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

During the Spring Festival I visited Anqing, a faded old city on the Yangtze that was once a source of modern Chinese Buddhism. After the Xiang Army captured it, literati in Zeng Guofan’s circle such as Zhao Liewen and Yang Wenhui became closely tied to late-Qing Buddhism. Yang founded the Jinling Buddhist Press, restored lost scriptures, and opened Jetavana Hermitage, a beginning of modern Buddhist education. In 1899 Master Yuexia led Yingjiang Temple and founded a Buddhist school with Changxing, who later took its leading students to Xiamen and created the influential Minnan Buddhist Academy. Zhao Puchu, born in Anqing’s Tiantai Lane in 1907, profoundly shaped Chinese Buddhism, especially after the 1980s. Today the Yangtze rolls east and incense burns at Yingjiang Temple, but few remember the monks’ and laypeople’s vows, now small streams within Chinese Buddhism’s lifeblood.

Last time I described the Buddha’s final days. Knowing death was near, he gave no worldly instructions but repeatedly urged Dharma practice to penetrate birth and death. Yet what is practice for? Does awakening to emptiness merely ensure a peaceful death? Fortunate people may also live long and die without illness. What deeper secret lay in his final teaching?

While discussing emptiness, I stressed that Buddhism is not a philosophy of substances. Nothing exists independently or self-sufficiently: all things, including life, arise through mutual dependence. Connections among living beings are readily felt in love, family, friendship, and bonds with animals. But how are we related to inanimate things? We often feel thrown into a dangerous world that civilization must oppose and conquer. Modern civilization’s exploitation and pollution show our assumed opposition to nature. This explains both increasingly radical anthropocentrism and repeated frustration in conquering nature, like this Spring Festival’s extreme weather.

Buddhism must therefore answer: what inner relation joins living humans to the external natural world?