Mindful China: Embracing Early Meditation, Vipassanā Practices in Search for Awakening, and Secular Well-being

Event date:16:00–17:30 (Vancouver) / 19:00–20:30 (New York) / 23:00–00:30 (London) Thursday, 28 March, 2024 | 07:00–08:30 (Beijing/Taipei) Friday, 29 March, 2024

Organizer: University of British Columbia

Over the past few decades, there has been a remarkable surge of interest in early Buddhist meditation techniques and Theravāda-inspired practices, particularly vipassanā, throughout the Chinese-speaking world. These practices, whether rediscovered in canonical scriptures or newly introduced from Southeast Asia, retain the allure of being the original teachings of the historical Buddha and are welcomed as such by their Chinese followers. Many practitioners adopt them in search of alternatives or complements to the meditation methods traditionally available within Chinese Buddhism. The venues for these practices range from mainstream Chinese monasteries and a small number of Theravāda monasteries to a large and growing number of secular meditation centres. Practitioners include committed Buddhists seeking deeper spiritual cultivation and those drawn primarily by the positive effects on mental and physical well-being. This lecture traces the historical roots of this phenomenon from the Republican era to the present, examines the motivations and outcomes reported by practitioners, and addresses the broader implications of this movement for individual and social well-being.

 Lecture Report: “Mindful China: Embracing Early Meditation and Vipassanā Practices in Search for Awakening, and Secular Well-being”

Yin-Cheng Distinguished Lecture Series 
University of British Columbia, March 28, 2024, at 16:00–17:30 (Vancouver)
Lecture by Professor Ester Bianchi (University of Perugia)
Response by Dr. Ngar-sze Lau (Chinese University of Hong Kong)

Report by Tzu Chi Charity Foundation

Supported by the Buddhist Tzu Chi Charity Foundation, this lecture was hosted at the Asian Centre of the University of British Columbia as part of the Yin-Cheng Distinguished Lecture Series on Buddhism. It was the third lecture in the series to be held at UBC. Professor Ester Bianchi of the University of Perugia delivered the keynote lecture entitled “Mindful China: Embracing Early Meditation and Vipassanā Practices in Search for Awakening, and Secular Well-being.” The discussant was Dr. Ngar-sze Lau of the Chinese University of Hong Kong, who joined online. The event was introduced by Professor Jinhua Chen, who also offered a welcome from the Yin-Cheng Network for Buddhist Studies at UBC. Opening remarks on behalf of the Tzu Chi Foundation were provided by Professor Rey-Sheng Her of Tzu Chi University.

Prof. Ester Bianchi holds a PhD in Indian and East Asian Civilization from the University of Venice and is Associate Professor of Chinese Religions and Philosophy at the University of Perugia, Italy. She is also an External Associated Researcher with the Groupe Société Religion Laïcité of the École Pratique des Hautes Études, and a Research Fellow of the Wutai International Institute of Buddhism and East Asian Cultures. Her research focuses on the religions of China, with particular emphasis on Buddhism in both imperial and modern-contemporary periods, Sino-Tibetan Buddhism, Chinese Buddhist monasticism, the revival of Buddhist monastic discipline, and, most recently, the spread of Theravāda Buddhist models in modern Chinese Buddhism. The present lecture forms part of a broader book project with the tentative title Chan After Chan, drawing on fieldwork conducted in mainland China and Thailand.

Dr. Ngar-sze Lau is Senior Lecturer at the Chinese University of Hong Kong and Affiliated Assistant Professor at the Department of Buddhist Studies, Fo Guang University. She completed her MPhil in Social Anthropology at Oxford and her PhD in Religious Studies at Lancaster. Her research interests include contemplative education, lay Buddhist meditation, and transnational meditation movements in contemporary Chinese societies. She has published widely on secular mindfulness and modern Vipassanā movements in the Chinese-speaking world.

