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

After nearly a year of weekly updates, we reach the final lecture. Beyond teaching and research, almost all my free time went into conceiving and writing this program. Qian Yongxiang once asked in Shanghai whether I recorded from completed scripts or wrote while releasing. When I said the latter, he was surprised by the schedule. Why arrange it this way?

The program draws on a decade of introductory Buddhism and Buddhist-history courses I taught at universities and temples. I did not want a routine knowledge course. Chinese society needs intellectual stimulus that breaks inherited prejudice and inertia. I preferred adjusting emphasis through listener feedback over following a fixed textbook framework: a Buddhist program interacting closely with this age and individual life.

My motives differed from most. Though I now research Ming-Qing Chan, Buddhism played only a minor role in my academic training. It entered through personal spiritual growth. A passionate classical-music listener, I often had rich experiences. At a Bach chamber concert I encountered an indescribable mystical state and wondered whether rational cognition was deeply limited. Seeking another mode of understanding led naturally toward religion.

Later I visited Boston, a city of classical music spanning chant to modern works. Interested in religion, I attended Bach’s St Matthew Passion, Mass in B Minor, and medieval and Baroque music. Yet total immersion never restored that mystical experience. Abraham Joshua Heschel and Martin Buber inspired me, but were not what I most sought.

Around then I developed mild depression and happened upon Burmese Theravada Buddhism. Its lucid teaching and direct meditation attracted me, so I read scriptures while practicing.

Intensive meditation showed that its experiences follow intelligible logic rather than subjective fantasy. More importantly, it resolved my depression. Curiosity about practice and theory led me deeply into Chinese Buddhism. I entered through lived experience of mind, unlike those beginning with concepts.

This made me question purely rational learning and modern systems of knowledge, which seemed unable to answer life’s real questions.