Editor’s note: This bonus episode was first released as Episode 446 of Eight Minutes, Season 4, on May 5, 2023, shortly before Relief for Life launched.

Wang Hailing - Gatha

Leung Man-tao: I know that in recent years you have immersed yourself in the intellectual history of Buddhism, especially Ming and Qing Chan, while also doing some Dharma outreach at a temple in Shanghai. Is that right?

Cheng Qing: I would not really call it Dharma outreach, just introductory lectures on Buddhism. By coincidence, a small temple named Yongfu Nunnery sits next to Shanghai University. Once we became acquainted, the temple invited us to give popular lectures on weekends.

Leung: Have you noticed what kinds of people visit the temple?

Cheng: At first they were mostly older, fairly traditional lay Buddhists. In recent years I have noticed more young people, especially white-collar workers, as well as university students. But because the temple is beside a university, I cannot yet say whether this is a broader trend.

Leung: Have you spoken with these young people about their reasons or motivations?

Cheng: I have followed the phenomenon for some time. When “Buddha-like” living first became fashionable, I tried to distinguish it from Buddhism. Later I asked a deeper question: why are people interested in such restrained, conservative cultural symbols? It seems to represent a change of mentality.

People of my generation, born in the 1970s, tended to care about collective concerns such as country, family, and society. As younger people confront structural transformation, they become more individualized, care more about life’s meaning, and show relatively less interest in the older generation’s national questions.

Young people today are in a situation whereno one tells them how to settle an individualized life. I once wrote that internet society challenges the new generation to rediscover personal meaning. Such meaning is plural but must have some main thread. Could it mean a revival of traditional culture? What role does Western culture play in our present intellectual context? Which elements can reconcile or even form a new mode of thought? I continue observing.

 

Leung: Besides young people seeking a place for their individual lives, many visit temples to burn incense, worship, and draw lots. They may not care about Buddhist thought but face an uncertain future: will I find work, will my relationship fail, will next year’s salary hold? Many feel their economic life is in trouble. One answer is to seek the supernatural—metaphysics, for instance—and temples become such places. As both a Buddhist and a scholar, how do you respond?

Cheng: During introductory lectures, young people often ask similar questions, such as which temple is most efficacious. That is normal. Religion always has many levels that satisfy different needs.

Interestingly, young people remake many symbols into quasi-religious objects, calling parts of popular culture some “Church of X” online. These emerging symbols lack traditional religion’s space, institutional integrity, and durability; they may be a passing current. Buddhism, however, possesses great continuity and an internally rich vocabulary and set of symbols. Whatever changes outside, its divination verses and prayers for fortune, study, or health form a complete system readily available to young people.

Institutional religion in China today therefore provides a convenient interface without requiring the invention of new cultural symbols.

My generation grew up during mainland China’s ascent. Our thought concerned country and society, and our uncertainty was small because society was rising and we knew life would not be too harsh. I understand the younger generation’s intense fatalism: their future society is much more uncertain than ours was.

 

Leung: You described institutional Buddhism as serving different social functions in China. One today is a temporary place for solving problems. Visiting a temple can resemble fortune-telling, and people compete to burn larger incense sticks, as if bigger means more effective. When worship becomes a means of satisfying greed, something seems wrong.

Cheng: Professor C. K. Yang wrote in Religion in Chinese Society that traditional Confucian rationalism could not answer many tragic parts of life, explain supernatural phenomena, or account for large-scale social change.

For historical reasons, many spaces of folk belief disappeared: small earth-god shrines and temples to Lord Guan once formed an important part of daily religious life. People’s needs were forced into legally open Buddhist temples. Famous sites such as Lingyin Temple are always crowded; however early you arrive, pilgrimage groups arrive earlier.

 

Leung: Suppose a troubled young person enters a temple to worship and burn incense, yet this never satisfies the deepest inner need. Master Sheng Yen wrote in Orthodox Chinese Buddhism that Buddhism is in one sense atheistic: no central creator-god rules everything as an object of worship. Buddhism has gods, but like the deities of its eight classes, they remain within samsara and suffer. Why, then, worship Buddha images?

Cheng: One major feature of Buddhism is its abundance of religious and cultural symbols. Someone approaching through Theravada Buddhism is less easily dazzled by them.

In my university general-education course, I usually begin with “misunderstood Buddhism.” The Buddha is not a creator but an awakened person who suffered life like us, as in Hesse’s Siddhartha. Seeking more possessions and wealth in temples inflates desire; we need rational, reflective exchange.

That is work I have wanted to do for years:restore Buddhism to its original face. It originally addressed life’s suffering, but in many minds has become a tool for increasing desire. As you said, incense grows ever larger because it implies exchange. Some temples strongly oppose giant incense sticks, but cannot resist believers’ expectations.

Leung: I sometimes ask people burning such huge incense whether they are trying to bribe the Buddha.

Cheng: Temple masters are helpless too. At Lunar New Year they say those people are not burning incense so much as setting fires.

Leung: I once thought this was simply not Buddhism. Later I realized that although someone enters not to seek the Dharma but for comfort or blessing, they still enter a temple, see an image, and form a wholesome connection. We call this an expedient means. But where is its boundary? Beyond what line does it cease to be expedient?

Cheng: Buddhists often debate that boundary. A saying holds that “expediency produces degradation”—not moral vulgarity, but violation of the Dharma’s foundation. Incense and blessings are fine; Chinese temples use them to welcome people, as the smiling Maitreya welcomes all. But one problem is thatthey can in turn influence Buddhism’s core. Some people must clearly grasp Buddhism’s development. If social currents give even them non-Buddhist ideas, Buddhism faces disaster and can no longer stand out among religions through its distinctive thought.