Two Waves: Framing the Phenomenon

Professor Bianchi structured her lecture around the concept of two distinct but related waves of interest in early meditation and Theravāda-inspired practice in the Chinese world. The first wave began in the 1920s and 1930s, during the Republican era, and involved the rediscovery of early Buddhist meditation techniques through the study of canonical texts. The second wave began in earnest in the 1990s and gathered momentum through the 2000s, bringing with it the direct introduction of Theravāda meditation and modern forms of vipassanā from Southeast Asia into mainland China.

These two waves are, Professor Bianchi argued, neither coincidental nor unrelated. The enthusiasm for Theravāda meditation in contemporary China has its roots in the intellectual and spiritual ferment of the Republican period. Three features connect the two waves. First, both are expressions of a quest for Buddhist normativity and authenticity: whether rediscovered in the Āgamas or freshly introduced from Myanmar or Thailand, these practices appeal to Chinese practitioners precisely because they are felt to be the original teachings of Śākyamuni himself. Second, from the Republican era onward, early meditation practices were identified closely with those cultivated by Theravāda Buddhists, collapsing what had historically been a significant sectarian boundary. Third, many of the early practices rediscovered in the Republican period are today taught as integral components of modern vipassanā curricula, demonstrating a continuity of content across the historical rupture of the Mao era.

The First Wave: Buddhist Modernism and the Rediscovery of Early Meditation

The intellectual context of the first wave was the global rise of Buddhist modernism. In Europe and Japan, nineteenth-century scholarship had tended to locate “pure Buddhism” in the earliest canonical texts, a move that in China prompted a wholesale reevaluation of the Āgamas, which had long been categorised as lesser, or Hīnayāna, literature and treated as preliminary and subordinate to Mahāyāna teachings. Under the influence of this global shift, Chinese scholars and monastics began to approach the Āgamas as the core of original Buddhism and as a foundational resource for both Hīnayāna and Mahāyāna practice. Alongside the Āgamas, the Yogācārabhūmi śāstra and its chapter on meditative absorption received fresh attention, as did fifth-century Chinese meditation manuals and the works of Tiantai master Zhiyi, particularly his “Exposition of the Gradual Method of the Dhyāna Pāramitā,” which presented early meditation techniques within a coherent sequential system explicitly framed within the Mahāyāna Bodhisattva path.

This was a crucial move, and Professor Bianchi dwelt on it at some length. The majority of texts in which early meditation techniques were embedded, apart from the Āgamas themselves, had been produced within Mahāyāna contexts, and so the revival of early practice did not require practitioners to abandon the Mahāyāna framework that defined Chinese Buddhist identity. Early meditation could be presented not as a departure into Hīnayāna territory but as the restoration of a dimension of Buddhist practice that had been unjustly neglected.

Two different approaches to this restoration emerged, which Professor Bianchi termed the inclusive and the exclusive. The inclusive approach, exemplified most prominently by the reformist monk Taixu, held that early and gradual practices were complementary to the Chan tradition and could serve as a foundational stage on the path toward the sudden enlightenment that Chan sought. Taixu’s own framework distinguished between “Tathāgata Chan,” which encompassed the early practices, and “Patriarchal Chan,” which emphasised sudden enlightenment. He considered both legitimate, but believed that the sequential, gradual character of early meditation was particularly well-suited to the demands of modern life. His disciple Wei Chueh, the founder of Taiwan’s Chung Tai Shan, developed this inclusivist position further by integrating early practices such as the four foundations of mindfulness and the meditation on impurity as formal preparatory stages within what remained fundamentally a Chan lineage framework.

The exclusive approach was exemplified by Tiantai master Miaojing, who argued that Chan had systematically overshadowed the early practices and that those practices needed to be restored, not as preliminaries to Chan, but as superior alternatives to it. Miaojing was blunt in his criticisms: the Chan technique of gong’an and huatou practice was, he argued, too disconnected from scriptural authority, too focussed on samatha at the expense of vipassanā, and, most tellingly, too demonstrably unsuccessful in producing genuine awakening among its practitioners. Against this critique, he presented the early practices as the authentic transmission of Śākyamuni himself. Yet despite his polemical rhetoric, Miaojing’s actual approach was remarkably ecumenical. He drew on the Āgamas, Mahāyāna sūtras, the Yogācārabhūmi, Abhidharma texts, Tsongkhapa’s Lam rim chen mo, and Theravāda sources including the Visuddhimagga, framing early meditation practice in relation to all of them. In his later years, he increasingly identified himself simply as a “disciple of Śākyamuni,” setting aside sectarian affiliations entirely.

