Event date: 16:30–18:30 (EST) Friday, 17 January, 2025 | 05:30–07:30 (Taiwan) Saturday, 18 January, 2025

Organizer: Princeton University

Tracing contemplative philosophy from Dharmakīrti in India up to the contemporary Chag-Dzog traditions of Tibetan Buddhism, one can tell a contemplative and philosophical narrative that leads from Dharmakīrti’s thought to the nondual theories and practices of contemporary Mahāmudrā and Dzogchen. That narrative begins with an emphasis on the epistemic primacy of experience and the search for a metaphysics of consciousness resting heavily on the role of “reflexive awareness” construed as the “empty luminosity” of the mind. In the Indian context, an attractive conclusion to the Dharmakīrtian approach is a type of pure awareness in which both epistemic and metaphysical concerns resolve in an experience of cessation. Yet in the Tibetan context, this outcome proved so unattractive that cessative experiences were seen as disastrous sidetracks on the road to awakening. This lecture examines why the Chag-Dzog traditions arrive at such an aversion to “blank mind” states and what this tells us about the primacy of experience, the nature of consciousness, and the problem of agency in the awakened state of a Buddha.

 Lecture Report: “Reflexivity, Luminosity, and Cessative Sidetracks”

Yin-Cheng Distinguished Lecture Series 
Princeton University, January 17, 2025, at 16:30–18:30 EST
Keynote Lecture by Professor John D. Dunne (University of Wisconsin-Madison)
Response by Professor Bronwyn Finnigan (Australian National University) and Professor Thomas Metzinger (Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz)

Supported by the Buddhist Tzu Chi Charity Foundation, this lecture was hosted by the Center for Culture, Society, and Religion at Princeton University as part of the Yin-Cheng Distinguished Lecture Series on Buddhism. It served as the keynote address of the conference “Agency and Experience: Buddhist and Cognitive Perspectives.” Professor John D. Dunne of the University of Wisconsin-Madison delivered the keynote lecture entitled “Reflexivity, Luminosity, and Cessative Sidetracks,” with responses from Professor Bronwyn Finnigan of the Australian National University and Professor Thomas Metzinger of Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz, who joined online. The event was introduced by Professor Jonathan Gold, who welcomed participants and thanked the Tzu Chi Charity Foundation for supporting both the conference and the lecture series. Welcoming remarks were also offered by Professor Rey-Sheng Her of Tzu Chi University. Three scholars from Princeton’s organizing committee, Molly Crockett, Nadav Amir, and Jonathan Gold, were acknowledged for their work in assembling the conference.

Prof. John D. Dunne is Distinguished Professor of Contemplative Humanities at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he also holds a co-appointment in the Department of Asian Languages and Cultures and serves as a faculty member of the Center for Healthy Minds. His work focuses on Buddhist philosophy and contemplative practice, especially in dialogue with cognitive science and psychology. He is the author of Foundations of Dharmakīrti’s Philosophy and numerous articles on Buddhist epistemology, reflexive awareness, and the intersection of Buddhist thought with cognitive science. He is also a Fellow of the Mind and Life Institute. The keynote was drawn from a sixteen-thousand-word essay he had written for the occasion, portions of which had been shared in advance with the two respondents.

Prof. Bronwyn Finnigan is Associate Professor in the School of Philosophy at the Australian National University and was serving as Visiting Associate Professor in Princeton’s Philosophy Department at the time of the lecture. Her research engages philosophy of mind, moral psychology, and ethics in Western and Buddhist philosophical traditions, with particular focus on Buddhist moral psychology, the nature of fear and anxiety, and the role of self-concepts in mindfulness research. She has a book under contract with Cambridge University Press on varieties of mindfulness. She noted that one of her earliest publications as a graduate student had developed ideas from an earlier article by Professor Dunne, entitled “Thoughtless Buddha, Passionate Buddha,” which she described as a remarkable piece of graduate work.

Prof. Thomas Metzinger is Professor Emeritus of Theoretical Philosophy at Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz. He is the author of Being No One and The Ego Tunnel, whose recent book was warmly recommended by Professor Dunne in his opening remarks. His work on the phenomenal self-model has become a major reference point for philosophical and scientific discussions of consciousness, self, and subjective experience. He has maintained a formal meditation practice for forty-eight years.

An Opening Story: Cessation in the Field

Professor Dunne opened with a personal anecdote that he said at least one person in the room could corroborate, since that person had been there. In 1994, teaching on the Antioch Buddhist Studies Program in India, he had worked alongside Raji, a celebrated vipassanā teacher who came every year to teach undergraduate students from the United States. The year was particularly hot, and the teaching took place on the roof of the Burmese Bihar. Not far away, a sadhu had buried himself underground to prove that he could attain a form of samādhi in which everything stopped, including his breath. Total cessation of mind, cessation of breath, cessation of all activity. This image, Professor Dunne said, crystallised the phenomenon he would be exploring for the next fifty minutes: the profound cultural and philosophical attraction that cessative states have exerted across the Buddhist world, and the question of whether that attraction might be leading contemporary contemplative science in a problematic direction.

Two Qualms

Before turning to his philosophical argument, Professor Dunne laid out two related concerns that had motivated his inquiry.

The first was what he called the “barking up the wrong tree” problem. If the goal of studying cessative states in laboratory settings is to understand the nature of consciousness, there is something paradoxical in the methodology. Cessation, by definition, is the absence of the thing one is trying to understand. As he put it: is it like studying a circuit with no electricity running through it? Is it like a dance with nobody moving? If consciousness is a dynamic, self-illuminating process, examining its most minimal and contentless expression may simply not be the right experimental design. He noted this concern was increasingly relevant given recent ventures such as a West Coast startup called Journey, which at the time of the lecture was advertising the ability to bring users to a jhāna state within five days. He expressed curiosity about how that would turn out.

The second and larger qualm was what he called the “moth to a flame” problem. Is there something about cessation, something almost anaesthetic in its appeal, that draws people to it not for epistemic reasons but for psychological ones? Is the contemporary surge of interest in minimal and contentless states partly a cultural phenomenon rather than a purely scientific one? Professor Dunne said he would not pursue this second qualm in depth during the lecture, leaving it open as a question for the respondents and the audience, but he introduced it as a background concern that shaped his interest in the Chag-Dzog critique.

Four Categories of Cessation

Moving to his analytical framework, Professor Dunne proposed four heuristic categories of cessation. The first is the cessation of thoughts and conceptuality. The second is the cessation of sensory perception, encompassing what the Yogācāra tradition calls the six active consciousnesses, from eye-consciousness through to mind-consciousness. The third is the cessation of the phenomenality of consciousness itself, the luminosity or prabhāsvara quality that undergirds awareness even when no object is present. The fourth is the cessation of physiological processes, including respiration. These categories exist on a spectrum, and different Buddhist traditions mark their soteriological goals at different points along it. In non-Tantric contexts, the paradigmatic cessative endpoint is nirodha-samāpatti, the attainment of cessation, which Paul Griffiths had analysed in his 1986 book Being Mindless, a work Professor Dunne recommended warmly despite noting that it had received far fewer citations than it deserved.

The Ontological Trap: Sarvāstivāda

The main philosophical argument of the lecture traced what Professor Dunne called the “attractor state” quality of cessation through four major phases of Sanskrit Buddhist thought. He began with what he termed the ontological trap, as represented by the Sarvāstivāda tradition.

In the Sarvāstivāda framework, saṃsāra is the flowing together of substantially real, causally conditioned elements, the five aggregates, each fixed in their essential nature by their causal history. The fundamental driver of this system is ignorance, which is always part of the causal history of these conditioned elements. Since the elements cannot be transformed without violating their fixed natures, liberation can only consist in their cessation. There is no exit from saṃsāra through transformation; there is only escape through stopping. This is the trap: once you accept the Sarvāstivāda metaphysics, cessation becomes the only available soteriological option.

Nāgārjuna’s Response and Its Unexpected Destination

Nāgārjuna’s Madhyamaka philosophy appears to dissolve the trap by denying that phenomena have fixed essential natures. Things are empty of inherent existence, and it is ignorance that makes them appear fixed. Remove the ignorance through the wisdom that sees emptiness, and transformation becomes possible. Nirvāṇa is now described as “unlocated,” abiding neither in saṃsāra nor in full cessation.

But Professor Dunne argued that Nāgārjuna’s system, when pressed by the commentator Candrakīrti, circles back to cessation through a different door. Working through Nāgārjuna’s verse that karma and affliction cease through concepts, and concepts cease through fabrication (prapañca), and fabrication ceases in emptiness, Candrakīrti concluded that the experience of emptiness is an experience in which the activity of the mind itself ceases. A Buddha’s realization, on this account, is a realization in which nothing is happening mentally. Candrakīrti is left having to explain how Buddhas can still engage compassionately with the world while residing in what is effectively a cessative state, a problem he addresses through complex accounts of non-conceptual cognitive functioning that Professor Dunne described but did not detail. The point was that even Madhyamaka, which seemed to offer a way beyond cessation, arrived back at a version of it.

Professor Dunne illustrated the stakes of this issue with a famous episode from the Vimalakīrti Sūtra. Śāriputra, who in the sūtra represents a conservative early Buddhist perspective, cannot see the Buddha field because his mind is, in the words of a divine being, “filled with cesspools.” The Buddha touches his toe to the ground and the world is momentarily transformed into a spectacular paradise, before collapsing back. The episode illustrates the Mahāyāna claim that what one sees reflects the state of one’s mind, but it also raises the question of what a Buddha’s ongoing experience of the world actually consists in, a question that cessative accounts of enlightenment make increasingly difficult to answer.

Yogācāra, Dharmakīrti, and Reflexive Awareness

Yogācāra philosophy appeared to offer a more constructive alternative. Rather than locating the problem in the fixed or unfixed nature of phenomena, or in conceptual fabrication as such, it identified the root of suffering in a specific illusion: the illusion of subject-object duality. Eliminate that illusion, and what remains is said to be ineffable but accessible, continuous with ordinary experience but free of its distorting overlay. This led to the Dharmakīrtian concept of reflexive awareness, svasaṃvedana.

Professor Dunne explained svasaṃvedana with an example he had apparently used with audiences before: seeing a double rainbow in Austria. When you see something as beautiful and absorbing as a double rainbow, you are not attending to your own affect in that moment; you are looking at the rainbow. But later, when asked how you felt, you can report accurately that you felt awe, even though you never directed attention to that feeling as an object. The awe was present in the experience without being presented as an object. This always-present subjectivity that underlies experience without becoming its focus is what Dharmakīrti means by self-reflexivity. The metaphor is light: just as a lamp illuminates whatever is in the room without being a separate object in that room, consciousness illuminates its contents through the bare, intransitive act of presenting.

Professor Dunne drew a grammatical analogy to make this precise: in Romance languages, transitive verbs can be made intransitive through a reflexive pronoun. In Spanish, one says se habla español rather than hablo español, making the knowing a happening rather than a directed action. Svasaṃvedana does the same thing to the verb “to know.” It converts the transitive “I know that” into an intransitive “there is knowing.” This intransitive knowing, he argued, is what the Tibetan tradition invokes when it speaks of the luminous, self-aware quality of the mind.

The problem, however, is that recognising svasaṃvedana requires eliminating the conceptual and dualistic overlay that ordinarily obscures it. And here the commentator Śākyabuddhi, a highly influential thinker in the Dharmakīrtian tradition, identified a logical difficulty: if self-reflexive awareness is already present in every moment of ordinary experience, why can ordinary beings not simply perceive it directly? His answer required concluding that recognising svasaṃvedanademands a state devoid of ordinary phenomenal content. We are back, once again, to cessation. As Professor Dunne put it: we had a good option, we didn’t have to go there, but we went there anyway.

The Chag-Dzog Critique: Why Cessation Is Dangerous

Having established cessation as a recurring attractor state across four major phases of Sanskrit Buddhist philosophy, Professor Dunne turned to what he called the Chag-Dzog critique. The compound term “Chag-Dzog” combines Chag-chen (Mahāmudrā) and Dzog-chen (Dzogchen), and the texts he drew upon come from a seventeenth-century Tibetan teacher whom he described as probably a somewhat marginal figure in his own milieu, not engaged in sectarian rivalry with other traditions but criticising his own fellow practitioners.

The text Professor Dunne read from contains instructions for śamatha in the Chag-Dzog tradition. He read a passage directly: “When you can just see the mind’s nature, you should cultivate stability, relaxing body, speech, and mind. Do not pursue the fluctuation of thoughts of the past and future. Look directly at the mind with the mind. Sights, sounds, smells, and such: don’t stop the six consciousnesses and do not pursue them. Whatever appears, whatever arises, rest in it, all intently, lucidly, nakedly. Practice with proper intensity and relaxation. If there’s too much intensity, the practice is contrived. Too much relaxation, and one is seized by thoughts. Instead, be merely undistracted.”

Immediately after these instructions, the text warns: “These days, some practitioners of śamatha consider a thoughtless state in which the six consciousnesses are stopped to be an excellent practice. But this is just called the absorption in cessation, and it is said to be a fault and a sidetrack of meditation. It is explained that it causes, as its result, rebirth in the form realm as a being without sañña, or as a nāga, or an animal. It is definitely not a path to liberation.”

The nāga rebirth, Professor Dunne noted, is associated in Tibetan thought with pride and anger, though he acknowledged he was still working on understanding precisely why this particular consequence is invoked. What is clear is that the absorption in cessation is identified as inhibiting vipaśyanā, the development of insight into the nature of the mind, and that this inhibition is the most critical failure: not merely a failure to progress, but an active obstruction.

A second anecdote in the text recounts the encounter between the practitioner Yan Ben Tbo and the master Vira. Yan Ben Tbo boasts of a samādhi so stable he can remain in it for several days without thoughts of food or water. Vira replies: through that kind of thing, you will be reborn as a nāga. I don’t need any of that. A similar exchange occurs in the Milarepa literature, where a practitioner claims the ability to sustain thoughtless meditation for many days, and Milarepa laughs and says: You cannot get liberation by squeezing sand.

The Chag-Dzog text that Professor Dunne’s teacher had also given him contains an even more explicit passage from a commentary: “If one remains in that state for a long time, then the faith, pure appearance, compassion, and confidence in karmic causality that were previously present in one’s mind will all wither and disappear. That blank thoughtless state itself is ignorance. That is delusion’s cause.”

Professor Dunne offered two reasons why the Chag-Dzog traditions found cessation so problematic. First, dynamic consciousness is actually required to understand the nature of consciousness. Stopping it is not studying it; it is studying its absence. Second, there appear to be genuine behavioural and ethical consequences: practices that aim at thoughtlessness tend to erode compassion, faith, and sensitivity to karmic causality. These are empirical claims, Professor Dunne noted, that he genuinely wondered whether contemporary research might be able to investigate.

He closed his lecture with the teaching that his teacher’s teacher, Tögyal Rinpoche, had cited as the summary of the entire Chag-Dzog approach to practice, attributed to Milarepa: “Appearances don’t bind you. Experiences don’t bind you. Clinging binds you. Cut the clinging.” This, Professor Dunne proposed, is the corrective to the cessative attractor: the problem has never been the presence of appearances, but the clinging to them. Liberation consists in releasing that clinging, not in eliminating the appearances themselves.

Response by Professor Bronwyn Finnigan

Professor Finnigan opened by situating her response within what she described as its broader significance: the Chag-Dzog traditions’ strong normative resistance to cessative practice raises a question with implications well beyond sectarian Buddhist debate. Should contemporary Buddhists, or anyone adopting Buddhist-derived practices, engage in practices aimed at generating such states?

Her response developed in two movements. In the first, she challenged the suggestion that Sanskrit Buddhist philosophy had uniformly arrived at cessative conclusions. To do so, she offered a close reading of Vasubandhu’s Trisvabhāvanirdeśa, the Three Natures Treatise, focusing on its celebrated simile of the magician and the elephant. In the simile, a magician performs an incantation that causes an elephant to appear before an audience. The audience takes the elephant to be real, which, in the context of ancient India where trained war elephants represented mortal danger, produces genuine terror. The magician’s illusion is a simile for the imaginary nature (parikalpitasvabhāva), the illusory subject-object duality through which we ordinarily apprehend the world. The fact that the illusion arises dependent on the magician is a simile for the dependent nature (paratantrasvabhāva). What, then, is the perfected nature (pariniṣpannasvabhāva), the goal state?

