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

Over the past week I traveled to Shaoguan in Guangdong and Changsha in Hunan. Besides visiting Yunmen Temple for a second time, I changed trains to spend two days in Changsha. My previous visit was during university, backpacking on a shoestring with three classmates. More than twenty years had passed before I returned. A college friend drove me through Changsha’s nighttime traffic. The city is no longer merely Mount Yuelu and the Xiang River in my memory; it has become one of China’s foremost internet-famous destinations and entertainment centers.

Whenever I reach a place, I most want to visit its old temples. This time I made time for Kaifu Temple in the city center. It is now a nuns’ monastery, and its central location gives it a strong atmosphere of prayer, with crowds packed together offering incense. In the late Qing and Republican periods, however, it was a source of modern Buddhist transformation in Hunan. The Hunan Monastic Normal School led by the eminent monk Liyun was located there. The celebrated Bihu Poetry Society, founded there by the Eight-Fingered Monk, Liyun, Wang Kaiyun, and other literati, took its name from the temple’s Bibo Lake. Despite the incense smoke and somewhat cluttered installations, a strangely quiet simplicity still pervades the grounds, perhaps offering comfort to those who need it.

Let us return to the Diamond Sutra and continue exploring the Buddhist wisdom it reveals.

In the previous three lectures, I explained how the Buddha answered Subhūti’s questions in the Diamond Sutra. Subhūti had experienced non-self and, according to Buddhism, no longer needed to enter rebirth and undergo its sufferings. Yet before the Buddha he still could not fully understand the Buddha’s inner world, because his realization of the wisdom of emptiness remained narrow and incomplete by comparison.