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

Last episode described monks and laypeople who faced death with enviable transcendence. Many read such accounts only as other people’s stories, without recognizing the same real problem awaiting resolution in our own lives.

Modern society gives us excessive information, yet when life becomes real, every view summons a competing one. No position seems self-consistent, making a coherent philosophy of life difficult. We either react instinctively or overthink, hesitate, and cannot decide.

Before encountering Buddhism over a decade ago, I knew important ideas in Chinese and Western intellectual history, but none offered a coherent way of life I wished to practice. Buddhism revealed thatbeyond distinctive insight, it emphasizes practice and verification, turning suspended ideas into action and giving me great stability.

My interest in Buddhist views of life and death arose partly from a childhood question: why was “I” born neither in the past nor future but precisely now? It produced intense death anxiety.

After I began teaching Buddhism at university, many students approached me whenever we discussed death. They had lost family or friends, and long-suppressed anxiety lacked healthy release. Our upbringing offers almost no death education. Traditional clans, communities, and rituals once provided it; their modern disintegration leaves individuals alone beneath death’s unbearable weight.

Feeling this absence, I began public lectures and met bereaved groups with urgent needs. At the time, neither my knowledge nor inner strength could help their heavy grief adequately.

In Taiwan in 2016, I met Lin Qixian and Guo Huixin, senior teachers devoted to death studies. I invited them to Shanghai’s Jifeng Bookstore. With Professor Lu Qinchi of Renji Hospital, we held two courses on Confucian, Buddhist, and Daoist views, hospice care, and end-of-life support, then unfamiliar on the mainland, including a visit to a community hospice ward. I began seeing how Buddhist ideas could operate in society and help the dying.

Unexpectedly, this learning seemed to prepare me comprehensively for an approaching test.