To make this vivid for her students, Professor Finnigan offered a thought experiment: imagine attending a magic show with someone you love very much, perhaps your mother. The magician invites a volunteer, your mother raises her hand, and she is brought onto the stage, placed into a box, and apparently sawed in half. If you do not know this is a trick, the experience is terrifying. Then an assistant leads you to the edge of the stage and shows you your mother tucked safely into the box, the fake legs waggling around. The relief is immediate. You return to your seat. You still see the magician apparently sawing your mother in half, but the experience has been entirely transformed. You might even laugh. The appearances have not changed, but your relationship to them has changed completely, because you know the truth.

This is what Professor Finnigan described as the first and, in her view, philosophically preferable interpretation of Vasubandhu’s perfected nature: a state of philosophical realisation in which appearances continue but are no longer mistaken for mind-independent realities. Dualistic experience persists, but clinging ceases because one knows the appearances to be constructed. This interpretation does not require cessation of phenomenal content. It requires transformation of how content is held.

The second interpretation, however, finds passages later in the Trisvabhāvanirdeśa that appear to suggest that the appearances themselves also disappear in the perfected state, leaving only an undifferentiated, boundless suchness with no subjects, no objects, and no differentiated content of any kind. Professor Finnigan noted that this second option is what Professor Dunne had identified as the attractor state in Indian Buddhist philosophy, and she agreed with his reading. Her point was to show that within Yoga cāra itself, competing interpretations exist, and that preferring the non-cessative interpretation has strong textual support from one of its most foundational texts.

In the second part of her response, Professor Finnigan asked what philosophical criteria might help contemporary practitioners choose between these competing approaches. She examined the question from two distinct angles.

First, evaluating against the goal of mental health and wellbeing. Non-dual and cessative practices have attracted considerable therapeutic interest, and there is robust evidence that rumination, involving repetitive negative self-referential thinking with both valence bias and self-bias, plays a central role in the development and maintenance of depression and anxiety. Practices that decrease rumination consistently improve mental health outcomes. But different practices target rumination through different mechanisms. Cognitive behavioural therapy targets the valence and self-bias directly, aiming for a realistically positive self-concept. Mindfulness-based interventions reduce self-related processing more broadly. Non-dual awareness practices aim to restrict all thinking. Professor Finnigan argued that the last strategy might function like a hard reset on a computer caught in a faulty circuit: effective in short doses, but unlikely to outperform targeted interventions over the long term, and certainly not capable of sustaining the sustained engagement with lived needs and relationships that long-term wellbeing requires.

Second, evaluating against the goal of Buddhahood or the Bodhisattva ideal. Here the problems with cessation become more acute. A Buddha is conventionally understood as exemplifying profound wisdom and boundless compassion, adapting teaching through upāya, skilful means, to the specific needs of different audiences. This adaptability requires discriminating awareness of who is being helped and what they need. Non-dual awareness, by definition, is characterised by the absence of differentiated content, subjects, and objects. How could such a state generate the knowledge required to identify suffering and respond to it appropriately?

The Bodhisattva ideal, as expressed in Śāntideva’s famous verse from the Bodhicaryāvatāra, “As long as space abides and as long as the world abides, so long may I abide, destroying the sufferings of the world,” similarly presupposes the ongoing capacity to perceive suffering, to track its diminishment, and to know when one’s task is complete. A mode of liberation characterised by the absence of all differentiated content could not sustain this commitment without invoking supernatural mechanisms that cannot be empirically verified.

Professor Finnigan concluded with three questions for anyone considering whether to adopt cessative practices: What goals do you seek to achieve? How do these practices facilitate those goals? And do your answers rely on assumptions that extend beyond what naturalistic cognitive science can verify?

Response by Professor Thomas Metzinger

Professor Metzinger began by reflecting on what it means to honour a great tradition. Not by wearing funny clothes, bestowing titles, or simply redescribing inherited frameworks, he said, but by taking the tradition seriously as an ongoing epistemic project and building conceptual bridges from it to the best current philosophy and empirical science. He offered three such bridges.

The first bridge was phenomenal transparency, a concept he traced back to George Edward Moore’s 1903 paper, which, he noted, was more than 120 years old but remained remarkably apt. Moore had observed that consciousness functions like glass: we see through it to the objects it presents, rather than noticing the medium of presentation. He had even used the term “emptiness” to describe the character of this transparency, writing that consciousness is “as if before us a mere emptiness,” yet “can be distinguished if we look attentively enough, and if we know there is something to look for.” Phenomenal transparency, in Metzinger’s terminology, is the condition in which only content properties are available to attention; the carrier properties of consciousness, its representational character as a medium, are invisible. The phenomenology is one of immersion, realness, and mind-independence. This is the neurological basis of what Candrakīrti had called the entrapment of “childish beings” in naive realism: we are deeply embedded in a world model that presents itself as direct access to a mind-independent world, with no access to the earlier processing stages that constructed it.

The first application of transparency in Metzinger’s framework is the phenomenal self-model. When a system operates under a phenomenally transparent self-model, it generates, by necessity, the phenomenology of identification and ownership: the felt sense that there is a real, located self that is the author and locus of experience. Phenomenal opacity, by contrast, allows the system to perceive the constructed character of its own self-representation, recognising the self-model as a model rather than as reality.

The second bridge was what Metzinger called the Phenomenal Model of the Intentionality Relation (PMIR). In ordinary experience, the subject is phenomenally represented as being directed toward an object: there is something it is like to be a knowing self attending to something. Metzinger used a memorable analogy: have you ever slowly, very carefully opened a refrigerator to see if the light really goes out? That careful, self-aware act of looking is what śamatha creates: a system that is aware of itself as a knowing system directed at an object. Non-dual practice, by contrast, can opacify the PMIR, making visible the emptiness of the intentional relation itself, the fact that what appears as a subject grasping an object is not a real transitive action but an event in which subject-form and object-form arise simultaneously in awareness. Metzinger noted that contemporary research shows the PMIR collapses in neurotypical individuals many hundreds of times per day; it is a volatile, unstable structure in the human mind, much more so than the subjective phenomenology of continuous selfhood would suggest.

The third bridge was what Metzinger called the contraction principle. In ordinary experience, phenomenal consciousness contracts to a first-person, spatiotemporal vantage point, generating the egoic perspective: a located self with specific concerns, vulnerabilities, memories, and anticipated trajectories. The contraction is evolutionarily successful: it allows organisms to orient effectively within their environments and coordinate complex social lives. But it also, as Metzinger put it, creates an ocean of suffering.

Opposing the contracted, egoic perspective, Metzinger described a quality he called epistemic openness, which he and colleagues had identified psychometrically as factor eight in a large database of meditative experience reports. This factor, which the researchers dubbed “emptiness and non-egoic awareness,” is characterised by the absence of spatial and temporal self-location, no sense of ownership, no agency, and no conceptual self-representation, alongside a heightened awareness of the system’s own capacity to know. One experiential report from the database captures it: “I experienced awareness itself, not in the sense that I was experiencing awareness. There was no me. There was no observer. Awareness itself was always already aware.”

Metzinger hypothesised that epistemic openness corresponds to a state in which the system’s internal model of its own epistemic space, the high-dimensional screen on which everything else appears in normal waking life, has been made phenomenally opaque. One becomes aware, for the first time, of the model itself rather than merely of its contents. Cessation, on this account, would be the case in which this model has been deliberately shut off rather than made opaque. The Chag-Dzog critique, Metzinger suggested, can be read as pointing precisely to this distinction: making the epistemic space opaque is productive; shutting it down is not.

Metzinger closed by noting that after forty-eight years of formal practice, he found himself no longer particularly interested in the political rivalries between ancient schools. What interested him was whether the conceptual bridges he had proposed might help clarify what is actually happening in meditative experience, and what it would take for contemporary cognitive science to investigate these phenomena with the seriousness they deserve.

Discussion

The Q&A session ranged across several interconnected themes.

A question about the relationship between the Chag-Dzog critique and the early neuroscience of meditation prompted a candid self-assessment from Professor Dunne. He had been involved in some of the pioneering studies of long-term meditators, working with Francisco Varela, Antoine Lutz, and Matthew Ricard, in which the concepts of focused attention and open monitoring were developed. He acknowledged that the research team had assumed they were probing a minimal-consciousness approach without ever asking the adept meditators whether their meditation involved cessation of content or dynamic engagement with it. The phenomenological questionnaires asked about stability, luminosity, and clarity of awareness, but not about whether content was present. This oversight, he said, was consequential, and the Chag-Dzog critique implies that the question of content versus contentlessness is precisely the question that most needed to be asked.

A question about whether the Chag-Dzog critique is ultimately a sectarian claim rather than a universally applicable philosophical argument prompted a nuanced response. Professor Dunne acknowledged that the texts do appear to be directed at practitioners within the writer’s own tradition, not at hypothetical practitioners in other countries or lineages, and that institutional rivalries cannot be ruled out. But he argued that the critique carries philosophical weight independent of its local context: the two concerns he had identified, the difficulty of studying consciousness by examining its absence, and the possible ethical and behavioural consequences of cultivating thoughtlessness, are genuine and general concerns that any tradition would do well to consider.

Questions about the implications for clinical mindfulness practice generated a spirited exchange. Professor Finnigan reiterated her concern that the distinction between practices that target specific harmful thought patterns such as rumination and practices that aim at the elimination of all thought is rarely made explicit in clinical or corporate mindfulness applications. This distinction, the Chag-Dzog literature makes clear, is not merely a technical meditation question but a question with real consequences for practitioners. Professor Dunne agreed and noted that the growing popular interest in accessing cessative states, exemplified by the Journey startup mentioned at the outset, made this conversation more urgent rather than less.

A final question asked how the relationship between cessation and insight could be reconciled with the widespread positive reports of cessative experiences by practitioners who do not seem to have suffered the negative consequences the Chag-Dzog texts warn about. Professor Dunne replied that this is indeed an empirical question, and one that his ongoing research hopes to address more directly. The Chag-Dzog claim that compassion, faith, and moral sensitivity wither in practitioners who rely on cessative absorption is not impossible to test, at least in principle, and it would be valuable to know whether contemporary data support or complicate it.

Bibliography

Dunne, John D. Foundations of Dharmakīrti’s Philosophy. Somerville, MA: Wisdom Publications, 2004.

Finnigan, Bronwyn. “Buddhist Moral Psychology.” In The Oxford Handbook of Moral Psychology, edited by Manuel Vargas and John Doris. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022.

Garfield, Jay L. Engaging Buddhism: Why It Matters to Philosophy. New York: Oxford University Press, 2015.

Gethin, Rupert. The Foundations of Buddhism. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998.

Gold, Jonathan C. Paving the Great Way: Vasubandhu’s Unifying Buddhist Philosophy. New York: Columbia University Press, 2015.

Metzinger, Thomas. Being No One: The Self-Model Theory of Subjectivity. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003.

Metzinger, Thomas. The Ego Tunnel: The Science of the Mind and the Myth of the Self. New York: Basic Books, 2009.

Sharf, Robert H. “Buddhist Modernism and the Rhetoric of Meditative Experience.” Numen 42, no. 3 (1995): 228–283.

Vasubandhu. Trisvabhāvanirdeśa. Trans. Fernando Tola and Carmen Dragonetti. Journal of Indian Philosophy 11, no. 3 (1983): 225–266.

Event date:10:00–12:00 (Paris) / 16:00–18:00 (Taiwan) Friday, 31 May, 2024

Organizer: INALCO (French National Institute of Oriental Languages and Civilizations)

If touching on the Buddhist network modes suggested by Welch, this paper primarily concerns patterns of discernibly Buddhist social-cultural practices, performances, and representations of consequence to local-regional histories of the end of the imperial era and the rise of the Chinese nation-state. It is not an attempt to tell a Buddhist or religious history, but recognises, within a “six-teachings-in-one” (Buddhist-Confucian-Daoist-local religion-Wu-ist-secularist) social-culture, distinctive Chinese Buddhist elements significant to the processes and leavening dynamics of local and regional history in these turbulent times. Shifting the focus away from the well-known Jiangnan metro-area and toward its peripheral and largely abstracted northern antithesis, Jiangbei and Subei, the analysis is situated in a culturally coherent subregion once known as Huaihai. Drawn mostly from non-Buddhist and non-religious sources and some fieldwork, the findings fit comfortably neither with Welch’s supposition of a predominant northern Jiangsu Buddhism nor with common postulations of a withered Buddhism, indistinct in the mélange of a “backward” culture. Many of the patterns discussed may seem hardly surprising, even ordinary. Yet, reflecting on stories of Buddhist monks, nuns, lay women and men, as well as those of people and places in more ambiguous relationships to Buddhism, the study detects Buddhist social-cultural resources extraordinary in their contributions to shaping and revealing historical change in this setting.

 Lecture Report: “The Extraordinary Ordinary: Consequential Buddhist Patterns to Huaihai Region History, Circa 1880–1960”

Yin-Cheng Distinguished Lecture Series 
INALCO, Paris, May 31, 2024, at 10:00–12:00 (Paris)
Lecture by Professor Jan Kiely (Geneva Graduate Institute) 
Response by Professor Vincent Goossaert (École Pratique des Hautes Études)

Report by Tzu Chi Charity Foundation

Supported by the Buddhist Tzu Chi Charity Foundation, this lecture was hosted by the Centre for Interdisciplinary Studies on Buddhism (CEIB) at INALCO, Paris, as part of the Yin-Cheng Distinguished Lecture Series on Buddhism. Professor Jan Kiely of the Geneva Graduate Institute delivered the lecture entitled “The Extraordinary Ordinary: Consequential Buddhist Patterns to Huaihai Region History, Circa 1880–1960.” The discussant was Professor Vincent Goossaert of the École Pratique des Hautes Études. The event was introduced by Professor Zhe Ji, who holds the Inalco-Sheng Yen Chair of Modern and Contemporary Chinese Buddhism and serves as Director of the CEIB. Professor Ji situated the lecture within recent advances in the study of contemporary Chinese religions and noted Professor Kiely’s co-edited volume, Modern Chinese Religion II: 1850–2015 (Brill, 2015), alongside his monograph The Compelling Ideal: Thought Reform and the Prison in China, 1901–1956 (Yale University Press, 2014), as foundational reference points for understanding religious and social transformation in modern China.

Prof. Jan Kiely is Senior Lecturer at the Geneva Graduate Institute. He received his doctorate from the University of California, Berkeley, and spent many years teaching and conducting research at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. A historian of modern China with a particular focus on religion, thought reform, and local society, he is co-editor of the journal Twentieth-Century China and of the volume Fieldwork in Modern Chinese History (2019). His current book manuscript, from which this lecture draws, employs the mixed methods of historical anthropology to narrate a local and regional twentieth-century Chinese history with religion at the centre.

Prof. Vincent Goossaert is Professor of Daoism and Chinese Religions at the École Pratique des Hautes Études. One of the foremost scholars of Chinese religious history, he is the author of The Taoists of Peking, 1800–1949 and co-author, with David Palmer, of The Religious Question in Modern China. His work pioneered the study of the institutional and social dimensions of Chinese religion in the modern period, and he served as co-editor with Professor Kiely and John Lagerwey of Modern Chinese Religion II.

Beginning in the Field: No Buddhist History Here

Professor Kiely opened by describing the fieldwork in Shuyang county, northern Jiangsu, that first prompted the research he presented. When he arrived in 2015 to look for temples in one of Jiangsu’s largest counties by population, he found only three Buddhist ones, all newly built in the twenty-first century, all lavishly appointed as symbols of cultural heritage, all managed primarily by nuns of non-local origin, all prominently displaying Chinese Communist Party propaganda alongside warnings against heterodox religious sects. The observation he recorded in his field notes was blunt: “There is no Buddhist history here.”

A decade of subsequent research proved that initial judgment entirely wrong. What he had encountered was not an absence of Buddhist history but its erasure: a break so thorough that no physical continuity remained between the institutional Buddhism of the late Qing and Republican periods and the state-Buddhist institutions of the post-2000 revival. Understanding what had been lost, and why, became the animating question of his book project. The lecture presented the first systematic account of what, in Huaihai, that lost history contained.