I do not oppose blessings. When a concrete person voices suffering while confronting life, it offers immense psychological comfort. Anonymous campus confession boards have a counterpart in temple Buddhas and Guanyin figures, which serve as spiritual confidants for Chinese people. Some things cannot be told to family or intimates, so the temple becomes a space of healing. But reducing Buddhism to this function narrows it.

 

Leung: Students of Buddhism know that historically the Buddha initially opposed images, saying, “Who sees the Dharma sees me.” Buddha images appeared four or five centuries after his passing. People seem naturally to need a concrete visual and material symbol. Though Buddhism opposes idol worship, it later tolerated people’s need for an anchor through which to think and form connections. How do you view idols?

Cheng: I see two lines in the motivation for Buddha images. Historically, early Buddhism used symbolic signs such as footprints and the bodhi tree. Familiar figures appeared later in Gandhara. Mahayana doctrine offers another explanation: it does not oppose form, but attachment to form.

The Diamond Sutra says clearly: “If you see that all forms are not form, you see the Tathagata.” Why is form “not form”? This involves emptiness, the difficult Buddhist idea of no inherent essence. We substantialize a celebrity as a shining idol, define both that person and ourselves dualistically, and then place ourselves beneath them.

From the Diamond Sutra to the Prajnaparamita sutras, Buddhism does not reject form; it rejects making perceived form into substance.The problem lies not in form itself, but in human cognition.People naturally imagine a form as superhuman, a charismatic idol.

Leung: Mahayana also explains form through the doctrine of the three bodies: dharmakaya, sambhogakaya, and nirmanakaya. Does that relate doctrinally to Buddha images?

Cheng: Buddhism reached China first through Buddha images, which were never separate from its transmission here. The “manifestation body” is what ordinary people can see: Shakyamuni as an ordinary monk. Only bodhisattvas see the “enjoyment body.” The “Dharma body” is Mahayana’s ultimate awakening:formless and without appearance, yet manifesting everywhere。

. Buddhists often ask where the Buddha went after nirvana. If he simply ceased to be, why practice? I too will cease, so I might as well eat better now. This question extends into Pure Land theory, whose many lands express how complete truth manifests according to conditions.

According to this theory, Buddhism, especially Mahayana, ultimately emphasizes that youmust not be contaminated by attachment to form. This returns to Buddhism’s foundation in prajna, the thought of emptiness. Without it, every form fascinates us. Smartphones and the internet create countless forms today. People feel unsettled because they become lost among them and exhaust body and mind.

Mahayana has a coherent theory of Buddhist forms, but in daily life ordinary people attach themselves to and drift among different forms. Escaping one, they worship and covet another.

 

Leung: Do you still often visit practice centers for Chan meditation?

Cheng: Some years ago I stayed at Mount Tiantai and followed my own practice. Recently I visit less because of the pandemic and more often retreat at home. During holidays such as May Day, I live simply, meditating and reading sutras each day.

These practices are necessary, but I have noticed that Chinese homes lack sacred space. In the past it might have held a bodhisattva image or ancestral tablet; today it may simply be a meditation corner. I call all of these “sacred space” becauseit is a place where the spirit recovers and receives nourishment. Many homes display wealth and desire everywhere but offer scarcely any place to enter, face oneself, or encounter a religious object.

Mine is a simple tatami space with a piece of Chan calligraphy. Meditating and reading sutras there greatly helps psychological and spiritual regulation.

People’s materialism or absolute individualism is connected to the disappearance of external vessels. Consumer society has left people without attachment. We need an imagination or support outside secular society—transcendence, in any of many forms. Yet in recent decades that external support and those resources have become difficult to find.

Leung: Even a tiny shrine, or a sacred boundary around a roadside tree, can open into another dimension. Traditional Chinese people might bow to a local earth god when passing. That moves me because it shows reverence: some things exceed their power, and human beings are limited. Such spaces once let people face what they could not do and their own flaws. Now that they are gone, can humanity truly conquer nature?

Cheng: I often say we have become “hollowed-out individuals.” We discussed space; in time, I notice that many young people still read history, but through popular online fantasy and time-travel fiction. They care little for historical reality and collage symbols from the past with present and future. I call this a “hollowed-out present.” They do not seek coherent, stable intellectual resources in past experience, while the future they face is unknown and wholly uncertain.

In both time and space they find nothing to rely on: neither a truth that brings peace nor a place that offers stability. Young people’s temple prayers may be blind, but naturally reveal deeper motives. Asking which temple is effective shows that faith and spiritual life have become fast consumption. They received no education in it as children; how difficult it would be to begin from scratch.

Leung: Your word is excellent: burning incense is consumption too. Having paid for a giant stick, one expects immediate results and a job next year.

Cheng: Especially after pandemic restrictions ended, I saw once-empty practice sites crowded with young people. Religion alone cannot explain this; it reflects the age’s spiritual condition. Religious questions are never only religious, but manifestations of a great era’s thought, ideas, and spiritual life. Religion may appear absurdly because daily life so often disparages and stigmatizes it.

Leung: Future intellectual historians looking back at us will find this fascinating. In the last year, young Chinese people went to two places: temples to burn incense or Zibo to eat barbecue.

Cheng: Barbecue and incense—a perfect summary, two sides of one thing.

Leung: It probably tells us what has gone wrong with our time.