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

Last time I said our search for ultimate meaning arises from fear of death: death anxiety drives us to strive and prove that we matter. Today I will depart slightly from the plan and introduce Buddhist rebirth from ordinary understandings of life and death.

Though death anxiety always threatens us, people respond through everyday practices. These need not form a complete theory or rigorous argument; they may be collective customs such as funerals. Ritual teaches us what death means for life, and we carry that understanding into our own existence, almost reversing Confucius:“Without knowing death, how can one know life?”

Today’s funerals are relatively uniform. Urban funeral homes outsource package services: emcees repeat formulas, ceremonies offer shallow official praise, and expensive goods become the main measure of remembrance. Beyond confronting consumerism once again, participants receive little education about life, only sighing at their temporary survival.

Years ago, on the fourth floor of a Nagoya department store, I found a counter devoted to funeral clothing. China has almost no such retailers, and mourners dress casually, reflecting ritual decline. More strikingly, funeral goods inside a department store treat death as an equal part of life instead of excluding its symbols from public space. Avoiding death only increases fear and turns related people and things into taboo.

When a relative died in a remote mountain village, I accompanied my mother. After bowing to the coffin, I expected a familiar rural funeral but encountered something wholly new. Villagers carried round basins, singing and dancing around the coffin with joy, recreating Zhuangzi’s“drumming on a basin and singing.”During the all-night vigil, a Daoist priest danced dazzlingly over firewood and joked with family. Before burial next morning, relatives opened the coffin, forced out two cries, then carried it uphill.

I later learned this Tujia custom is called Sa’erhe. Its basin-drumming reflects a Daoist idea:Life comes from nature and returns to nature in endless cycles; why grieve?These villagers may never have read Laozi or Zhuangzi, but generations learned a detached attitude toward death through ritual.