Professor Kiely was careful from the outset to position his work as history rather than religious history. He is not a scholar of Buddhism, he said, and does not claim to be. What he brought to the Huaihai material was a historian’s training in using non-religious sources to understand religious phenomena, and a commitment to taking religion seriously as a dimension of social and political life rather than treating it as epiphenomenal to the main story of modernity. The framework he employed was that of a “six-teachings-in-one” social-culture, the interweaving of Buddhist, Confucian, Daoist, local religious, shamanistic (Wu), and secularist elements that characterised the social-cultural life of this region, and the question he asked was not which strand was “really” dominant, but how their interactions generated the particular institutional forms and social dynamics that shaped Huaihai’s modern history.

The Buddhist-Preeminent Model in Late Qing Huaihai

The first major contribution of the lecture was the identification of what Professor Kiely termed the “Buddhist-preeminent” model of temple institutions in late Qing Huaihai. This model does not mean that all temples in the region were Buddhist in a doctrinal or liturgical sense. Many of the temples managed by Buddhist monks and nuns housed a diverse array of deities, including local gods, river dragons, the Three Kingdoms generals Liu-Guan-Zhang, the Ox Deity, and various other local cults. What the model asserts is that Buddhist clerics occupied the leading institutional role across the full range of temple institutions in the region, managing property, conducting rituals, cultivating relationships with local elites and clan networks, and providing the organisational framework within which the multiplicity of local religious life was housed and sustained.

This pattern, Professor Kiely argued, has been noted for the Song period but its continuous presence through the late imperial era and into the early twentieth century has not previously been documented in scholarship on northern Jiangsu. His contribution is to demonstrate, through a systematic reading of non-religious sources, including county gazetteers, clan genealogies, judicial records, local memoirs, and his own fieldwork, that the Buddhist-preeminent model was a durable and consequential feature of Huaihai’s social organisation, and that its collapse in the Republican period constituted a major rupture whose implications extended far beyond the institutional history of Buddhism itself.

Abbot Jingyi and the Dragon King Temple

Professor Kiely opened his case material with the figure of Abbot Jingyi, who died in 1883 at the Dividing the Waters Dragon King Temple in Shuyang, and whose tomb and pagoda, built at his direction, marked the preeminent significance of Buddhism within this ostensibly non-Buddhist institution. The temple occupied a strategically critical location at the point where the Shu River split into its northern and southern branches, a hydrological pivot essential to the flood-control infrastructure of the entire county. County magistrates patronised and conducted rituals there; the wealthiest clan in the county, the Dongguan-Cheng, financed its major reconstructions; and the temple’s safety and the security of its resident monks received explicit state protection in a carved stone order posted on site, banning “pettifoggers, bandits,” and troublemakers.

What Jingyi had achieved at this temple was not merely administrative competence but something more subtle and more significant: a cultivation of relationships with influential elites through shared aesthetic practices, a piety that commanded respect across sectarian lines, and a cosmological framework capacious enough to include the Dragon King and the full range of deities present in the temple within a form of Buddhism that was conspicuously loyal to the empire and aligned with elite social ideology. He was also a painter and calligrapher of considerable skill, and the garden he created within the temple grounds attracted admiration from local literati who had no particular devotion to Buddhism. His ability to make Buddhism culturally compelling to non-Buddhist elites was, Professor Kiely argued, precisely what the institutional preeminence of Buddhism in this region required. A monk who was also an aesthete, a community organiser, and a trusted partner of the local state could secure the position of his tradition in ways that doctrinal authority alone could never accomplish.

Women, Clans, and the Guanyin Cult

A second dimension of late Qing Huaihai Buddhism that the lecture foregrounded was the central role of women, both as Buddhist nuns and as lay patrons, in the establishment and maintenance of Buddhist institutions in the region. The temple-founding stories that clans preserved in their genealogies consistently feature young women of talent and virtue who refused marriage in order to pursue a religious vocation, prompting their clans to build temples to house them and endow them with family property. These are simultaneously stories about clan property management, the creative resolution of tensions within the patriarchal family system, and the assertion by strong-willed women of a form of spiritual subjectivity that the Buddhist institutional framework made possible.

The Guanyin cult was the most visible expression of this female-inflected Buddhism. Women drew Guanyin’s presence into temples whose primary dedications were to other deities, transforming through their everyday devotional practice the religious character of institutions that the records identify primarily through their official or clan-patronage function. One striking example was the Iron Granny, a metal Guanyin statue at the Ladies of the Three Stars Temple near Tanjia Stockade, described as arriving by water in the early Qing. Local women treated it as a manifestation of Guanyin for all matters of marriage, childbirth, and even childcare, reportedly leaving children in the care of the Bodhisattva during the busy agricultural seasons. The temple was nominally Daoist; its effective religious life, shaped by female devotional practice, was Buddhist. Patriarchal clans funded the institutional frameworks; women, through their practice, determined the spiritual contents of those frameworks.

The Guangxu Temple Construction Boom

Professor Kiely presented tabular evidence of a significant temple construction and reconstruction boom in Shuyang county during the Guangxu reign period, spanning from 1877 to the 1890s. The table he assembled from county and sub-county sources listed over a dozen major Buddhist-affiliated construction projects during this relatively brief period, almost all of them jointly undertaken by Buddhist clerics and local clan networks. This boom was not an isolated phenomenon but reflected wider patterns of late Qing institutional consolidation in which Buddhist monks served as indispensable partners for clans seeking to build enduring local institutions, extend their influence, and project philanthropic prestige.

The monk Jizhou, working in the markettown of Xintiaohe during the 1880s, exemplified the kind of monk-builder whose skills made such projects possible. Like Jingyi before him, Jizhou combined institutional ambition with practical organisational talent, cultivating relationships with local clans and securing the material and social conditions necessary for major construction. The Huayan Temple he renovated in 1888, a clan temple of the Zhang family of Zhang village, maintained the Zhang ancestral spirit tablets in its precincts before and after the renovation, illustrating the degree to which Buddhist institutional management and clan ancestor veneration were not competing but complementary functions in Huaihai’s social order.

The Collapse of the Old Order and the Republican Crisis

The lecture’s second major movement traced the disintegration of the Buddhist-preeminent model in the turbulent decades following the fall of the Qing dynasty. This disintegration, Professor Kiely argued, was neither sudden nor the product of a single cause. It resulted from the convergence of multiple destabilising forces: the collapse of the imperial state that had provided Buddhist institutions with their most important source of legitimacy and protection; the violence and social chaos of the warlord period; the emergence of new forms of lay Buddhist activism that drew financial resources and ideological energy away from local institutional Buddhism; aggressive temple property confiscation campaigns by the KMT revolutionary state in the late 1920s; and the internal dynamics of temple institutions themselves, which, under the new conditions, became vulnerable to precisely the kinds of conflicts over property, succession, and clerical conduct that had previously been managed within a stable framework of external support.

The judicial records of the Republican period tell a story of accelerating institutional crisis. Legal cases brought by monks against one another over temple inheritance and property seizure appear with increasing frequency in the county court records of the 1930s. A particularly striking example involved the monk Qingxu suing the monk Juexian for “seizure of inheritance and usurping property” in January 1932, a suit thrown out summarily and so requiring resolution outside the formal legal system. In the same month, another monk faced criminal charges as an accomplice in concealing a crime. Even conservative KMT officials found it difficult to suppress their stereotypical prejudices against Buddhist clerics in this environment, and their contempt for monks further diminished the institutional standing of Buddhism in local society.

The most dramatic external intervention was the KMT government’s assault on the largest visible institutions in the late 1920s. In 1929, the county authorities moved to secularise the Dividing the Waters Dragon King Temple by converting it into a Sun Yat-sen Park. The monks moved out, though Jingyi’s garden remained open for some years to religious and leisure use. The temple’s last elderly caretaker monk in the 1930s and 1940s, the monk Cheng, was known for living with his wife in a nearby village and consuming meat and alcohol, while still wearing his threadbare monastic robe and remaining celebrated for his calligraphy, poetry, and painting. When the Japanese built a fort at the temple in early 1945 and CCP forces attacked it, the temple burned to the ground. In 1947, amid ongoing civil war fighting, the monk Cheng was killed, the record using the euphemism “killed by bandits” to refer to CCP guerrilla forces.

The Perdurance of Local Buddhism

Against this narrative of institutional collapse, Professor Kiely devoted significant attention to documenting the persistence and adaptation of local Buddhist practice through the 1930s, 1940s, and into the 1950s. This perdurance took forms very different from the grand institutional Buddhism of the late Qing, but it was real, rooted in mutual commitment, and far more consequential than the official surveys of the period, with their dismissive assessments of rural “superstition,” were prepared to acknowledge.

In the Chan Buddhist Temple in ChanWu village, twenty-plus monks continued to reside in the 1930s, maintaining their community through a period of extraordinary external violence and pressure. A government survey in 1935 found twelve temples in a small area of villages supporting fifty-five Buddhist monks and six nuns, with more than half of the monks at the Chan Buddhist Temple being quite young men at the start of their monastic careers. The temple’s abbot had received his ordination training at the prestigious Jinshan Monastery in Zhenjiang, maintaining a connection to the wider world of Chinese Buddhist institutional culture even in this rural setting. When war and revolution reached the village in the 1940s, the monks processed their great bronze Buddha through the streets of the village during a severe drought, as they had done in similar circumstances before, a gesture that affirmed the continuing centrality of the temple to the life of its community to the very end.

The bonds between individual monks and their communities were also, in many cases, deeply personal and irreducible to institutional function. The monk Zongqi, caretaker of a temple in eastern Shuyang for decades, was beloved not for his temple’s official status or his doctrinal learning but for what those who remembered him described as his “wisdom about human feelings,” his gifts as a storyteller and comedian, and the subtle moral wisdom embedded in his jokes. A nun in the Shuyang countyseat was still in her small temple in 1953–55, regaling the students building a nearby high school with tales of ghosts, spirits, and the great fish-spirit in the temple pond they were supposed to fill in with dirt. A nun known as Monk Liu, despite her title, was celebrated as the host of women pilgrims to a regional temple festival, a role whose communal significance the revolutionary state found far harder to suppress than the formal institutions themselves.

Even the last remnants of institutional Buddhism made their commitments visible in ways that testify to what remained at stake. In the early 1930s, the ailing monk Zhuojing returned to his tonsure temple to prepare for his Buddhist death. In 1948, as KMT troops awaited evacuation from the CCP siege of Lianyungang, the monks at the Yuntaishan Three Primes Temple offered the soldiers a lesson in the Three Officers and the importance of their temple’s annual festival. After everything had been lost, the last monk of the Big Buddha Temple in Sand River Temple village, whose temple had been destroyed, lived out the rest of his life among the villagers, maintaining his personal bonds with the community to which his institution had belonged. His disciple, Juezhao of the Gao family, is the last link Professor Kiely can identify to this history.

Response by Professor Vincent Goossaert

Professor Goossaert described the paper as a groundbreaking contribution to the religion-centred local history of modern China, the first sustained historical-anthropological study of the Huaihai region, and a valuable counterpoint to existing local histories focused on very different parts of China. His response raised three substantial methodological and analytical questions designed to extend and refine the analysis.

The first concerned the relationship between the Buddhist-preeminent model Professor Kiely had identified and other possible frameworks for modelling the same evidence. If the lens shifted from institutional management to ritual practice and god worship, a different pattern might emerge. The major local pilgrimage site in the region is devoted to the Three Officers, a cult with strong Daoist associations. If one focused on which gods were most present in household shrines, which ritual specialists conducted healing rites and funerals, and who in practice spoke through mediums, one might encounter what could be called a “Daoist-preeminent” model, even though Daoist priests are almost entirely absent from the historical records. Professor Goossaert emphasised that such alternative models would not contradict Kiely’s findings but would be equally valid and would enrich understanding of the full complexity of Huaihai’s religious ecology. He also asked how the picture might change if one shifted from the chronological approach of the paper, which focuses on moments of institutional rupture, to a longue durée perspective on deep local patterns of ritual organisation around specific cults.

The second question concerned division of ritual labour. What Professor Kiely describes for the late Qing is a model in which Buddhist clerics managed all kinds of temples and maintained the ancestral cults of local clans, a pattern with parallels in Song dynasty scholarship but not previously documented as a continuous feature through to the early twentieth century. This raises the question of what Buddhist clerics did not do, and who else did it. Professor Goossaert was particularly curious about the role of tongzi mediums and vernacular ritual masters, who are mentioned in passing in the paper and who have been documented by scholars for other nearby parts of Jiangsu. Understanding the specific articulation between Buddhist institutional management and other forms of ritual expertise would sharpen the picture of what exactly made the Buddhist-preeminent model distinctive, and how it related to the full range of religious practice in Huaihai.

The third question addressed the possibilities of social network analysis. Since the lecture was presented within a framework concerned with social networks, Professor Goossaert asked whether Professor Kiely’s source material might allow for a more formal and systematic analysis of the networks connecting local elites, clans, and clerics. He added, characteristically, that he would want to include networks between humans and gods within such an analysis: the relationships of patronage and intercession that bound human communities to specific deities were themselves a form of social network, and one that structured the institutional landscape of Huaihai’s religious life as consequentially as the human networks Professor Kiely had documented.

Discussion

The discussion addressed a broad range of themes emerging from the lecture and the discussant’s response.

Questions about the specific role of nuns within the Buddhist-preeminent model prompted a reflection on the evidence for female clerics as institution builders and community figures. The lecture had shown that nuns occupied a central role in specific types of institutions, particularly those devoted to the Guanyin cult and founded originally for women of privileged families who had chosen a religious vocation. Professor Kiely noted that the persistence of female clerics into the 1950s, visible in sources that had largely ceased to notice male monks, suggested that the community bonds formed around certain nuns were especially durable. The continuing presence of a nun in the Shuyang countyseat in 1953, entertaining the students who came to fill in her temple pond, offered a small but vivid example.

Questions about the relationship between the local Buddhism Professor Kiely described and the reformist Buddhism associated with figures like Taixu and the broader Republican-era revival movement prompted a nuanced response. Local Buddhist institutions in Huaihai existed in some relationship to the wider networks of reform-minded Buddhism, but that relationship was not one of simple derivation or alignment. The local Buddhism of Huaihai was, in Professor Kiely’s account, primarily responsive to local social conditions, local elite patronage, and local community needs, rather than to the ideological programmes of metropolitan reformers. This localism was both its strength, the source of the deep community bonds that sustained it through decades of external pressure, and its vulnerability, the reason why the eventual destruction of those community bonds constituted not a political problem but an existential one.

Questions about the prospects for recovery and continuity after 1949 led to a sober assessment. The material, human, and epistemological destruction that erased Buddhist institutional culture in Huaihai was close to total. The monks who had built their careers within that culture had mostly left the region by 1949 and did not return. The physical temples were destroyed in waves of violence spanning the late 1940s, the early 1950s, and the Cultural Revolution. The county-level government surveys that might have preserved some record of what existed in the 1930s and 1940s were largely dismissive of what they saw, categorising it as superstition rather than religion. And the local knowledge and memory that might have survived was itself erased by the rupture of the Cultural Revolution generation. What appeared in Shuyang when Professor Kiely arrived in 2015, the new, externally financed, state-supervised Buddhist institutions he documented at the beginning of his fieldwork, was not a recovery of the earlier Buddhism but its replacement by something categorically different, connected to it by neither personnel nor memory nor institutional continuity.

Professor Kiely closed by returning to the methodological principle of micro-history from which the lecture took its title. Many of the patterns he had described were, when encountered individually and in fragments, entirely ordinary: a monk tending a garden, a clan rebuilding a temple after a flood, women praying to Guanyin for healthy pregnancies, a nun telling ghost stories to passing students. Their extraordinariness, he suggested, lay not in their individual character but in their cumulative significance, in the evidence they provided, when assembled with patience and care from a mass of non-religious sources, of a Buddhist social-cultural formation that played a consequential and largely unrecognised role in shaping the modern history of an entire region. Recovering that history, and understanding what was irretrievably lost in its destruction, is among the most important tasks facing historians of modern Chinese religion.