Early Practices in Detail: The Four Foundations and the Six Gates

Among the specific practices rediscovered during the Republican era and carried forward into the contemporary period, Professor Bianchi gave particular attention to two clusters. The first is the four foundations of mindfulness, the satipaṭṭhāna in Pali, the si nianchu in Chinese, which comprise mindfulness of the body, of feelings, of mind, and of mental objects. These practices are prominent in Theravāda tradition and are described in both Hīnayāna and Mahāyāna canonical sources within the Chinese Buddhist canon. They were emphasised by Miaojing, who stressed that the Buddha himself had urged his disciples to continue relying on them after his passing, and by Wei Chueh, who presented them as the foundational framework of Buddhist practice. In contemporary China, they form the cornerstone of several Theravāda meditation traditions that have gained substantial followings, including the Mahasati movement, which Professor Bianchi described in the second part of her lecture.

The second cluster is the five gate meditations, a set of five practices suited to practitioners of different temperaments and psychological dispositions, which include the meditation on impurity, breath mindfulness, loving-kindness meditation, contemplation of dependent origination, and the analysis of the elements. Of these, the first and the fifth have been the most widely adopted in modern Chinese contexts, and all five continue to be practised in contemporary China in both monastic and lay settings.

The Second Wave: Modern Vipassanā and the Mahasati Movement

The second wave of the movement brings the story into the post-Mao era, when a different kind of encounter with Theravāda meditation became possible. Where the Republican-era practitioners had worked primarily from texts, the contemporary movement involves direct transmission from Southeast Asian meditation traditions, particularly from Myanmar. Professor Bianchi focused in detail on the Mahasati movement in mainland China, a form of dynamic vipassanā derived from the teachings of Luangpor Teean of Thailand, a modern reformer who taught a form of walking and movement meditation that he understood as a return to the original mindfulness practice of the historical Buddha.

The mainland Chinese headquarters of Mahasati is the Shifu nunnery, whose abbess, a nun known as Xuezhi, has been central to establishing and expanding the movement. Every meditation session at Shifu begins with the Bodhicitta vow, the aspiration to achieve awakening for the benefit of all sentient beings, making absolutely clear that this is not a Hīnayāna institution. The four characters for the four foundations of mindfulness are engraved on the meditation path. Practitioners and teachers consistently refer to their tradition as “Southern Buddhism” or “Pali lineage Buddhism” rather than as Hīnayāna, and the declared goal of the practice is Buddhahood. This framing is deliberate: the Mahasati community is acutely aware of the stigma of being perceived as Hīnayāna in a predominantly Mahāyāna environment, and it defends itself against this perception by insisting on the Mahayana goal and the Mahayana ritual context in which the practice is embedded.

Professor Bianchi described how the spread of Mahasati has required negotiation at multiple levels. The abbess Xuezhi has worked actively to introduce Mahasati into mainstream Chinese monasteries that follow the Mahayana tradition, inviting Thai Mahasati teachers to lead retreats for monastics who would never have previously encountered Theravāda practice. The result is a form of hybridity that is characteristic of the contemporary Chinese Buddhist landscape: practitioners who recite the bodhicitta vow, follow Mahayana precepts, and maintain a distinctly Chinese monastic culture, while practising a meditation technique transmitted directly from a Thai lineage and understood as the original practice of Śākyamuni.

Practitioners’ Motivations and Outcomes: Evidence from a WeChat Survey

To move beyond institutional and textual sources, Professor Bianchi designed an original survey, administered through WeChat to Chinese Buddhist practitioners in mainland China, Taiwan, Southeast Asia, Europe, and North America. The survey reached practitioners through seven different teachers affiliated with mainstream Chinese Buddhism, Tibetan Buddhism, and Theravāda traditions, generating 166 responses. Professor Bianchi acknowledged that the response volume exceeded her expectations and that her analysis remains preliminary, but the initial findings were striking.

