This meeting with the Buddhist writer, researcher, and trained chaplain Chenxing Han is an opportunity to explore the interplay between our ideas of Buddhism (heavily interspersed with social and personal expectations, along with colonial projections) and the living fabric of our own life—our own attempts to be good human beings happening against the background of our vulnerability.

Chenxing will talk about some of the issues she covered in her widely reviewed book Be the Refuge: Raising the Voices of Asian American Buddhists, and also talk about her new book that has just come out, one long listening. This session will be of interest to those who want to understand the social fabric of modern Buddhism in the West, challenge colonial assumptions, learn about someone’s personal experience of Buddhist chaplaincy, and simply meet someone who, like many of us, is working to embody the Dharma in a deeply personal and unique way. 

This meeting is a part of our Monthly Speaker series—an opportunity to meet exceptional contemplatives and researchers who are bringing change to the world.

“Chenxing Han’s luminous spiritual practice of friendship, as the Buddha said, is not ‘half of the holy life—it is the whole of it.’ Her journey as a Buddhist chaplain is grounded, unmade, regrounded by an immense understanding of her relations with other humans and nonhumans as instances of companionship, transient yet eternal in its recurring resonance. Each meeting unfurls with tenderness, intimacy, generosity. This sustained climate of sacred concordance—with friends, strangers, patients, teachers, winds, birds, trees—is a flower nourished by, as Han writes, one long listening. In a world deprived of listening and overfilled with pain and grief, Han’s habit of listening is a habit of love.

“Han’s writing, like her presence, is a radiant stream of wakeful, loving life. She plays with multiple layers of language, translation, legibility, and karmic force as she listens to the poetry, calamity, comedy, and mystery of life unfolding. The dreamlike vignettes of her own and others’ moments of despair and delight, sickness and stability, flow like a vast river, with no beginning, no end, now terribly agitated, now exquisitely calm. Reader: Exhale deeply, empty yourself to listen to Han listening. Watch how bodily and psychic pains could turn into smiles in this magic river of long, long listening.”
—Quyên Nguyễn-Hoàng, translator of Chronicles of a Village by Nguyễn Thanh Hiện