Bibliography

Event date:14:00–15:30 (UK) / 21:00–22:30 (Taiwan) Tuesday, 14 May, 2024 

Organizer: University of Cambridge

Monastic education was one of the most important and consequential dimensions of the modernization of Chinese Buddhism. The 1920s and 1930s witnessed a period of intense growth in the establishment of new Buddhist academies, known as foxueyuan, which fundamentally transformed the institutional landscape of Chinese Buddhism. This lecture examines the convergence of identity and institution in this pivotal historical moment, focusing on the emergence of modern Buddhist academies and the student-monks they produced. Three paradigm shifts are identified as central to this transformation: a reconception of the vertical teacher-student relationship in which ideological inspiration displaced absolute authority; the emergence of a horizontal, collective student-monk identity that operated across regional and lineage boundaries; and a reformulation of Buddhist orthodoxy that cast educational modernization as renewal rather than departure from tradition. Together, these shifts gave rise to a new way of imagining what it meant to be Buddhist in modern China, one in which formal education replaced lineage transmission as the defining marker of monastic identity.

 Lecture Report: “From Disciples to Student-Monks: Educational Modernization and Identity Production in Chinese Buddhism”

Yin-Cheng Distinguished Lecture Series 
University of Cambridge, May 14, 2024, at 14:00–15:30 UK
Lecture by Professor Rongdao Lai (McGill University)
Response by Professor Stefania Travagnin (SOAS, University of London)

Report by Tzu Chi Charity Foundation

Supported by the Buddhist Tzu Chi Charity Foundation, this lecture was hosted by the Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Cambridge as part of the Yin-Cheng Distinguished Lecture Series on Buddhism. Professor Rongdao Lai of McGill University delivered the keynote lecture, entitled “From Disciples to Student-Monks: Educational Modernization and Identity Production in Chinese Buddhism,” drawing on her forthcoming monograph Citizen Bodhisattva: Education, Student-Monks, and Identity Production in Modern Chinese Buddhism (1911–1949). The discussant was Professor Stefania Travagnin of SOAS, University of London. The event was chaired and introduced by Professor Noga Ganany, who welcomed the speaker and situated the lecture within current scholarship on institutional religion and identity formation in modern China. Opening remarks on behalf of the Tzu Chi Foundation were offered by Dr. Rey-Sheng Her.

Prof. Rongdao Lai is Assistant Professor of Religious Studies and East Asian Studies at McGill University. She holds a PhD from Harvard University and specialises in the institutional and intellectual history of Chinese Buddhism in the modern period, with particular attention to monastic education, identity politics, and the intersection of Buddhist reform movements with broader social and political currents in Republican China. Her forthcoming book, Citizen Bodhisattva, is the first comprehensive study in English of the foxueyuan phenomenon and the student-monks it produced.

Prof. Stefania Travagnin is Reader in Chinese Buddhism at SOAS, University of London. She has conducted extensive fieldwork in mainland China, Taiwan, and Southeast Asia, with research interests ranging from Republican-era Buddhist reform and gender in Chinese Buddhism to contemporary monastic education and Sino-Tibetan Buddhist exchange. She has recently completed a research trip focused on sangha education in Sichuan, covering both the Republican era and the post-Mao period.

An Opening Anecdote: The Uncertain World of the Student-Monk

Professor Lai opened her lecture with a vivid and revealing anecdote drawn from the memoir of Zhenhua (1922–2012), a young monk from Henan who in the autumn of 1945 had just completed his full ordination at the prestigious Baohua Mountain Longchang Monastery outside Nanjing. Near the end of the fifty-three-day ordination session, word circulated among the new ordinands that Taixu, the most celebrated reformist monk of the era, was to set up a Buddhist Studies academy at the Pilu Monastery in Nanjing, with classes beginning immediately after the Lunar New Year. Zhenhua and eight fellow monks, electrified by the possibility of a modern Buddhist education, made their way together to the monastery and were warmly received.

What followed was a sequence of disappointments that captures, with unusual clarity, the disorder and volatility that characterised many of the new Buddhist institutions of this period. Two months passed without any sign of the academy opening. The majority of the group fell into performing paid ritual services for the monastery, tempted by easy income. Zhenhua alone refused, and fell ill without money for a doctor. When a fellow monk eventually told him that the promised academy had almost certainly been a ruse to attract newly ordained monks into the ritual labour schedule of the monastery, he left. A year later, through the recommendation of a prominent lay Buddhist, he secured a place at the Tianning Buddhist Academy in Changzhou. Here too he was quickly disillusioned: the teachers were unqualified, the food was poor, the monastery treated the academy as an afterthought, and tension between students and administrators regularly erupted into conflict. He left again.

Zhenhua was conscripted during the civil war and taken to Taiwan in 1949. After re-ordaining in 1952, he studied under several eminent teachers, including the scholar-monk Yinshun, and went on to become principal of several Buddhist academies, most notably the Fuyan Buddhist Institute. His story distils the central themes of Professor Lai’s lecture: the infectious enthusiasm for the new educational institutions, the gap between ideal and reality, the tensions between student-monks and the monastic establishment, and the ultimately transformative power of the student-monk identity, even when the institutions themselves fell short.

Taixu and the Foxueyuan: Ambition, Marginality, and Reform

Against this personal history, Professor Lai turned to the figure who dominates the landscape of modern Chinese Buddhist education: Taixu (1890–1947). Any account of Taixu, she noted, immediately runs into a paradox. On the one hand, he seems ubiquitous in the Buddhist life of twentieth-century China: he published widely, his activities were regularly reported in Buddhist periodicals and newspapers, and his call for systematic reform attracted passionate responses from monastic and lay followers across the country. On the other hand, his lifelong effort to introduce structural changes to Chinese Buddhism was marked, by his own acknowledgement, by constant failure. Within the traditional Buddhist establishment, with its networks of prestigious monasteries and influential abbots, Taixu was a consistently marginalised figure. He was never part of the influential core. He always found it difficult to secure a major monastery as the base for his reform movement, and he depended almost entirely on the goodwill and financial support of urban lay Buddhist networks, which were themselves a relatively new and unpredictable force in Buddhist life.

Professor Lai argued that it was precisely this marginality that gave Taixu his particular historical significance. Unable to work through the existing institutional channels, he was free to move between his reform-minded following and the traditional Buddhist circles, negotiating a different way of imagining modern Buddhist identity. His appeal lay not in the institutions he managed to build, most of which were short-lived, but in his capacity to articulate a new vision for what Chinese Buddhism could become. That vision centred on education as the primary vehicle of reform, and it was in education that Taixu made his most lasting impact.

The Founding of the Wuchang Buddhist Academy

In 1918, Taixu established the Jueshe (Bodhi Society) in Shanghai, together with a network of lay Buddhist reformers that included Chen Yuanbai, Jiang Zuobin, and Huang Baocang. The society’s most important activity was publishing, producing the periodical Haichaoyin (Voice of the Ocean Tide), which would become one of the longest-running Buddhist publications in modern China and a primary vehicle for the circulation of reformist ideas. In the spring of 1922, Taixu travelled to Wuhan to lecture on the Sūtra of Perfect Enlightenment, and the enthusiasm of the local lay Buddhist community led directly to the founding of the Wuchang Buddhist Studies Academy, which opened its doors in September of that year to approximately seventy lay and monastic students.

The academy’s founding charter is remarkable in its comprehensiveness. Divided into fifteen chapters, it covered founding principles, admission requirements, a detailed curriculum, daily schedules, evaluation procedures, graduation requirements, job descriptions for each administrative post, rules for communal living, merit and disciplinary procedures, and provisions for expansion. The curriculum was deliberately eclectic, covering the doctrinal traditions of all eight schools of Chinese Buddhism and incorporating secular subjects including Western ethics, psychology, biology, philosophy, and sociology. Language instruction in English, Japanese, Sanskrit, and Tibetan was to rotate across semesters. The strict regulations for communal life were modelled on those of the traditional public monastery.

Taixu was frank about what he was attempting. In an address to the academy’s second incoming class in 1924, he distinguished his school from the Buddhist institutions he considered inadequate: those that had borrowed secular school structures merely to protect monastic property from government confiscation, and those that trained students only in the doctrine of a single school or lineage. The Wuchang Academy aimed to combine the best of both the modern pedagogical system and the traditional public monastery, while shedding the shortcomings of each. Yet even as he spoke, Taixu was becoming aware of the difficulty of sustaining what he had built. Two years after the founding, citing health reasons, he submitted his resignation to the lay patrons and departed, having lost their support amidst competing pressures: a shortage of qualified teachers, institutional competition from other Buddhist groups, and the growing intellectual independence of his own student-monks, who had absorbed the critical spirit of the May Fourth movement and were not always amenable to direction.

Between 1925 and 1949, the academy operated intermittently, forced to close during the Northern Expedition in 1926 and again during the Second Sino-Japanese War. After 1928 it was reorganised as a division of Taixu’s World Buddhist Institution. Despite its turbulent history, or perhaps because of it, the Wuchang Academy assumed a mythological significance in the collective imagination of modern Chinese Buddhism. In 1935, the monk Weifang called it “the Buddhist Whampoa,” comparing it to the famous military academy that had produced the officers of the Nationalist revolution.

Three Paradigm Shifts

Professor Lai argued that the significance of the Wuchang Academy, and of the foxueyuan movement more broadly, lay not in the stability of its institutions but in the three paradigm shifts it generated.

The first was a transformation of the teacher-student relationship. In traditional Chinese Buddhism, the master-disciple bond was the foundational unit of institutional life: it was vertical, personal, and lifelong, governing tonsure lineage, dharma transmission, and the entire trajectory of a monk’s career. The Wuchang Academy did not abolish this relationship. But it changed its character in a significant way. At a modern foxueyuan, students were taught by multiple teachers in a classroom setting, engaging with textbooks, blackboards, and structured evaluations rather than with a single revered master whose word was absolute. Taixu himself had disciples and followers in the traditional sense, but the relationship between him and the wider community of student-monks who identified with his vision was often mediated not through personal contact but through print: periodicals, textbooks, essays, and open letters. This means that students sometimes identified with Taixu and his ideas without ever meeting him. The teacher’s role at the modern foxueyuan, Professor Lai argued, was to provide the ideological basis for the students’ undertaking rather than the absolute spiritual authority of the traditional master. A multiplicity of voices and authoritative sources replaced the singular dharma relationship of the past.

The second and most consequential shift was the emergence of a collective, horizontal student-monk identity. The 1920s saw the rise of a new generation of young monastics who understood themselves as members of a unique community distinct from the rest of the Chinese sangha. In a socio-political environment saturated with the language of democracy, freedom, equality, and national renewal, these young monks were determined to demonstrate that they too could become “new monks” for a new era. Student-monks were not merely the passive products of their institutions; they were active and often critical agents who published essays, debated the future of Buddhism in print, and organised themselves in response to external threats such as government proposals to confiscate temple property. The monk Fachuang, for example, proposed lobbying the government so that a Buddhist revolution introducing universal sangha education could be carried out.

Professor Lai stressed that this collective identity operated along two parallel axes simultaneously: the physical network of Buddhist academies and the abstract network constituted by the hundreds of Buddhist periodicals published during this period. It was in the continuous competition, tension, and negotiation between these student-monks, both in their academies and in the pages of their journals, that a shared vision of collective belonging took shape. The identities they generated, variously named the xueseng (student-monk), the xinseng (new monk), and the seng qingnian (young monk), were fluid and contested rather than fixed, but they were real and consequential. They added a new layer of horizontal affiliation to the pre-existing networks of dharma kinship and regional belonging that had always characterised Chinese Buddhist social organisation, without displacing those older networks.

The third shift was a reformulation of orthodoxy. Modern Buddhist educators justified their institutions not as departures from the traditional public monastery system but as renewals of it, claiming that the foxueyuan preserved the best of the conglin tradition while equipping it with the tools needed for the present moment. Taixu was explicit that the newness he advocated was grounded in Chinese Buddhist history and enriched by the strengths of Japanese, Tibetan, and other traditions, rather than imposed from outside. His followers extended this claim in ambitious directions: the monk Zhifeng predicted that, if properly reformed, a renewed Chinese Buddhism would benefit not merely China but all humanity, and saw a globally-oriented Buddhist educational system as the prerequisite for world peace. This reformulation of orthodoxy gave student-monks the authority to represent Buddhism in public, to demand lay support for their institutions, and to position themselves as the vanguard of an authentic tradition. Their prolific writing in periodicals was not merely a supplement to their formal learning; it was itself the primary medium through which the student-monk identity was articulated, circulated, and contested.

The Wuchang Legacy

Professor Lai closed by observing that the influence of the Wuchang model extended far beyond its physical history. Graduates of the Wuchang Academy and its affiliated institutions went on to found or teach at at least fifty Buddhist academies across China between the 1920s and 1940s. The “Wuchang ideal” became a reference point against which other institutions defined themselves, whether by claiming allegiance to it or by articulating a different path. In a wider sense, the pedagogy of the modern foxueyuan changed what it means to be a Chinese Buddhist monastic. Today, when Chinese monastics are introduced in formal or informal contexts, their biographical information routinely includes the Buddhist academies they attended, alongside the traditional markers of native place, tonsure temple, ordination monastery, and dharma lineage. This shift, Professor Lai suggested, amounts to the emergence of a new form of lineage, one grounded not in the transmission of dharma from master to disciple but in the shared experience of modern institutional education.

Response by Professor Stefania Travagnin

Professor Travagnin offered a rich and contextualising response that both affirmed the significance of the lecture’s contribution and extended it in several directions.

She began by situating the lecture within the broader field of Taixu studies, noting that Western scholarship had already produced important monographs on Taixu, including Justin Ritzinger’s recent work, while mainland Chinese scholarship had increasingly enshrined him since the late 1980s as the “founding father” of modern and contemporary Chinese Buddhism. She observed that this enshrinement is itself an act worth examining critically: Taixu was, as Professor Lai had shown, frequently marginalised and often unsuccessful in his own lifetime. It was the subsequent construction of his significance, not just his actual achievements, that needs to be understood. She praised Professor Lai’s work for adding nuance to this picture by focusing not on Taixu himself but on the student-monks he inspired, whose own agency in shaping the trajectory of modern Chinese Buddhism had been insufficiently appreciated by previous scholarship.

Professor Travagnin raised four questions designed to set the Wuchang model within a broader educational and social context.

First, she asked how the student-monk community compared with the communities of students generated by the new secular universities of the same period, such as the new Peking University founded a generation earlier. The collective identity of the student-monk, with its emphasis on citizenship, national responsibility, and the reform of inherited institutions, bears striking parallels to the self-understanding of secular student movements in Republican China. Understanding how these two domains connected and conversed, she suggested, would sharpen the analysis of what was distinctively Buddhist about the student-monk phenomenon and what was a refraction of a broader social transformation.

Second, she turned to student-nuns, a dimension of the story that the lecture had not addressed. Wuhan hosted the women’s division of the Wuchang Buddhist Academy from 1924 onward, and in 1931 the Wuchang Bodhi Vihara was founded, which in 1936 began publishing the Fojiao nüzhong zhuankan, the first magazine on Buddhist women in Chinese history. These communities of female student-monastics developed in parallel to, and sometimes independently of, the male institutions, and they deserve their own analysis. Professor Travagnin’s fieldwork had uncovered extensive evidence of nuns who practised canxue and xingjiao, travelling to lecture and propagate the dharma, and whose stories appeared in Republican Buddhist periodicals. The question of whether female monastics developed the same form of collective self-awareness as their male counterparts, and whether gender shaped the student-nun identity in distinctive ways, is one that the existing scholarship has not yet adequately addressed.

Third, she broadened the institutional picture by pointing to the shuyuan, the traditional Chinese academy, as an alternative educational model that was being revived in the Republican period alongside the new foxueyuan. Wang Enyang’s Guishan Academy in Sichuan was one of many institutions of this kind that combined the learning of Confucian and Buddhist values, claiming to renew the spirit of the Song and Ming shuyuan tradition. Like the foxueyuan, these institutions presented themselves as models for the salvation of humanity. But they moved in a rather different direction from Taixu’s vision, representing a different, sometimes more conservative, response to the challenge of Western intellectual dominance in the wake of the May Fourth movement.

