Hello, everyone. I’m Cheng Qing. It has been a while; welcome back to the Relief Teahouse.

Recently I have often seen all kinds of alarming claims on social media introduced as “Master Hongyi said.” I felt compelled to clarify them. A quick search produces lines such as:“Master Hongyi: The best release of life is releasing yourself.” “Master Hongyi: Every meaning in life exists so that you may meet yourself.” “Master Hongyi: Everything that grinds you down exists to ferry you across.”The examples are endless.

At first I thought these were occasional, secondhand excerpts by a few people. When Master Hongyi appeared ever more often, I wondered whether newly discovered historical sources had somehow escaped me.

A little textual investigation showed thatthese online “Hongyi sayings” are either invented inspirational clichés or counterfeits mixing Hongyi’s writing with an editor’s opinions,turning many people unwittingly into victims of false quotations. A line in your social feed may seem harmless, but it can seriously mislead someone seeking authentic Buddhist teaching.

This relates to the challenge of modernizing education that Chinese Buddhism has always faced. Sutras are difficult, and monastic and lay commentaries across the centuries also require explanation. Many people did such work in the late Qing and Republican eras, including Master Taixu. The severe rupture of Buddhist tradition today means we mostly encounter folk belief and have few chances to understand Buddhism’s profound intellectual and spiritual dimensions.

Consider this passage attributed to Master Hongyi:

The first line,“A fortunate person must suffer an ordeal of love,”may fit an imagined Li Shutong, who left his Japanese wife by West Lake to become a monk. But reading on, I can say with complete certainty that this is not Hongyi’s voice. Because the closing quotation mark appears only at the end, ordinary readers assume he said it all.

Following the trail, I found many popular books bearing Hongyi’s name, some highly rated on Douban. Many explicitly call him the original author but also list an editor-commentator. Readers cannot tell what Hongyi wrote and what the editor invented. For example:

The opening line,“The world’s forms, sounds, fragrances, and flavors constantly deceive ordinary beings and make them form attachments,”is standard Buddhist thought. The explanation may not look seriously wrong, but its tone and grammar are plainly not Hongyi’s style, despite the explicit phrase “he explained.”

Another example says:

Anyone with slight knowledge of Hongyi’s character and style knows this cannot be his. He was exceptionally rigorous and sometimes overly cautious.

Hongyi had little connection with Buddhism in youth. Only in his thirties, influenced in Hangzhou by Ma Yifu and others, did he gradually encounter the Dharma. Compared with earlier eminent monks, he came to the sutras quite late. His greatest contribution after ordination wasa new commentary on the Nanshan Vinaya. This important, rich, complicated, and detailed disciplinary classic for Chinese monks received his exhaustive analytical annotation.

Hongyi’s writing and teaching were extremely rigorous, usually relying on direct quotation from sutras and treatises with little elaboration of his own. HisNotes on the Heart Sutra, for example, is essentially annotation. The ubiquitous “Hongyi sayings” today are immediately recognizable as inauthentic.

One sentence quoted above reads:“Buddhas and bodhisattvas also enjoy the five desires and six objects, but without attachment.”It may look unobjectionable, butthe word “enjoy” plainly carries craving, grasping, and contamination. Hearing“enjoy without attachment” or “be contaminated and then leap free” suggests not Buddhist liberation but a logic of committing errors while escaping them.

Another line is:“Without craving, grasping, becoming, discrimination, or attachment, they remain forever in concentration.”That too easily misleads. For example,what does “forever in concentration” mean? Literally, someone seems permanently fixed in meditative absorption. But in Buddhism, concentration must be joined with wisdom.To remain forever in concentration sounds like dying in one place. Liberation is insteadthe simultaneous possession of concentration and wisdom, without greed or attachment in any circumstance。

. What ordinary people call concentration means abiding on one object. Watching the breath in meditation and fixing attention upon it is calledstopping by binding the mind to an object, like a cord tied firmly to the breath.If stability exists only with one object and vanishes when the object changes, it is ordinary concentration, not the stable wisdom Buddhism describes.

 

What, then, were the original words behind these supposed Hongyi texts, and how were they adapted? The quotation comes from his famousCollection of Evening Sunshine. Hongyi selected valuable lines one by one from Buddhist scriptures and Chan records without elaboration or explanation. These examples show that the earlier quotation was merely one line in the book.

Who wrote the long passage beyond the original? The editor? Not necessarily: even the published name may be a pseudonym attached to a collage. The explanation actually came from another book interpreting Collection of Evening Sunshine.Whether those explanations are reasonable is beside the point. Online texts may be the result of repeated quotation and distortion.People arrive because of Hongyi and are absolutely misled: he selected only one line, while others supplied the elaboration, yet these books often receive high ratings.

Consider another passage:

This does not belong to the earlierLectures on the Collection of Evening Sunshineeither; it is the compiler’s invention. When one article contains three or four voices, how can anyone distinguish them? Readers seeking “spiritual healing” may be led astray by mistaken ideas while believing them authentic Buddhism. How unjust.

Why is it misleading? Take“Under temptation, people move farther from their hearts.”Is the heart in some fixed place from which one can move farther away? In Buddhism, mind arises interdependently with all things in the universe. This is the crucial teaching ofdependent origination，: all phenomena are connected, so where could near and far exist?It would be more Buddhist simply to say, “Under temptation, people easily lose their way.” Hongyi would never explain the Dharma with such ambiguity.

Or consider:“Only by wiping the dust from within can we feel our true selves.”What is a “true self”? Many imagine practice ends in finding one. Scriptures do speak of suchness, tathagatagarbha, and Buddha-nature, but always with one premise:all phenomena arise dependently and possess no inherent essence or substantial reality. Do not imagine an independent, actually existing substance or soul inside body and mind.Every bodily and mental phenomenon arises through conditions and has no substantial existence. Telling people to “feel the true self” strengthens belief in inherent reality: as if the external world’s complexity disturbs purity and must be blocked so an unaffected “true self” can gain peace and freedom. That violates dependent origination.

 

Fundamentally,Buddhism teaches no-self and denies a substantial essence. Yet we naturally begin every thought from “I”; this cognition is an inborn illusion.Popular inspiration and mind-body-spirit teaching often urge us to “find yourself” or “find the true self.” Be cautious, becausethe more you block the outer world to seek a supposed true self, the more you oppose yourself to the world.

For Buddhism, no substantial true self exists; surroundings trouble you because you oppose yourself to them. Knowing that you and everything arise dependently—you in me, me in you—you meet and handle circumstances as they come and make appropriate effort. Why pick at the environment and flee desperately toward a nonexistent utopia of the true self? Belief in “I” is precisely what makes us choose and create opposition from personal preference and values.

Faced with fashionable online “Hongyi sayings,” keep a clear, rational mind and begin from Buddhism’s foundations so as not to be misled.

Finally, after this program ends, may you continue learning to observe the mind in daily life and see the roots of affliction. Until next time.