A Development of the Heart: Popular Buddhist Engagements With the Xin in Contemporary China

Abstract

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.