Fourth and finally, Professor Travagnin drew attention to what she called the alternative models: institutions and pedagogical approaches that emerged from within or alongside the Wuchang network but that were not straightforward replications of the Wuchang model. Many of these were founded by former students or close collaborators of Taixu, who shared his general orientation toward reform while charting their own paths. These alternatives, she argued, offer essential context for understanding the full spectrum of effects of Taixu’s call for Buddhist renewal, and for positioning Wuchang not as the single origin of all subsequent developments but as one powerful pole in a complex field of competing visions. It was ultimately the renewal of emphasis on education as a vehicle of human development and institutional transformation, rather than the Wuchang model in particular, that constituted Taixu’s most enduring legacy.

Discussion

The discussion that followed ranged widely.

A question about how student-monks navigated the tension between their modern educational identities and the traditional demands of monastic life prompted Professor Lai to draw on her memoir sources, which reveal a persistent ambivalence. Student-monks were critical of the established monastery system, yet they remained dependent on it for ordination, for the ritual economies that generated institutional income, and for the social legitimacy that traditional monastic affiliation conferred. This dependence was felt as a constraint, and the resentment it generated was one of the primary motors of the student-monk identity’s critical and reformist edge.

A question about the relationship between the student-monk periodical culture and the broader May Fourth print culture led to a discussion of how Buddhist publications shared form, vocabulary, and sometimes writers with the wider Republican cultural press, and how the category of the “new youth” was adapted within Buddhist discourse to produce the figure of the “Buddhist new youth” or the “young monk,” who was simultaneously a nationalist subject, a modern intellectual, and a religious practitioner.

A question about the reception of the foxueyuan model in Taiwan after 1949, following the migration of many mainland Chinese monastics, provided an opening for a reflection on the longer arc of the story: the institutions Professor Lai had studied did not simply end with the Communist victory. They were transplanted, adapted, and extended in Taiwan, where figures like Yinshun and Zhenhua himself continued the project of monastic education in new conditions. This transnational afterlife of the Republican-era foxueyuan is, Professor Lai noted, a subject that her book addresses in its concluding chapters and that warrants sustained future investigation.

Bibliography

Event date: 17:30–19:00 (EDT) Thursday, 18 April, 2024 | 05:30–07:00 (Beijing/Taipei) Friday, 19 April, 2024

Organizer: Harvard University CAMLab

Internationally renowned composer Lei Liang meditates on the concept of “home,” a theme inseparable from his musical lineage and his personal history of displacement, discovery, and return. Drawing on the haunting melodies of Inner Mongolia that have accompanied him since childhood, the Chinese written character for resonance as “the sound of home,” and his transformative encounters with Chinese cultural heritage in American libraries, Liang traces the arc of a lifelong sonic search. At the centre of the lecture is his collaborative work at the Lei Lab at the Qualcomm Institute at UC San Diego, where engineers, art historians, oceanographers, and geologists have joined forces to reimagine cultural heritage and natural soundscapes through a fusion of acoustic and visual media. Inspired by the luminous landscapes of painter Huang Binhong and propelled by original software that translates visual and material stimuli into aural experiences, and extended into the undersea worlds of bowhead whales and bearded seals in the Arctic Ocean, Liang’s work asks what it means to hear what was previously invisible, and to find in that act of expanded listening a new understanding of where, and what, home might be.

 Lecture Report: “Towards a New Shanshui: A Sonic Search for Home”

Yin-Cheng Distinguished Lecture Series 
Harvard University CAMLab, April 18, 2024, at 17:30–19:00 EDT
Lecture by Professor Lei Liang (University of California, San Diego)
Response by Professor Kay Shelemay (Harvard University) and Professor Hui Weng (Berklee College of Music)

Report by Tzu Chi Charity Foundation

Supported by the Buddhist Tzu Chi Charity Foundation, this lecture was hosted by Harvard University’s CAMLab as part of the Yin-Cheng Distinguished Lecture Series on Buddhism. Professor Lei Liang of the University of California, San Diego, delivered the keynote lecture entitled “Towards a New Shanshui: A Sonic Search for Home.” The discussants were Professor Kay Shelemay of Harvard University and Professor Hui Weng of Berklee College of Music. The event was introduced by Professor Eugene Wang, who situated the lecture within a broader scholarly conversation about the relationship between music and inner experience, acoustic world-making, and the ancient Chinese cosmological concept of sympathetic resonance, ganying, as a bond linking all sentient beings across time and space. Opening remarks on behalf of the Tzu Chi Foundation were offered by Dr. Rey-Sheng Her of Tzu Chi University.

Prof. Lei Liang is Chancellor’s Distinguished Professor of Music at the University of California, San Diego. He holds a Bachelor of Music and Master of Music from the New England Conservatory and a PhD from Harvard University. His orchestral work A Thousand Mountains, A Million Streets won the prestigious Wladimir Lakond Award for Music Composition from the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2021, and his saxophone concerto Xiaozhan was named a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Music in 2015. He has also received the Koussevitzky Foundation Commission, the Creative Capital Award, and the Bogliasco Foundation fellowship. Since 2012 he has served as Composer-in-Residence at the Qualcomm Institute at UC San Diego, where he leads an interdisciplinary team of software developers, robotic engineers, material scientists, and oceanographers. He is the founder of Lei Lab, whose projects span Chinese landscape painting, Arctic oceanography, and the development of free, open-source software for acoustic exploration.

Prof. Kay Shelemay is Professor of Music and of African and African American Studies at Harvard University. She is among the foremost ethnomusicologists of her generation, and her research ranges across Ethiopian Christian liturgical music, the Jewish diaspora, Syrian Christian music, and the social transmission of musical tradition in urban America. Her books include A Song of Longing: An Ethiopian Journey, Music, Ritual, and Falasha History, and Soundscapes: Exploring Music in a Changing World.

Prof. Hui Weng is Associate Professor at Berklee College of Music and a faculty member at the New England Conservatory. A celebrated performer, educator, and innovator in Chinese traditional music, she was among the first students to be accepted into NEC’s contemporary music arts department as a traditional Chinese instrument specialist. She performs on the guzheng and has received the Golden Bell Award and recognition as a rising star at the International Chinese Music Competition. Her project Rivers of Resonance, supported by the Berklee Faculty Development Grant, explores elemental soundscapes across five rivers of the world.

Where is Home? A Question in Music and Language

Professor Liang opened by inviting the young cellist Chen-yi Hu to perform a movement from his composition Mongolian Suite (2022), entitled “Where is Home?” This piece, he explained, brought him face to face with a musical and spiritual heritage that has occupied a special place in his heart since childhood: the music of Inner Mongolia.

One of his family’s closest friends in Beijing was the renowned Mongolian scholar Wulalji, who would visit regularly and, with a sip of alcohol, begin to sing, sometimes continuing late into the night. Many of these songs had been passed down to him from the legendary musician Serashi (1887–1968); others came from his mother, Jijig (1912–2005), who had preserved urtyn duu, long songs, that no one else could still sing. These memories were formed in the years immediately following the Cultural Revolution, when obnoxiously cheerful propaganda music saturated the airwaves. It was precisely then that the loneliness and melancholy of those long Mongolian songs pierced through to something essential, evoking in him a deep sense of longing and awakening.

The Mongols, Professor Liang observed, were the world’s most feared conquerors, yet the music they sing today is not martial in character. They sing of a mother’s devotion, friendship, loss of loved ones, and the homeland left behind, because the warriors were always far from home. These songs remind us, he said, of what it means to be away. And he asked the audience: are we not all living far from home today?

From this personal and musical beginning, Professor Liang turned to the Chinese written character. The classical scripts of Chinese, he observed, combine images, phonetics, and meanings in an interplay that generates dense poetic associations for the attentive reader. He drew the audience’s attention to two different historical writings of the character xiang, meaning resonance or echo. In the calligraphy of Tang dynasty master Yu Shinan, xiang is composed of yin (sound) as its radical and xiang (home) as its phonetic indicator. Read as a textual construction, the word for resonance means literally “the sound of home.” In a different version of the same character, preserved on the Shichen Stele of the Eastern Han dynasty, xiang is composed of yin (sound) on the left and jing (landscape) on the right. This second version gives us the meaning “soundscape.” Two poetic definitions of the same word, Professor Liang proposed, are precisely what twenty-first century sonic practice is exploring: the sound of home and the soundscape of the world are, in classical Chinese, the same word.

Discovering China in American Libraries

Professor Liang then traced the circumstances that had led him, paradoxically, to discover China in America. Born and raised in a musical family in Beijing, he left for the United States at seventeen as a high school student in Austin, Texas. His training at the preparatory school of the Central Conservatory of Music had never exposed him to an open-shelf library. His first encounter with one, in the Asian Library of the University of Texas, was an experience he described as profoundly liberating: books in English, simplified Chinese, and traditional Chinese were all available, telling different versions of his own story, much of which had been unknown to him growing up. This encounter with what he came to call “the transparency of knowledge” marked the beginning of his search for home.

That search deepened when he came to Boston for his undergraduate education at the New England Conservatory. He frequented the Harvard-Yenching Library, browsing through string-bound volumes printed on rice paper. The physical texture of those pages, the warmth and softness of Chinese paper against his fingertips, conveyed something intimate and irreplaceable, a sensation, he noted, that no PDF could provide. It was in those shelves that he fell in love with the writings and work of the landscape painter and calligrapher Huang Binhong (1865–1955), whose theories of ink, brush technique, and light became, as he put it, his orchestration teacher.

Huang Binhong’s late paintings, created after he had nearly lost his sight to cataracts at the age of 87, are distinguished by a quality that critics have called luminous: light seeping through layers of dense, overlapping ink, invisible on first glance, revealing itself to sustained, patient attention. For Professor Liang, this quality became the model for a new kind of listening, a luminous listening in which what is initially inaudible gradually becomes present.

The Huang Binhong Project: Seeing Beyond the Visible

In 2012, Professor Liang was appointed Composer-in-Residence at the Qualcomm Institute at UC San Diego. His first major interdisciplinary project took as its point of departure a 1953 album of landscape paintings by Huang Binhong, loaned to the team through the generosity of collector Elna Tsao and the Mozhai Foundation. Working with cultural heritage engineer Dr. Samantha Stout, robotic engineer Dr. James Strawson, and imaging specialist Professor Falko Kuester, the team conducted a diagnostic survey of the album in four wavebands of the electromagnetic spectrum: visible light, ultraviolet, infrared, and beyond.

The imaging process was technically ambitious. High-resolution visible images were captured at six gigapixels with a feature size of six micrometres, approximately one-tenth of the width of a human hair. A custom-designed robotic imager allowed the team to complete the analysis with a precision and speed that would have been unattainable by conventional methods. The result was access to layers of the painting that had been entirely invisible to the human eye: infrared light penetrated the surface to reveal underdrawings; ultraviolet fluorescence exposed organic compounds, glazes, and previous restorations; X-ray fluorescence confirmed the presence of cinnabar in the artist’s seal by detecting mercury at the molecular level.

The original album, each leaf measuring 46 by 32 centimetres, was divided into 1,820 micro-images, each a landscape in itself, and stitched together to be projected onto a display wall of 967 by 272 centimetres, composed of 32 monitors. With the aid of a joystick controller, viewers could fly into the landscape as if riding a drone, discovering previously unseen details of the rice paper’s fibre, its uneven texture, its unexpected cracks, and the traces of glue left as light ink spread across the page. A miniature painting had assumed the monumentality of an actual mountain landscape.

Professor Liang argued that this technology does not merely improve how we see art. It fundamentally destabilises the hierarchy of looking. We can choose to look with the eyes of a conservator, examining vulnerabilities and signs of aging; with the eyes of an art historian, reconstructing the artist’s process and technique; with the eyes of a cultural heritage engineer, asking about the genesis, anatomy, and pathologies of the object. And we can add the eyes of a composer. Each perspective reveals something invisible to the others, and the act of multiplying perspectives reminds us that our own unassisted eye is a particularly limited instrument. As Professor Liang observed, this means that those who work with invisible things, musicians, may have no less access to the heart of a matter than those who work with visible ones.

Sonic Brushstrokes: Translating Huang’s Techniques into Sound

The question Professor Liang set himself was not simply how to create a sonic impression of what we see in a painting, as composers had done for centuries, but something more radical: could one paint like Huang Binhong himself, using a sonic brush?

To do this, the team developed a suite of original software tools, all designed to translate specific painterly techniques into acoustic processes. Huang’s seven kinds of ink, five kinds of brush techniques, nine kinds of water techniques, and multiple dotting and texturing strokes were studied as compositional procedures and translated into their acoustic equivalents. Filter Bank software, designed by Dr. Greg Surges, imposed harmonic grids onto complex source sounds. Time Stretch software applied a phase vocoder to sounds, allowing them to be expanded or contracted in time without changing their pitch, analogous to the way a painter might dilute ink to modulate its density. Concatenative Synthesis analysed audio signals for recurring structural patterns and recombined their blocks in ways that preserved the musical syntax while generating something new, directly parallel to Huang’s method of deconstructing natural forms into assemblages of brushstrokes. Multi PVOC and Multi Delay tools created spatial textures in which a single sound could be stretched and distributed across multiple loudspeakers in different temporal configurations, producing an acoustic equivalent of the layered, multi-directional depth of Huang’s ink.

These tools gave rise to what Professor Liang called “sonic particles,” the acoustic equivalent of Huang’s dotting technique, dian, which deconstructs contour and outline into a field of individual marks. Just as Huang’s landscape paintings are composed not of lines but of countless individual touches of the brush, each carrying its own weight and life, Professor Liang’s compositional approach fragments sound into particles that accumulate into something larger, a texture that feels simultaneously intimate and vast.

The Arctic Ocean: From Landscape to Seascape

Having established the principle of luminous listening through the Huang Binhong project, Professor Liang then introduced a second major strand of his work, one that carries the sonic search for home into an entirely different register: the acoustic world of the Arctic Ocean.

Collaborating with oceanographers and geologists, the Lei Lab embarked on a project of sonifying the undersea environment, making audible the sounds and patterns of a world that human ears could not access without technological mediation. The sounds of bowhead whales, bearded seals, and the geological formations of the Arctic seabed became the raw material of composition.

Professor Liang made a point that carries particular weight in the present moment: bowhead whales are among the longest-lived of all mammals, surviving for over 200 years. They communicate across vast distances through song, and the acoustic environment of the Arctic Ocean is a system of extraordinary complexity and fragility. The great oceanographer and acoustician Roger Payne, who made the songs of humpback whales publicly known in the 1970s and thereby changed global consciousness about cetaceans, was a source of direct inspiration. The sounds that human technology can now access and render audible were described by Professor Liang not merely as raw material but as teachers, entities whose communicative repertoire operates at timescales and frequencies entirely outside ordinary human experience.

This work led to what Professor Liang offered as a gentle provocation: a proposal to replace the canonical “three Bs” of Western classical music history, Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms, with three new Bs: the Lugar Wells, the Bearded Seal, and the Bowhead Whale. The humour of the proposal should not obscure its seriousness. What it asks is whether we can expand our understanding of music as a practice of attentive listening to include forms of communication and expression that entirely predate and surpass the Western classical tradition, that exist in environments inaccessible to unaided human perception, and whose extinction would constitute an irreplaceable loss not only ecologically but acoustically.

Throughout these projects, Professor Liang was insistent on one ethical commitment that runs through all of his work: all software developed by the Lei Lab is made freely available. The expansion of listening that these technologies enable should not be the privilege of those who can afford it. This is, he suggested, a matter of principle as well as practice.

Response by Professor Kay Shelemay

Professor Shelemay opened by situating the lecture within the context of Harvard’s Fogg Museum, where the event was held, and whose galleries had provided Lei Liang with a space for meditation during his years as a graduate student and junior fellow. She described the lecture as one that had taken the audience from light, as conveyed by pigment and electromagnetic spectrum, to deeper concepts of orchestration, spatial sound, and the possibilities of luminous listening.

