buddhism

www.chengduliving.com — The Moms and I followed my good friend Zhuang deep into the hills west of Chengdu on a day trip in search of golden gingko trees. We found them surrounding a Buddhist temple.

www.china-underground.com — Diyu, the Traditional Chinese Hell, based on Buddhism concept of Naraka, is an underground maze with various levels and chambers, to which souls are taken after death to atone for the sins they committed when they were alive.

www.speakingofchina.com — “Do you believe in God?” The question, asked by a teenage girl with a sweet boy cut and a pink clip in her hair, mentally knocked me over in front of the crowd at the first English corner I attended in Purple Mountain Park. I knew what the answer was, but I didn’t know how to say it in front of people who clung to my every word, as if it were the gospel.

speakingoffaith.publicradio.org — Put the words "religion" and "China" in a sentence together, and Western imaginations may go to indifference at best, to brutal repression at worst. Yet in grand historical perspective, China is a crucible of religious and philosophical thought and practice. Anthropologist and filmmaker Mayfair Yang says that the upheavals of the 20th century created an amnesia — in the West as in China itself — about this rich, pluralistic spiritual inheritance. She traces some of this story for us, and describes a subtle new revival of reverence and ritual.