Across all three affiliation groups, early meditation practices and modern vipassanā were far more widely practised than might have been expected. Twenty-three Chan practitioners reported including early meditation practices or vipassanā in their regular practice. Most non-confessional practitioners, those who identified simply as Buddhists without affiliation to any particular school or lineage, also included early meditation and vipassanā. Three Pure Land practitioners and two Tibetan practitioners similarly reported doing so. The picture that emerges is one in which early meditation practices and vipassanā have diffused well beyond the Theravāda institutional settings in which they are most visible, penetrating Chan, Pure Land, and even Tibetan Buddhist practice communities.

The outcomes reported by practitioners were consistent across groups. The majority identified inner peace as the primary result of their practice. A considerable number also reported improvements in physical and mental health, either separately or in combination. The survey’s open-ended responses added texture to these findings. One non-confessional lay vipassanā practitioner described drawing on nianfo, satipaṭṭhāna, vipassanā, and other techniques simultaneously, saying that through years of practice he had experienced physical health, inner tranquillity, and freedom from engagement in trivial matters. A Buddhist monastic practitioner described practising satipaṭṭhāna within the context of Theravāda Buddhism in China and reported that since beginning the practice she had felt “health and happiness,” and that no matter how chaotic the external world became, her inner self remained “joyful and content.” She expressed a hope for “the harmony, integration, and prosperity between Theravāda and Mahāyāna traditions,” a formulation that captures, in a single phrase, both the aspirations and the tensions that the movement navigates.

Response by Dr. Ngar-sze Lau

Dr. Lau offered a rich and contextualising response that supplemented Professor Bianchi’s account with additional historical and institutional material. She provided a systematic review of the key texts Professor Bianchi had discussed, highlighting the importance of the Āgamas, the Yogācārabhūmi, and Tiantai meditation manuals for the Republican-era rediscovery of early practices, and drawing attention to the parallel development of Buddhist networks connecting China with Japan, Sri Lanka, and Southeast Asia during the same period.

Dr. Lau emphasised a dimension of the Republican-era movement that Professor Bianchi’s lecture had not fully developed: the transnational ambition of Taixu and his circle. From 1922 onward, Taixu established modern Buddhist academies modelled on secular universities, and proposed a tripartite curriculum encompassing early Indian Buddhism, Buddhism based on Chinese texts, and Buddhism based on Tibetan and other Himalayan traditions. He sent disciples to Japan, Tibet, and Ceylon to study, and his disciple Fafang became particularly significant as a builder of relationships with Theravāda Buddhist countries. In the context of the Sino-Japanese War, Taixu and Fafang turned their attention to Southeast Asia, building connections with Theravāda Buddhist institutions as part of a project of religious revival and national consolidation. The purpose, as Fafang stated in a speech in Burma in 1941, was not to replace Chinese Buddhism with Theravāda but to enrich it, to make Buddhism sufficiently powerful to help a world in crisis. This transnational dimension, Dr. Lau argued, is essential for understanding why Theravāda-inspired practices found such a receptive environment in China both during the Republican era and again in the post-Mao period.

Dr. Lau also raised four specific questions for Professor Bianchi: first, about a text on meditation and illness attributed to Nonghai and its textual lineage; second, about the use of the term Hīnayāna in contemporary meditation settings and whether practitioners at the Shifu nunnery deployed it in self-description; third, about the goals of Mahasati practitioners, specifically whether they aspired to Pure Land rebirth, Arahathood, or Buddhahood; and fourth, about the term nèi guān chán, “inner contemplation Chan,” which has become a popular label for the new meditation boom in contemporary China, combining samatha, vipassanā, and satipaṭṭhāna under a single, distinctively Chinese designation.