She offered the concept of synesthesia as a framework for understanding the lecture’s central achievement. Synesthesia, she argued, is no longer simply a neurological curiosity or an interrelationship of the five senses. In the hands of a composer like Lei Liang, working with the technologies of the Qualcomm Institute, it becomes the awakening of endless domains in which perceptions of the natural world are transformed and extended by new instruments of apprehension. She was struck by the way in which multispectral imaging allowed the team not only to see different colours but to see the same colour through entirely new eyes and ears, and she identified this as a model for a form of listening that the lecture had made available to its audience.

Professor Shelemay paid particular attention to the ethical dimension of the lecture’s commitment to free software, which she described as an insistence on ensuring that the new modality of listening Lei Liang had introduced could be available to all, not merely to those with institutional resources. She connected this to a broader vision in which home is not a geographical location but a sensory and relational one, shared not only across cultures but across the myriad landscapes and seascapes of the natural world. If home is where one first encounters sensory experiences, she suggested, then music can over time convey a more global home, one that extends above, below, and beyond geographical boundaries.

Response by Professor Hui Weng

Professor Weng began by acknowledging her personal debt to Lei Liang: it was he who had introduced her to the Contemporary Improvisation department at the New England Conservatory, where she became one of the first students to be accepted as a traditional Chinese instrument specialist, and where she later taught, gradually opening doors for other students from similar backgrounds. In that sense, she said, Lei Liang had helped her find her own musical home.

Her response addressed two aspects of the lecture. The first concerned what “home” means for a practitioner of Chinese traditional music based in the United States. As a guzheng performer and educator teaching at both Berklee and NEC, she described the question of home as one she navigates daily: her identity as a guzheng performer remains foundational whatever she does, whether collaborating across genres or engaging in improvisation, yet establishing that identity in a new cultural environment presents constant challenges of survival, recognition, and growth. She proposed that one of her most important teaching goals, newly articulated in light of the lecture, was to help her students not only to succeed but to find and build their own home, a stable place of artistic identity from which genuine voice can emerge.

Her second point took the form of a question for Lei Liang from an educational perspective: given the fusion of art, science, and technology that his work exemplifies, what skills should musicians be prioritising in order to thrive in today’s landscape? Professor Liang’s response was characteristically spare. Rather than offering a curriculum, he suggested that the most important discipline he had given himself as a student was to read at least one book outside of music for every period spent immersed in it. No curriculum could fit every individual, he said; the success of an educational institution lay in creating an environment in which everyone could become fully themselves.

Discussion

The discussion that followed ranged across several themes.

A question about the challenges of integrating Arctic natural sounds into a coherent musical work drew from Professor Liang a reflection on the fundamental disjunction between the acoustic world of marine mammals and the conceptual frameworks of Western music theory. The sounds of bowhead whales and bearded seals do not admit of description in terms of counterpoint, harmony, or rhythm in any conventional sense. Pitch, timbre, duration, and spatial trajectory all operate at scales and in combinations for which existing musical vocabulary has no adequate terms. The collaboration with oceanographers had therefore required the invention of a shared language, a process that took, in one case, an entire year of regular conversation before the team arrived at a vocabulary capable of sustaining genuine co-imagination. The emergence of that language, Professor Liang suggested, was among the most valuable outcomes of the collaboration, and he described it as an essentially creative process, one in which entirely new concepts were required to describe what was being experienced and composed.

A question about the future of musical composition in relation to technology prompted a reflection on the relationship between acoustic instruments and electronic tools. Professor Liang was clear that his engagement with technology was never an end in itself but always a means of discovering something that the technology then enabled him to bring back to the acoustic instrument. His experience with the Huang Binhong landscape project had produced a piano solo piece that made no use of extended piano techniques, exploring instead the extraordinary possibilities already latent in the standard instrument. The engagement with Arctic oceanography is generating a large-scale orchestral work that translates what was learned in the ocean back into the ensemble. Technology, in this account, functions as a kind of expanded ear, a way of learning to hear what was previously inaudible, and then transmitting that hearing to the orchestra.

A visitor from the China Academy of Arts raised the question of the Six Laws of Painting articulated by the fifth-century critic Xie He, and in particular the first law, qi yun sheng dong, typically translated as “spirit resonance and life movement.” She noted the presence in that formulation of something that could only be described in musical terms, and asked how Professor Liang understood the relationship between the theory of Chinese landscape painting and musical theory. He responded that this convergence had struck him as one of the most revealing dimensions of Huang Binhong’s work. The presence of rhythm and pulsation in a painted landscape, he observed, was not merely metaphorical. To look at a great Chinese landscape scroll correctly was an experience that necessarily involved time: the eye moved through the composition at its own pace, meditating, returning, discovering new relationships, just as a listener moves through a piece of music. He recounted being told by a collector who had loaned the team the scroll painting by Wang Wei that the one thing he asked was that they not read Wang Wei too fast. That instruction, Professor Liang said, told him more about how to hear rhythm in painting than any theoretical account could have.

The lecture closed with Professor Wang observing that the audience was leaving not only with new ideas but with new eyes and ears, more attuned to the visible and the audible than they had been before it began. That, he suggested, was the best measure of what a lecture in this series could accomplish.

Bibliography

Huang Binhong. Hua yu lu [Sayings on Painting]. Shanghai: Shanghai renmin meishu chubanshe, 1982.

Liang, Lei. “Luminous Listening: Composing with the Visual.” In Sound Practice: Interdisciplinary Studies in Musical Performance, edited by Roger Savage. Oxford: Oxford University Press, forthcoming.

Payne, Roger. Among Whales. New York: Scribner, 1995.

Shelemay, Kay Kaufman. Soundscapes: Exploring Music in a Changing World. 3rd ed. New York: W. W. Norton, 2019.

Xie He. Gu hua pin lu [Record of the Classification of Old Painters]. Ca. 550 CE. Trans. Susan Bush and Hsio-yen Shih in Early Chinese Texts on Painting. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985.

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

Event date:16:30–18:00 (EST) Thursday, 15 February, 2024 | 05:30–07:00 (Taiwan) Friday, 16 February, 2024

Organizer: Princeton University

In this lecture on Buddhism and animals, Professor Gyatso departs from ideological and cosmological analyses of animals in Buddhist scripture and story literature, focusing instead on real, living animals in the contemporary world. Drawing on her current book project on animal ethics, she mobilises practical resources from Buddhist traditions to address the ongoing crisis of farmed animals in the global agro-industrial complex. Three main threads from Buddhist practice theory are considered: the cultivation of compassion towards animals; an “aleatory” lifestyle of interdependence and auspiciousness as lived and exemplified by animals; and technical distinctions in Buddhist meditation theory, particularly the interplay of swift insight and sustained habituation, as frameworks for moral cultivation. The talk cites Buddhist theorists Vasubandhu and Santideva alongside the speaker’s own phenomenological observations, and proposes original meditation practices for developing the moral conscience, intelligence, and commitment required to advocate effectively for animals.

 Lecture Report:  “Buddhist Practice Theory and Animal Ethics”

Yin-Cheng Distinguished Lecture Series 
Princeton University, February 15, 2024, at 16:30–18:00 EST
Lecture by Professor Janet Gyatso (Harvard Divinity School)
Response by Professor Brook Ziporyn (University of Chicago Divinity School)

Report by Tzu Chi Charity Foundation

Supported by the Buddhist Tzu Chi Charity Foundation, this lecture was hosted by the Center for Culture, Society and Religion at Princeton University as part of the Yin-Cheng Distinguished Lecture Series on Buddhism. Professor Janet Gyatso of Harvard Divinity School delivered the keynote lecture entitled “Buddhist Practice Theory and Animal Ethics.” The discussant was Professor Brook Ziporyn of the University of Chicago Divinity School. The event was introduced by Professor Jonathan Gold, who offered a warm welcome and a detailed account of Professor Gyatso’s scholarly career, noting that she had been his own teacher at Amherst College in the late 1980s, a personal connection that lent the occasion a particularly warm atmosphere. Welcoming remarks on behalf of the Tzu Chi Foundation were read by Kelly Carlton, a Princeton graduate student in Asian religions.

Prof. Janet Gyatso is the Hershey Professor of Buddhist Studies and Associate Dean for Academic Affairs at Harvard Divinity School. Her PhD is from the University of California, Berkeley, and she specialises in Tibetan and South Asian cultural and intellectual history. Her 2015 book Being Human in a Buddhist World: An Intellectual History of Medicine in Early Modern Tibet won the Toshihide Numata Book Award, the Choice Award for Outstanding Academic Title, and the E. Jean Smith Inner Asia Book Prize from the Association for Asian Studies. Her earlier book Apparitions of the Self: The Secret Autobiographies of a Tibetan Visionary has stood for over two decades as a model of innovative scholarship. Her current book project concerns the phenomenology of living well with animals and the related ethical and practical questions this raises.

Prof. Brook Ziporyn is the Mircea Eliade Professor of Chinese Religion, Philosophy, and Comparative Thought at the University of Chicago Divinity School. He received his PhD from the University of Michigan and is the author of seven books on Chinese thought, with special interests in Tiantai Buddhist philosophy and philosophical Daoism. His works include Emptiness and Omnipresence: An Essential Introduction to Tiantai Buddhism and The Penumbra Unbound: The Neo-Taoist Philosophy of Guo Xiang.

The Crisis of Animals and the Limits of Intellectual Ethics

Professor Gyatso opened by describing her current book project on contemporary animal ethics, a work driven by her deep concern about the “absolutely horrendous situation” of animals in the global agro-industrial complex: factory farming, shipping containers, the dairy industry, and industrial slaughter on a massive scale, which she did not hesitate to characterise as a holocaust. She framed her talk around a central frustration with Western ethical thought: intellectual formulations of ethics, however well-reasoned, have repeatedly failed to translate into action. The example she offered was Immanuel Kant, whose rigorous rational ethics did not prevent his countrymen from perpetrating the atrocities of the Second World War. Buddhist philosophy, by contrast, has long understood that having the right ideas is not enough. One must practise.

The challenge, then, is not simply to convince people that animals deserve moral consideration, but to develop practices that can actually transform embodied habits, motivate genuine commitment, and move people from intellectual acknowledgement to sustained ethical action. This is the animating question of Professor Gyatso’s book, and of this lecture.

The Beauty and Intimacy of Animal Life

Before turning to Buddhist theory, Professor Gyatso devoted considerable attention to the phenomenological case for why animals deserve our moral attention. Drawing on personal observation and footage she regularly watches on Instagram and social media, she described cows leaping and running when let out of the barn in spring for the first time, geese gliding onto a river in perfect synchrony, horses resting with their heads together, pigs cuddling side by side. Her purpose was not merely sentimental. She argued that this pleasure in watching animals, and the emotional response it generates, is itself ethically significant. To feel that pleasure is already to have taken a step toward moral relationship.

She developed the concept of “being with” as a fundamental existential category: the way animals are with each other, licking, cuddling, sleeping together, communing with their environment, is not incidental but reveals something philosophically important about the nature of interdependence. Animals, she argued, are particularly good at making their interdependence visible. Their bodies merge into the ground on which they rest; their intimacy with one another is immediate, physical, and unguarded. Against thinkers like Merleau-Ponty who have claimed that animals lack a “world,” Professor Gyatso insisted that anyone who has actually watched animals could not seriously sustain that position.

Interdependence as Moral Imperative

This observation of animal interdependence connects directly to Buddhist metaphysics. Professor Gyatso argued that interdependence, or pratītyasamutpāda, is not merely a philosophical description of how things arise in dependence on one another, but a moral fact that generates obligation. If our very being overlaps with and is constituted by the beings around us, then to care for others is in some sense to care for ourselves, and to be indifferent to their suffering is a kind of self-contradiction. The challenge, however, is that knowing this intellectually is not the same as feeling it in the body. What is needed is to bring the cognitive recognition of interdependence down into what the Japanese philosopher Yasuo Yuasa called “dark consciousness,” the embodied, pre-reflective level of our being, as opposed to the “bright consciousness” of rational thought.

It is here that Buddhist meditation theory becomes relevant.

Insight and Habituation: The Abhidharmakosha Framework

Professor Gyatso turned to Vasubandhu’s Abhidharmakośa, specifically its chapter on meditation, which articulates two fundamental categories: darśana (seeing or insight) and bhāvanā (cultivation or practice). Insight is swift and compact. It happens in a flash, a single cognitive breakthrough that permanently dismantles certain wrong views. In the context of animal ethics, it might take the form of a logical inference (“if I cry when someone hits me, and this dog is so like me and is crying, it is likely suffering as I do”), or a direct perceptual encounter with an animal’s suffering that strikes the observer with undeniable force. Such moments are rare and precious. Buddhist theory holds that they are often preceded by bodily sensations of heat and forbearance, and that they do clear the ground in a genuine and lasting way.

But insight alone is insufficient. Ignorance, aversion, greed, and pride are not dismantled by a single moment of realisation, however powerful. They are habits of the embodied mind, and they require a different kind of medicine: sustained, repeated, patient practice. This is bhāvanā: bringing one’s attention back again and again to the same object, not because the insight is not real, but because realisation needs to be neaded into the body, understood from multiple perspectives, applied broadly, and allowed to slowly displace the deep emotional obscurations that intellectual knowledge alone cannot reach. Professor Gyatso drew a memorable analogy to the legendary Japanese flautist Kogen Murata, who was instructed by his teacher to blow a single note on the shakuhachi for an entire year before being permitted to move his fingers.

Animal Fast and Slow: A Phenomenological Parallel

One of the most striking and original contributions of the lecture was Professor Gyatso’s observation that animals themselves embody a structural parallel to this Buddhist dialectic of insight and habituation. Animals, she noted, tend to move in a leisurely, unhurried manner for much of the time, resting, grazing, cuddling, digesting. But when required, they can react with extraordinary speed: the condylostylus fly responds in under five milliseconds; jellyfish in under 700 nanoseconds; cheetahs and house cats in approximately 20 milliseconds. This fast-slow rhythm, she argued, is not merely a function of predation and survival. It also characterises how animals navigate their worlds, explore, size up unfamiliar situations, recognise a beloved companion from across a field, and respond to love as well as danger.

The slow dimension is equally instructive. The image she returned to was the cow chewing cud: taking in material, processing it in stages, resting with it, allowing it to be fully digested before it becomes nourishment. This is, she suggested, formally analogous to what the Abhidharma had in mind when it insisted on the necessity of extended practice for needing insight into the body. She was careful not to claim that a cow chewing cud is cultivating compassion. What she argued for was a structural similarity between two dynamics: the fast-slow rhythm of animal knowledge and the insight-habituation rhythm of Buddhist meditation theory. Both, she proposed, may reflect a deeper material logic of how knowledge becomes embodied in a three-dimensional, physically extended world.

Original Meditation Practices for Animal Ethics

In the final section of her lecture, Professor Gyatso described two original meditation practices she is including in the fourth chapter of her book, practices she has developed herself and, unusually for a Buddhist scholar, recommends directly to the reader.

The first she described as a form of mindful attention practice, adapted from basic Buddhist mindfulness but with one crucial difference: the practitioner does not sit still, but instead follows an animal on its own terms. If walking a dog, one relinquishes control and allows the dog to lead, following its logic, attending to its attention, listening and looking with it. One returns to the animal whenever the mind wanders, just as one returns to the breath in standard mindfulness practice. Professor Gyatso attested personally to the transformative power of this approach: by following this method during her sabbatical year, she found herself seeing, hearing, and understanding her cats in ways she never had before, despite decades of loving them. What the animal communicates becomes legible in ways that habitual inattention had previously obscured.

The second practice is a visualisation adapted from Tibetan Buddhist tradition, specifically the practice of visualising the bodhisattva Avalokiteśvara pouring healing light onto suffering beings. Professor Gyatso’s adaptation focuses this visualisation explicitly on animals: imagining in specific and unflinching detail the suffering of animals in factory farms, in shipping containers, in slaughterhouses, the pigs in squalor, the cows separated from their calves at birth, and then visualising them bathed in healing light. She noted that this practice requires courage and determination, acknowledging that she herself cannot always sustain it. But she argued that being able to look at suffering, to stay with it rather than turning away, is not merely an emotional matter. It is a spiritual and ethical one. Only by developing the capacity to see the implications of our actions without flinching can we arrive at the kind of committed, embodied resolve that might actually change our behaviour.

