Based on long-term ethnographic research, this study examines how Chinese lay Buddhists have approached the “heart” (xin). For most lay Buddhists, understanding the nature of the heart is a crucial means of cultivating an authentic self which they believe is both constitutive of and prior to an everyday self that is ego-centered and calculating. In developing this understanding of the heart, lay practitioners draw on a combination of Confucian ideas on the heart as a source of ethical conduct and Chan Buddhist sources on the quieting of the heart. Different groups of lay Buddhists were initially motivated to understand the heart for different reasons. Older, working-class lay Buddhists saw the heart as providing ethical direction for a society that they believed was venal and corrupt while younger, middle-class lay Buddhists turned to the heart as a therapeutic refuge from the competing pressures of work and family. The study concludes by arguing that, despite these outward differences, for both groups of lay Buddhists, cultivating the heart had both ethical and therapeutic functions.
AdamekW. L. (2005). The impossibility of the given: Representations of merit and emptiness in medieval Chinese Buddhism. History of Religions, 45(2), 135–180. https://doi.org/10.1086/502698
AngleS. C.TiwaldJ. (2020). Moral psychology: Heartmind (xin), nature (xing), and emotions (qing). In NgK. C.HuangY. (Eds.), Dao companion to Zhu Xi’s philosophy (pp. 361–387). Springer Press. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-29175-4_18
4.
ArghirescuD. (2020). Zhu Xi’s ideal of moral politics: Theory and practice. In NgK. C.HuangY. (Eds.), Dao companion to Zhu Xi’s philosophy (pp. 465–497). Springer Press. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-29175-4_21
5.
ArghirescuD. (2021). Between heart-mind and names: Interrelatedness in the Chan scholar-monk Qisong’s thought. Comparative and Continental Philosophy, 13(3), 220–234. https://doi.org/10.1080/17570638.2021.2017249
6.
BaoY. (2015). Water, plant, light, and mirror: On the root metaphors of the heart-mind in Wang Yangming’s thought. Frontiers of Philosophy in China, 10(1), 95–112. https://doi.org/10.3868/S030-004-015-0006-5
7.
BenickåJ. (2003). Mind or heart? On translating the character xin in Chinese buddhist mahāyāna texts into western languages. Asian and African Studies, 12(2), 148–157.
8.
BramB. (2021). Troubling emotions in China’s psy-boom. HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory, 11(3), 915–927. https://doi.org/10.1086/717183
9.
ElvinM. (1993). Tales of shen and xin: Body-person and heart-mind in China during the last 150 years. In KasulisT. P. (Ed.), Self as body in Asian theory and practice (pp. 213–294). State University of New York Press.
10.
FisherG. (2011). Morality books and the re-growth of lay Buddhism in China. In ChauA. Y. (Ed.), Religion in contemporary China: Tradition and innovation (pp. 53–80). Routledge Press. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203840535
11.
FisherG. (2012). Buddhism in China and Taiwan. In McMahanD. L. (Ed.), Buddhism in the modern world (pp. 68–88). Routledge Press. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203139059
12.
FisherG. (2014). From comrades to bodhisattvas: Moral dimensions of lay Buddhist practice in contemporary China. University of Hawai’i Press.
13.
FisherG. (2017). Lay Buddhists and moral activism in contemporary China. Review of Religion and Chinese Society, 4(2), 247–270. https://doi.org/10.1163/22143955-00402005
14.
GrahamA. C. (1989). Disputers of the Tao: Philosophical argument in ancient China. Open Court Press.
15.
GregoryP. N. (2012). The Platform Sūtra as the sudden teaching. In SchlütterM.TeiserS. F. (Eds.), Readings of the Platform Sūtra (pp. 77–108). Columbia University Press.
HershockP. D. (1994). Person as narration: The dissolution of ‘self’ and ‘other’ in Ch’an Buddhism. Philosophy East and West, 44(4), 685–710. https://doi.org/10.2307/1399758
18.