Discussion

Professor Bianchi responded to each of Dr. Lau’s questions in turn before the discussion was opened to the wider audience. On the Nonghai text, she noted that it was published in 1946 but had been composed in the early 1930s, predating Nonghai’s full engagement with Tibetan Buddhism, and that its sources appeared to be medieval Chinese meditation manuals rather than Tibetan materials. On the use of Hīnayāna, she reported that while the term was used in the field, it was deployed primarily in contrast to the term Nanchuan Fojiao, “Southern Buddhism,” which practitioners and teachers preferred for self-designation. Hīnayāna appeared specifically in contexts where practitioners wanted to distinguish themselves from those who used Mahasati to pursue Arahathood rather than Buddhahood, the former being framed as the Hīnayāna goal and explicitly rejected. On the goals of Mahasati, she confirmed that the declared and consistently reiterated goal is Buddhahood, this being stated clearly on the tradition’s website and in its public teachings. On nèi guān chán, she agreed with Dr. Lau that the term had become a broad label for the contemporary meditation boom, encompassing samatha, vipassanā, and satipaṭṭhāna under a single heading, and that its currency reflected the degree to which these practices had been naturalised within a Chinese Buddhist idiom.

The floor then opened to audience questions. One question addressed the relationship between the contemporary enthusiasm for early practices and the perceived limitations of Chan. Professor Bianchi replied by distinguishing between the exclusive and inclusive approaches to this question: exclusive practitioners such as Miaojing argued that Chan had proved demonstrably inefficient and scripturally unfounded, while inclusive practitioners such as Taixu and Wei Chueh argued that Chan remained a valid and indeed supreme method, but that gradual preliminary practices were needed to prepare the ground for it and to meet the practical spiritual needs of contemporary lay practitioners.

A question about the potential harmful effects of meditation prompted an important passage in Professor Bianchi’s response. She noted that masters including Miaojing had written at length about the dangers of unguided practice, emphasising that even these ostensibly simple and direct practices should be undertaken under the guidance of a trained master. Miao Jin had described the “obstructions of Māra” as more formidable than the practice itself, and had distinguished between positive outcomes such as clarity, bliss, and physical vitality, and negative outcomes including mental disturbance and psychological harm. His recommendation, shared by most masters Professor Bianchi had interviewed, was that practitioners report both positive and negative experiences exclusively to their teacher, keeping them private from the broader community. Dr. Lau supplemented this with evidence from her own fieldwork, describing a case in which a practitioner experienced severe physical tension from an unbalanced approach to Burmese samatha meditation and required assistance from a second teacher to release it, and noting that lay teachers in Hong Kong had reported cases of meditation retreats triggering mental health crises in vulnerable participants.

A question about the continuity between the Republican-era and contemporary movements across the rupture of the Cultural Revolution drew a careful answer. Professor Bianchi noted that early practices continued to be taught in mainstream Chinese Buddhist monasteries immediately after 1949, including in the diaspora through figures like Miaojing who moved to Hong Kong and eventually to North America. In mainland China, a degree of continuity can be traced through Ye Jun, one of the monks sent by Taixu to study in Ceylon, who returned to China and taught Pali and the Vimuddhi Magga at the Beijing Institute of Buddhist Studies in the early 1960s, before everything was disrupted by the Cultural Revolution. The great boom in vipassanā and Theravāda meditation that characterises the contemporary period did not begin to recover until the 2000s, and the full story of how early practices resurfaced within mainstream Chinese Buddhism after 1980 remains, Professor Bianchi acknowledged, an area of ongoing research.

A final question asked why Chan had become the dominant form of meditation in China in the first place, prompting Professor Bianchi to offer a compressed but illuminating historical account. Following Robert Sharf, she suggested that Chan’s predominance during and after the Song Dynasty had much to do with its capacity to democratise access to awakening by offering a direct, simple, and distinctively Chinese path, stripping away the elaborate sequential structures of earlier meditation systems in favour of the intense, compact encounter with the critical phrase. Precisely because Chan was so direct and made so few demands in terms of preparatory training or scholarly knowledge, it could be adopted more widely and more easily than more complex alternatives. The contemporary enthusiasm for early practices, she concluded, can be understood in part as a response to the perceived costs of that simplicity: a recognition that Chan’s directness, however theoretically powerful, has left many practitioners without the structured, sequential tools they need to navigate the actual texture of their mental and physical lives.

Bibliography