She shared that these practices had, over the course of the past year, genuinely helped her reduce her own consumption of meat and dairy, more than any intellectual argument had managed. She was candid about her own imperfection, acknowledging with some wryness that translating love for animals into consistent dietary choices remains difficult when hungry at dinner. This honesty was warmly received.

Response by Professor Brook Ziporyn

Professor Ziporyn offered a rich and philosophically ambitious response that approached the themes of the lecture through the lens of the Buddha’s enlightenment narrative as recorded in the Pali Mahāsakata Sutta. He noted that the enlightenment under the Bodhi tree is typically presented as a realisation of high-level Buddhist philosophical truths: emptiness, non-self, dependent co-arising, the Four Noble Truths. But the actual narrative presents a three-stage process unfolding over the course of a night, and the most philosophically advanced teachings only arrive at the end of the third watch, not the beginning.

The first watch of the night was not about theory at all. It was a direct personal recollection of billions of past lives in excruciatingly specific detail: different names, clans, bodies, foods, pleasures, and pains. What was experienced first, before any general philosophical insight, was the sheer diversity of forms of experience the Buddha had inhabited, including, as the Jataka tales suggest, an enormous range of animal embodiments. The second watch extended this expanded vision outward to encompass all other sentient beings, their past lives and karmic trajectories, experienced with the same quality of intimate personal recollection. Only after dwelling in these two modes of direct, particular, embodied vision did the generalised philosophical understanding of the Four Noble Truths crystallise in the third watch.

Professor Ziporyn drew from this sequence a methodological lesson: one should not skip straight to the philosophical conclusions before doing the experiential groundwork. He endorsed Professor Gyatso’s meditation practices enthusiastically, particularly the practice of “being with” animals, which he associated with the traditional concept of darśan, seeing and being seen by a sacred presence. He testified personally that he had never felt more in the presence of an enlightened guru than when living with cats. He extended the temporal argument: just as the first phase of the Buddha’s enlightenment compressed vast stretches of past experience into the present moment, the practice of being with an animal can be understood as an act of expanded temporal perception, seeing in the present being before you the long chain of incarnations and sufferings of which it is the current expression. He proposed that learning to see as one remembers, and to remember as one sees, might be the bridge between compassion as feeling and compassion as action.

Discussion

The floor was then opened for questions, which ranged across a wide spectrum of topics and revealed the depth of engagement among the audience.

One question raised the familiar problem of whether individual choices about diet make any real difference in a vast global system. Professor Gyatso replied that the question of causal efficacy, while real, should not eclipse the separate and equally important question of living in accordance with one’s principles. Consistency with one’s values, she argued, matters independently of whether one’s individual choices measurably reduce demand. One becomes a model for others; one demonstrates that a different way of living is possible. Consumers do have collective power, even if that power is realised only in aggregate.

A question about the Pali teaching that monks may eat meat provided it was not killed specifically for them prompted a discussion of the relationship between individual intention, structural complicity, and consumer responsibility. Professor Gyatso distinguished between purchasing meat and encountering roadkill, arguing that purchasing even indirectly supports the industry and does constitute a form of moral responsibility, while acknowledging that the question of ethical consumption becomes genuinely difficult when extended all the way to plants, a domain where new research on plant sentience is complicating older assumptions.

A question about the risk of meditation on animal suffering leading to despair rather than action was met with a frank acknowledgement that such a risk is real, and that the practice requires developing what Buddhist texts call the forbearance to stay with difficult truths. Professor Gyatso was candid that there are images of industrial slaughter she herself cannot bring herself to look at. But the broader principle, she insisted, is that turning away from suffering is not ethically acceptable at this moment in history, and that developing the capacity to bear witness is itself part of the ethical work.

Questions also addressed the potential mammalian-centrism of the approach, the difficulty of extending compassion to less charismatic or visually engaging animals, the problem of predation as an ethical conundrum for anyone who simultaneously admires and seeks to emulate animal ways of being, and the broader question of how to draw principled distinctions in a system where all life in some sense eats other life. On all of these, Professor Gyatso was characteristically candid about the limits of her current thinking, describing them as challenges she is still working through, while insisting that the absence of a perfect philosophical system should not be used as an excuse for failing to act on the ethical low-hanging fruit that is already visible.

Bibliography

Event date: 0:00–22:00 (Beijing/Taipei) Saturday, 27 January, 2024
Organizer: Peking University

How might Buddhist storytelling contribute to cross-species thinking in an age of climate crisis? In this talk, Professor Heller examines how animals have figured into Buddhist stories in both the past and the present. Beginning with premodern Chinese sources that show karmic connections between human and animal lives as a means to shape ethical behaviour, she brings this tradition into conversation with contemporary Taiwanese Buddhist picturebooks to show how these sources depict ecological entanglements that go beyond the six realms of rebirth and even the category of sentient beings. She argues that children’s literature represents not only a site of moral formation for future generations, but offers models for how we might tell new stories to motivate change in an age of climate crisis.

 Lecture Report:  “Our Entangled Others: Buddhism and Multi-species Storytelling”

Yin-Cheng Distinguished Lecture Series 
Peking University, January 27, 2024, at 20:00–22:00 (Beijing/Taipei)
Lecture by Professor Natasha Heller (University of Virginia)
Response by Ven. De Yuan (Jing Si Abode) and Dr. Lei Ying (Amherst College)

Report by Tzu Chi Charity Foundation

Supported by the Buddhist Tzu Chi Charity Foundation, this lecture was hosted by the Buddhist Research Center of Peking University as part of the Yin-Cheng Distinguished Lecture Series on Buddhism. Professor Natasha Heller of the University of Virginia delivered the keynote lecture entitled “Our Entangled Others: Buddhism and Multi-species Storytelling.” The respondents were Ven. De Yuan of Jing Si Abode and Dr. Lei Ying of Amherst College. The event was chaired by Professor You Zhao of Peking University, and opening remarks were offered by Professor Wang Song, Director of the Buddhist Research Center of Peking University, and Dr. Rey-Sheng Her, Vice CEO of the Buddhist Tzu Chi Charity Foundation.

Prof. Natasha Heller is Associate Professor in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Virginia. A cultural historian of Chinese Buddhism, she is the author of Illusory Abiding, a study of the eminent Chan monk Zhongfeng Mingben during the Yuan dynasty. Her second monograph, Literature for Little Bodhisattvas, on Buddhist children’s literature in modern Taiwan, is forthcoming. She is also working on a third project examining the significance of trees in Chinese Buddhism.

Ven. De Yuan is Dharma Master at Jing Si Abode, Chairman of Yayasan Pendidikan Tzu Chi Malaysia, and Chairman of Tzu Chi Foundation Canada. Ordained in 2011, she has spoken at international conferences including the 2018 Parliament of the World’s Religions in Toronto and the 2019 China-US-Canada Buddhist Forum in New York.

Dr. Lei Ying is Assistant Professor of Asian Languages and Civilizations at Amherst College. She received her Ph.D. from Harvard University as a Presidential Scholar. Her research focuses on the interdisciplinary study of religion and literature, particularly the interconnection between Buddhism and modern Chinese literary and intellectual history. Her current book project is entitled Our Shared Karma: Buddhism, Literature, and the Modern Chinese Revolution.

Stories, Animals, and the Climate Crisis

Professor Heller opened with two brief stories. In the first, a dharma master encounters a weeping ox being beaten on its way to market, and through meditation realises that the animal is the reincarnation of his worldly brother; he persuades the owner to release it, and the ox spends the rest of its life at the temple absorbing Buddhist teachings. In the second, a monk’s cow explains in human speech that her milk belongs only to this monk, in repayment of a debt incurred in a past life when she, then a slave, had stolen food intended for monastics. One of these stories, Professor Heller revealed, comes from a children’s picture book published in Taiwan in 2005. The other is from a tenth-century Chinese text. The two share crucial structural elements: bovine rebirth is directly connected to behaviour in a prior human life, and the connection is discovered within a community, extending moral relationships across lifetimes. The chief difference is that the medieval cow speaks, while the picture-book ox can only moo in sorrow.

This seemingly small difference was Professor Heller’s starting point. Her book on Taiwanese Buddhist picture books, Literature for Little Bodhisattvas, had made her alert to the prevalence of talking animals in children’s literature, and she was struck, upon returning to the classical ox story, by the deliberate restraint of the choice not to have the ox speak. The reader’s access to the ox’s interiority comes only through the meditative vision of his monk-brother. Why this choice, in a text whose audience was presumably quite prepared to accept speaking animals? The question led Professor Heller to a broader inquiry: how do different kinds of Buddhist stories construct the relationship between human and non-human animals, and what resources might they offer for thinking through the ecological crises of the present?

The lecture situated this inquiry within two complementary intellectual contexts. The first was Amitav Ghosh’s analysis, in The Great Derangement, of the modern novel’s inadequacy for representing the climate crisis. Ghosh had argued that climate change produces events that are too vast, too improbable, and too accusatory to be assimilated into the customary frameworks of modern literary naturalism. What is needed, he suggested, are new forms of storytelling, and these might be found in the narrative traditions of Asia, Africa, and the Mediterranean, where non-human agency has long played a significant role. The second context was Lori Gruen’s concept of “entangled empathy,” developed in her book of the same name. Gruen argued against ethical theories that remain anthropocentric in orientation and proposed instead a mode of moral engagement that requires learning to toggle between perspectives, inhabiting the situation of another being sufficiently to understand what they require and to feel an obligation to respond. Storytelling, Gruen noted, is one of the primary means by which this capacity is cultivated.

A Typology of Buddhist Multi-species Narratives

Against this background, Professor Heller proposed a working typology of three kinds of Buddhist animal narratives, each with different implications for the development of cross-species empathy.

The first type she called stories of unidirectional concern. These are narratives in which a human being exercises compassion toward a non-human animal without any prior karmic connection between them. The paradigmatic example is the Jataka story of Prince Mahasattva, who slits his throat and throws himself from a cliff in order to feed a tigress so starved that she appears ready to eat her own cubs. The prince’s act is defined precisely by its crossing of species boundaries: he offers himself to a creature of lower spiritual status, associated with violence and predation, because he recognises her as a living being to whom he bears responsibility. Professor Heller was careful to note that the story is anthropocentric in its orientation: the tigress is the object of compassion, not its subject. But she invited the audience to look again at the Mogao Cave 428 mural depicting the scene, which includes not only the sacrifice but the prior image of the hungry tiger sitting awkwardly with her mouth open and her cubs gambolling around her. This image, she suggested, is a genuine attempt to inhabit the tiger’s perspective, to conjure what hunger looks like from within, and it gives the viewer imaginative access to an experience they could not otherwise approach.

A second example in this category, from a more recent Taiwanese picture book, tells the story of a young novice who saves a colony of drowning ants on his way home and, through this act of compassion, alters the fate the elderly monk’s clairvoyance had foreseen for him. Good deeds can literally save one’s life: this is a story about karma operating on a compressed timescale, shorter even than a lifetime. But Professor Heller drew a further parallel that gave the story contemporary resonance. The elderly monk believes the boy’s fate is fixed, yet the boy’s compassion rewrites it entirely. This narrative of fate overturned by ethical action, she suggested, offers an imaginative framework for approaching climate predictions: exceeding 1.5 degrees of warming may seem inevitable, and yet the effects of our collective actions may be more far-reaching than they appear.

The second type is stories of anxious entanglement, in which humans and animals are connected through reincarnation in ways that generate discomfort and ethical urgency. Professor Heller drew extensively here on Tang Lin’s seventh-century Record of Postmortem Retribution and Daoshi’s Grove of Pearls in the Garden of the Teachings. These texts contain a recurring motif: a man who has cheated or wronged someone is reborn as an animal in the household of the aggrieved party, and the past life is made legible through the animal’s unusual physical markings, its behaviour, or its dreamtime communication. An ox is marked with a stripe that resembles an official’s waistband, identifying it as the reincarnation of a corrupt bureaucrat. A calf is born with the characters of a debtor’s name written in white fur on its forehead. A pig communicates through the dreams of its former family, pleading to be rescued from the sacrificial altar.

What makes these stories ethically complex is their ambivalence. The families who discover that a pig or ox or sheep is a reincarnated relative do not, for the most part, welcome them home. The pig rescued at considerable trouble and expense is deposited in a field and told to run away, as the family cannot quite bring themselves to be seen in his company. The ox-brother at the monastery lives out his days in a religiously respectable but personally isolated situation. Professor Heller argued that we empathise with these animals not simply because they are animals, but because they were humans, and because their animal status is marked as a form of degradation and regret. This is precisely the limitation of the anxious entanglement model for cross-species thinking: it treats the animal body as a punishment rather than as a form of being with its own integrity and value.

Yet the model has resources that Professor Heller found worth recuperating. Drawing on Jonathan Walters’ concept of “sociokarma” and philosopher Jessica Locke’s work on Yogacara Buddhism and collective karmic intervention, she proposed that climate change can be understood as a form of collective anxious entanglement on a species level. The disruptive behaviour of orcas in the Atlantic and Mediterranean, widely reported in 2023, offered a striking contemporary illustration. Rather than understanding these encounters as attacks, as most media coverage framed them, Professor Heller proposed reading the orcas as indicators of ecosystemic distress, a collective karmic consequence of centuries of human action on the ocean environment. Our anxious entanglement with the orcas is real; the question is whether we can respond on the level of collective karmic intervention rather than the level of individual guilt.

The third and most promising type, in Professor Heller’s view, is stories of transposed perspectives, in which the reader is asked to see the world through the eyes of a non-human animal. She offered a reading of a Tzu Chi picture book, Little Yin’s Adventure Diary, which centres the viewpoint of a rove beetle, one of the less charismatic insects. In this story, the beetles have families, names, backpacks, and distinct personalities, while the human beings they encounter in the fields are depicted as anonymous, faceless, and undifferentiated. The reversal is deliberate and pointed: what if we were the ones who looked alike to another species, and the beetles were the beings with individual faces and inner lives? The story promotes non-killing not through abstract ethical argument but through a doubled act of perspective-taking in which the reader inhabits the beetle who, at the story’s end, inhabits the perspective of the human, understanding why people fear the rove beetle’s venom while imagining telling them that there is no need, that peaceful coexistence is possible.

Professor Heller concluded this section with a passage from Talia Lakshmi Kolluri’s story collection What We Fed to the Manticore, which imagines a young whale migrating through waters whose acoustic environment has been shattered by ship noise. The passage renders the whale’s sudden inability to hear anything but the grinding mechanical sound as a kind of perceptual annihilation, a collapse of the richly detailed world that sonar perception normally provides. We cannot know what it is to be a whale, but by putting ourselves alongside Kolluri’s fictional whale, we begin to develop the kind of cross-species empathetic imagination that both Ghosh and Gruen argue is necessary for responding to the Anthropocene.

Responses

Ven. De Yuan offered three stories corresponding to Professor Heller’s three narrative types, drawing on Buddhist scriptural tradition and contemporary Tzu Chi experience. She recounted the Jataka story of the Deer King, a previous incarnation of Sakyamuni Buddha, who went alone to the palace of a human king and negotiated a limit on daily hunting in order to bring peace back to the forest: a story in which the moral compass of a non-human being shames the human king into reform. She shared the true story of a Tzu Chi volunteer whose encounter with an eel that continued to bite, even after being severed from its head, prompted a recognition of karmic entanglement that led to a commitment to vegetarianism. And she described a Malaysian family whose collective merit-making on behalf of their severely ill infant, through organising the eating of a hundred thousand vegetarian meals in the baby’s name, appeared to contribute to his miraculous recovery. She concluded by connecting these narratives to Dharma Master Cheng Yen’s teaching that human beings, as the most intelligent of beings, bear a particular responsibility to protect all life, and that a plant-based diet is among the most concrete expressions of that responsibility.