HuangH. Y. (2015). From psychotherapy to psycho-boom: A historical overview of psychotherapy in China. In ScharffD. E. (Ed.), Psychoanalysis and psychotherapy in China (pp. 1–30). Routledge Press.
JiaL. 贾丽英. (2007). Lun Bailin Chan Si zongjiao luyou de chanye kaifa 论柏林禅寺宗教旅游的产业开发 [An analysis of the economic circumstances and management of contemporary Chinese Buddhist monasteries]. Shijiazhuang Xueyuan Xuebao 石家庄学院学报, 9(2), 100–104.
21.
LaidlawJ.MairJ. (2019). Imperfect accomplishment: The Fo Guang Shan short-term monastic retreat and ethical pedagogy in Humanistic Buddhism. Cultural Anthropology, 34(3), 328–358. https://doi.org/10.14506/ca34.3.02
22.
McRaeJ. (2003). Seeing through Zen: Encounter, transformation, and genealogy in Chinese Chan Buddhism. University of California Press.
23.
NiP. (2021). Theories of the heart-mind and human nature in the context of globalization of Confucianism today. Dao, 20(1), 25–47. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11712-020-09760-x
24.
SharfR. H. (2002). Coming to terms with Chinese buddhism: A reading of the treasure store treatise. University of Hawai`i Press.
25.
SlingerlandE. (2013). Body and mind in early China: An integrated humanities-science approach. Journal of the American Academy of Religion, 81(1), 6–55. https://doi.org/10.1093/jaarel/lfs094
26.
SundararajanL. (2015). Understanding emotion in Chinese culture: Thinking through psychology. Springer Press.
27.
WangY. (2017). Historical dictionary of Chan Buddhism. Rowman & Littlefield.
28.
WhyteM. (1974). Small groups and political rituals in China. University of California Press.
29.
XuJ. (2017). The good child: Moral development in a Chinese preschool. Stanford University Press.
30.
XuanF.KrauseC. (2020). The road to the rise of leadership in Chinese Buddhism in the post-Zhao Puchu era. In KrauseC. (Ed.), When a new generation comes up: Buddhist leadership in contemporary China (pp. 12–51). Special supplement of the Journal of the Oxford Centre for Buddhist Studies. Oxford Centre for Buddhist Studies.
31.
YangF.WeiD. (2005). The Bailin Buddhist temple: Thriving under communism. In YangF.TamneyJ. B. (Eds.), State, market, and religions in Chinese societies (pp. 63–87). Brill.
32.
YangJ. (2015). Unknotting the heart: Unemployment and therapeutic governance in China. Cornell University Press.
33.
YangJ. (2018). Mental health in China: Change, tradition, and therapeutic governance. Polity Press.
34.
YaoY.GombrichR. (2017). Christianity as model and analogue in the formation of the ‘humanistic’ buddhism of Tài Xū and Hsīng Yún. Buddhist Studies Review, 34(2), 205–237. https://doi.org/10.1558/bsrv.35392
35.
YüC.-F. (1992). P’u-t’o Shan: Pilgrimage and the creation of the Chinese Potalaka. In NaquinS.YüC.-F. (Eds.), Pilgrims and sacred sites in China (pp. 190–245). University of California Press.
36.
ZhangL. (2015). Cultivating happiness: Psychotherapy, spirituality, and well-being in a transforming urban China. In van der VeerP. (Ed.), Handbook of religion and the Asian city: Aspiration and urbanization in the twenty-first century (pp. 315–332). University of California Press.
37.
ZhangL. (2020). Anxious China: Inner revolution and politics of psychotherapy. University of California Press.
38.
ZhangX. 张晓燕 (2011). Lun siyuan guanli yu kaifa de xiandai jizhi 论寺院管理与开发的现代机制 [On the present-day mechanisms of temple governance and development]. Hebei Xuegan 河北学刊, 31(5), 222–225.
39.
ZhaoL.JohnN. (2019). The concept of ‘sharing’ in Chinese social media. In Selected papers of #AoIR2019: The 20th annual conference of the association of Internet researchers. Brisbane, Australia. 2–5 October.
