicle seeks it too, while working for the liberation of all beings.