Dr. Lei Ying opened with the twentieth-century Chinese intellectual Zhou Zuoren’s response to the same Jataka story of Prince Mahasattva that Professor Heller had discussed. Zhou, a humanist thinker of the May Fourth generation who had been deeply moved by Buddhist texts in his youth, both admired the story and insisted that its standard of compassion, the sacrifice of one’s own body for a tiger, lay beyond what could reasonably be expected of ordinary human beings. He kept it as a personal motto, a horizon to aspire toward, but maintained a critical distance. Dr. Lei Ying used this example to highlight what she identified as the central preoccupation of Professor Heller’s talk: the success and the limits of Buddhist narrative in motivating ethical transformation in readers across different historical contexts and moral sensibilities.

As a literary scholar, Dr. Lei Ying was particularly attentive to Professor Heller’s sustained engagement with narrative form, and she drew on Mikhail Bakhtin’s concept of the dialogic imagination to suggest that the most powerful texts are those that resist reduction to a single lesson or intended conclusion. What a literary masterpiece teaches can be elusive, and this is not a failure but a feature: it is precisely the irreducibility of certain stories that allows them to continue generating new meaning across different times and audiences. She closed with a close reading of the novice-and-ants story, focusing on a dimension Professor Heller had not fully developed: the question of what the eminent monk does not and cannot know. The monk foresees the boy’s death but not his act of compassion; the boy saves the ants without knowing he is saving himself; we as readers, standing outside the story, grasp the full chain of karmic causality that none of the characters can see. The story dramatises, Dr. Lei Ying suggested, a shared condition of partial vision that is not only human but existential, a fundamental finitude that compels humility toward others whose inner lives and causal histories we can never fully apprehend.

Discussion

The discussion that followed ranged widely across questions of narrative form, collective karma, and the limits of empathy.

Professor Heller’s response to both discussants centred on what she called the “stickiness” of stories. Short Buddhist narratives, she observed, stay with us in a different way than novels do. Where a novel like The Story of the Stone resists easy summarisation and produces effects that are difficult to articulate, a story about a novice who saves ants, or about a cow chewing cud, can come to mind the next time one walks past a puddle or encounters an insect in difficulty. Ven. De Yuan’s modern examples had shown how this works in practice: a man recognises the reality of karmic retribution through a bitten hand; a family understands the connection between collective merit and individual fate through their child’s recovery. Having the resources of narrative in the back of one’s mind, Professor Heller argued, allows us to interpret contemporary encounters with the natural world in ways that lead to ethical response rather than passive observation.

On the question of whether Buddhist philosophy had had too little influence in Western cultures, Professor Heller drew a distinction between Buddhist philosophy as an academic discipline and Buddhist narrative as a mode of transmission. Picture books and short stories may be more effective vehicles for bringing Buddhist ideas to new audiences than philosophical treatises, particularly because they reach children at the developmental moment when young minds are just beginning to construct narratives about the world. She noted that images from childhood picture books remain with readers across decades in ways that arguments rarely do.

A question from You Zhao about whether Buddhist thought draws a categorical distinction between animals and plants prompted Professor Heller to acknowledge that plants represent what she called an edge case in Buddhist taxonomy, one that her research on trees in Chinese Buddhism would likely force her to address more directly. She noted a useful distinction between individual trees that take on specific significance and undifferentiated masses of vegetation, a distinction that also applies to the question of how we extend empathy to insects and other creatures on the margins of what usually attracts human moral attention.

Questions from the audience addressed the relationship between Buddhist storytelling typologies and embodied religious practice, including life-release rituals and pilgrimage. Professor Heller suggested that an ethnographic approach combining attention to stories circulating in online and video formats with fieldwork at sites of religious practice could be productive for anyone wishing to trace the relationship between narrative and action in contemporary Buddhism.

The discussion closed on a question that had been implicit throughout the lecture: whether Buddhism holds that human beings are superior to animals. Professor Heller acknowledged that in traditional Buddhist cosmology, rebirth in a human body does reflect relatively virtuous karmic standing. But she argued that the doctrine of reincarnation itself subverts any simple hierarchy: if one has inhabited, and may again inhabit, every variety of animal body, then the boundary between human and animal is porous by definition. The recognition of that porosity, she suggested, is not merely a metaphysical curiosity. It is the beginning of the ethical work.

Bibliography

Ghosh, Amitav. The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016.

Gruen, Lori. Entangled Empathy: An Alternative Ethic for Our Relationships with Animals. New York: Lantern Books, 2015.

Kolluri, Talia Lakshmi. What We Fed to the Manticore: Stories. Portland, OR: Tin House, 2022.

Locke, Jessica. “In It Together: Theorizing Collective Karma through Transformative Justice.” Journal of Speculative Philosophy 35, no. 4 (2021): 309–321.

Ohnuma, Reiko. Unfortunate Destiny: Animals in the Indian Buddhist Imagination. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017.

Walters, Jonathan S. “Communal Karma and Karmic Community in Theravada Buddhist History.” In Constituting Communities: Theravada Buddhism and the Religious Cultures of South and Southeast Asia, edited by John Clifford Holt et al. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2003.

Event date:14:00-15:30 (GMT) Monday, 4 December, 2023 
Organizer: University of Oxford

Stanley Tambiah’s idea of the Galactic Polity, alongside previous ways of defining urban centers in Southeast Asia as Mueang, Mandala, or Nagara have been very useful in trying to understand the ritual, symbolic, and political ways of defining royal centers of power in the region. However, all-encompassing definitions always exclude as much as they include. This paper explores ways of understanding the founding and growth of the last Buddho-Brahmanic royal city of Southeast Asia, Bangkok. What and who gets excluded in the galactic polity and how does the ethnic history of the city help revisit the ways in which we understand the first 250 years of one of the world’s great cities.

 Lecture Report: “Mapping the City of the Gods: Bangkok, Ethnicity, and the Galactic Polity”

Yin-Cheng Distinguished Lecture Series 
University of Oxford, April 12, 2023, at 14:00–15:30 pm
Lecture by Professor Justin McDaniel (University of Pennsylvania) 
Response by Dr. Edoardo Siani (University of Oxford)

Report by Tzu Chi Charity Foundation

Supported by the Buddhist Tzu Chi Charity Foundation, this lecture was hosted by the University of Oxford as part of the Yin-Cheng Distinguished Lecture Series on Buddhism. Professor Justin McDaniel of the University of Pennsylvania delivered the keynote lecture entitled “Mapping the City of the Gods: Bangkok, Ethnicity, and the Galactic Polity.” The respondent was Dr. Edoardo Siani of Ca’ Foscari University of Venice. The event was chaired and introduced by Professor Kate Crosby of the University of Oxford, who welcomed the speaker and highlighted his extensive contributions to the study of Theravada Buddhism, Thai and Lao religious traditions, and the religious geography of Southeast Asian cities

Prof. Justin McDaniel is Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. His research spans Theravada Buddhism, manuscript cultures, Thai and Lao religion, and the religious geography of Southeast Asian cities. His books include Gathering Leaves and Lifting Words, winner of the Harry Bender Prize, and The Lovelorn Ghost and the Magic Monk, which explores the rich complexity of Thai religious life through the contrasting figures of a senior monk and a celebrated female ghost. He is known for combining close ethnographic attention to local detail with broad comparative and historical perspectives.

Dr. Edoardo Siani is Lecturer in Buddhist Studies at the University of Oxford. His research focuses on the intersection of Buddhism, astrology, and political thought in Southeast Asia, with particular attention to Thai court culture and the cosmological dimensions of royal power.

Prof. Kate Crosby is Professor of Buddhist Studies at the University of Oxford. Her research focuses on Theravada Buddhism, particularly its meditation traditions, manuscript cultures, and the history of Buddhist practice in South and Southeast Asia. She is the author of Theravada Buddhism: Continuity, Diversity, and Identity and Esoteric Theravada, which examines the pre-modern meditation tradition known as borān kammaṭṭhāna.

Rethinking the Frameworks for Southeast Asian Royal Cities

Professor McDaniel opened by situating his argument within a long-running debate in Southeast Asian studies over how to conceptualise royal cities and the nature of political and cosmological power in the region. Scholars have over the decades proposed a series of competing terms and models: Mueang, Mandala, Nagara, theatre state. Each has sought to capture the ways in which monarchs, urban planners, and ritual specialists organised space, power, and cosmological meaning in cities such as Angkor, Ayutthaya, and Kathmandu. Among these, Stanley Tambiah’s influential model of the Galactic Polity has proven the most durable and widely applied. Tambiah described such a kingdom as defined by a ritually and symbolically reinforced royal centre, from which power radiates outward like heat, growing gradually attenuated as it approaches ill-defined frontiers. The model has the virtue of elegance: it holds together the ritual, the political, and the cosmological in a single explanatory framework.

Professor McDaniel’s lecture was an extended challenge to what happens when this framework is applied to Bangkok. He did not argue that the Galactic Polity model is without value as an analytical tool; he acknowledged it as a useful concept for certain comparative purposes. What he resisted, with considerable archival and ethnographic weight behind him, was the assumption that Bangkok’s physical structure, social organisation, and founding logic could be adequately described or explained in these terms. Applied too rigidly, he argued, the model conceals more than it reveals, and what it conceals is precisely the most historically significant feature of Bangkok’s first 250 years: its profound and constitutive ethnic diversity.

The Mandala That Was Not

The first and most direct target of Professor McDaniel’s critique was Edward Van Roy’s influential study Siamese Melting Pot, which had argued that Bangkok’s original spatial organisation followed a Mandala template, with the Grand Palace complex as the sacred centre radiating outward through concentric rings of symbolic and political significance. Professor McDaniel dismantled this argument point by point.

The city wall, often cited as evidence of cosmological planning, was a practical military fortification, not a ritual statement. It was modified three separate times within the first reign of the Chakri dynasty alone, in direct response to the practical problems of waterways, swamp drainage, and the threat of attack. These are not the modifications one makes to a cosmological diagram; they are the improvisations of a dynasty trying to survive in a volatile geopolitical environment. Key monuments cited as pillars of the supposed Mandala arrangement tell a similar story. Wat Arun and Phuket Thong, frequently invoked as markers of the sacred city’s symbolic geography, were built in later reigns and sit well outside any coherent central axis. Most telling of all is the fate of the city pillar itself, which in a genuine Mandala city ought to stand as the unmistakable ritual centre around which the entire built environment is oriented. Bangkok’s city pillar sits in a neglected traffic circle, unremarked by most of the city’s residents, dwarfed in presence and significance by the many temples that surround it.

None of this is to say that cosmological ambition was absent from Chakri urban planning. Professor McDaniel was careful to acknowledge that the dynasty made conscious use of cosmological symbolism in particular monuments and ritual contexts. What he argued was that these gestures were selective, retrospective, and insufficient to support the claim that Bangkok was organised from its foundation according to a Mandala logic.

Ethnic Diversity as Historical Foundation

Having cleared the ground, Professor McDaniel turned to what he argued was the genuinely revelatory story about Bangkok: not the coherence of its cosmological plan, but the richness and complexity of its ethnic origins. Within the first fifty years of the city’s founding, communities of Lao, Malay, Vietnamese, Chinese, Hmong, Tamil, Persian, and Cham peoples were already well-established within and immediately around the city walls. Some had been brought to Bangkok as war captives following Chakri military campaigns in Laos, the Malay states, and elsewhere. Others were long-established residents of the lower Chao Phraya basin who predated the dynasty itself, having lived in the area before the fall of Ayutthaya in 1767.

More remarkable still was the ethnic composition of the Chakri royal family itself. Drawing on historical records that are rarely foregrounded in standard accounts of Bangkok’s founding, Professor McDaniel showed that the early Chakri kings had Hmong, Persian, and Chinese ancestry. The supposedly homogeneous ethnic centre of the Mandala, in other words, was never purely Siamese, and was never conceived as such by those who built it.

Through a series of closely observed neighbourhood case studies, Professor McDaniel traced how these diverse communities shaped Bangkok’s sacred geography in ways that the Galactic Polity model cannot accommodate. The Lao community’s connection to Wat Patum Wanaram, a forest monastery that today sits incongruously amid Bangkok’s most upmarket shopping district, was one of his most vivid examples. The Buddha images brought from Laos in the aftermath of military conquest and installed at royal temples were not simply trophies; they were symbols that bound conquered peripheral communities to the Chakri court in a relationship of cosmological indebtedness and belonging. The Cham and Malay Muslim communities concentrated around the Kutiyai Mosque, originally located directly adjacent to the Grand Palace, were not merely tolerated minorities at the margin of a Siamese city. They were present at the city’s symbolic core from the very beginning. The Tamil Chettiar community, whose financial networks were indispensable to the early Chakri economy, wove itself into the commercial and ritual fabric of the city in ways that no cosmological plan had anticipated.

In each of these cases, the argument was the same: these communities were not absorbed into a pre-existing cosmological structure but were constitutive of the city itself. Bangkok was diverse before it was royal; its diversity was not an incidental feature but a precondition of its founding.

Reinterpreting the Logic of the Galactic Centre

Having established the historical case for ethnic diversity, Professor McDaniel turned to an unexpected theoretical move. Rather than abandoning the Galactic Polity framework entirely, he proposed a reinterpretation that might actually make it more historically accurate than its standard application. In Buddhist kingship theory, and particularly in the Theravada traditions of mainland Southeast Asia, the capacity of a king to attract followers from the periphery and draw them toward the centre is itself a manifestation of his barami, his accumulated merit and virtue. A king whose court is surrounded by diverse peoples who have chosen or been compelled to orbit around him is not a king whose cosmological claims have been diluted. He is a king whose barami is visibly and impressively on display.

If this reading is correct, then Bangkok’s ethnic diversity is not a complication that the Galactic Polity model must struggle to explain away. It is, on the contrary, its most vivid expression. The diversity of Bangkok’s founding population was the Chakri dynasty’s most powerful argument for its own cosmic legitimacy. Far from contradicting the claims of the cosmological city, it confirmed them.

Discussion

Dr. Edoardo Siani offered a response that extended and refined the theoretical argument. He suggested that the galactic model might be reconceived not as a static spatial template, a diagram imposed on the city from above, but as a dynamic relational process: a centre that constitutes itself through the ongoing act of drawing the periphery toward it, incorporating, transforming, and appropriating what it receives. In this reading, the ethnic communities absorbed into Bangkok’s early royal orbit were not simply made subordinate. They were transformed into tokens of the centre’s power, and their incorporation was part of how the centre maintained its claim to be a centre at all.

Audience questions addressed a rich range of issues. Several touched on the conspicuous absence of Confucian ideas of statecraft from Bangkok’s political culture, despite the enormous economic and demographic presence of the Chinese community in the city. The question proved difficult to answer cleanly, and Professor McDaniel acknowledged it as one of the more genuinely puzzling gaps in the historical record. Other questions addressed the racial and ethnic hierarchies that persist in Bangkok today, and the reluctance of many residents to speak openly about the city’s ethnic past in an environment that officially promotes a narrative of Thai cultural homogeneity. The pre-dynastic history of the Bangkok area also came up: what was the population of the lower Chao Phraya basin before the fall of Ayutthaya, and to what extent did its already-diverse character shape the conditions in which the Chakri dynasty was founded? And there was the question of historical memory itself: how did the trauma of Ayutthaya’s sudden and violent destruction in 1767 shape the Chakri self-conception, and is Bangkok better understood as a renewal of something lost or as a genuinely fresh foundation?

Professor McDaniel concluded by returning to the methodological principle that had guided the lecture throughout. The most productive approach to Bangkok’s history, he suggested, may be the most intimate one: following the city’s stories neighbourhood by neighbourhood, interview by interview, attending to how ordinary residents understand their own local histories. Grand cosmological frameworks, applied too quickly from above, tend to find what they are looking for and miss everything else. The history of a city as complex and as alive as Bangkok deserves better.

Bibliography

McDaniel, Justin. Gathering Leaves and Lifting Words: Histories of Buddhist Monastic Education in Laos and Thailand. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2008.

McDaniel, Justin. The Lovelorn Ghost and the Magic Monk: Practicing Buddhism in Modern Thailand. New York: Columbia University Press, 2011.

Tambiah, Stanley J. World Conqueror and World Renouncer: A Study of Buddhism and Polity in Thailand against a Historical Background. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976.

Van Roy, Edward. Siamese Melting Pot: Ethnic Minorities in the Making of Bangkok. Singapore: ISEAS Publishing, 2017.