Young people and temple

With the popularity of "temple tours", those confused and anxious young people are no longer satisfied with simply burning incense, but want to find new answers to life in ancient temples. This article tells the stories of two eyewitnesses, revealing the confusion and anxiety of young people today. So, how did they find the meaning of life by volunteering in temples? Let's take a look.

Recently, it has become a trend for young people to escape from office buildings and switch to "physical work". The Douban group "Light Physical Work Exploration Alliance" attracted 30,000 young people to join soon after its establishment. On Xiaohongshu, more and more young people are leaving their jobs to set up stalls in the market and sell flowers in Yunnan.

It is not easy to survive in the workplace, and it is becoming easier for young people to quit their jobs than before.

Since February 2023, ticket orders for temple-related scenic spots have tripled compared to the same period last year. Among those who booked temple tickets, those born in the 1990s and 2000s accounted for nearly 50%. After the "temple tour" became popular, temple artifacts and peripherals were also sold out. The incense ash glass of Lama Temple and the eighteen-seed string of Lingyin Temple were widely sought after. Businessmen with a business vision also waited for opportunities to move. The earliest "Ci Cup" coffee of Yongfo Temple has now become a classic case of cross-border marketing.

Not only that, young people who are anxious about the future and confused about life are not satisfied with leaving the temple after burning a stick of incense, but choose to stay there as volunteers.

They come from far away and go up the mountain with questions, hoping to listen to wisdom and find answers or directions in the ancient temple nestled in the mountains and by the water.

Some people regard volunteering in a temple as a starting point for experiencing life, while others regard it as a temporary destination.

1. Quitting your job and traveling is actually not that happy

In the summer of 2021, Midori entered a large Internet company as a management trainee. Half a month after joining the company, she became a planning manager in a core department as she wished. Since then, she has continued to update #互联网打工日记 on Xiaohongshu, reviewing her own growth and sharing her work life.

A year ago, she wrote in her notes that having a job like this gave her independence and freedom, and the power to plan her own life, which she was happy and cherished.

But not long after, she stopped updating her workplace diary, and even rushed to the subway station after get off work to see the magnolias blooming, desperate to breathe in some fresh air. When the idea of ​​quitting her job came up, Midori was also surprised, and she couldn't figure it out. She had been preparing for this job from a long time ago, joining student clubs, interning at Fortune 500 companies, and she also developed a strong sense of professional identity after joining the company, but now, she just wants to quit.

She told Hedgehog Commune: "Being rooted in one position, I feel like I am nailed to the process. It seems that only after get off work can I truly become a thoughtful person."

Before making this decision, she thought about it for a long time. During that time, she tried hard to find the meaning of life and to make herself happy. Whenever she had free time, she would stroll around the city, watch the elderly play cards in the Hydrangea Park, and even go to the Yangtze River alone to buy a boat ticket for two yuan to watch the sunset.

Although Midori had not yet thought about her post-retirement plan and the destination of her next life journey, she still decided to start again. A firm voice in her heart said: "This time, don't live for your resume, live for your experience."

Midori wrote on Xiaohongshu: "Being sick will make your competitive heart suddenly become indifferent to the world." On the 15th day after recovering from the new crown, she embarked on her first trip after quitting her job.

With mountains, seas and cultural landscapes, she chose Shandong as her first stop. In order to see the winter in Jinan from Lao She's perspective, she came to Jinan and rode a shared bike to Lao She's former residence. On that day, she also updated her Xiaohongshu account. A user left a message under her note: "Midori's diary is really healing." She replied: "Your life is also healing you."

After visiting Jinan, she came to Qingdao and spent the whole day wandering around aimlessly, went to the vegetable market to chat with old men, went to the beach to enjoy the sea breeze, and even ate a whole can of canned pineapples by herself at the beach.

I imagined her eating canned pineapple in my mind, which was poetic yet a bit absurd. This sense of absurdity has also appeared in many literary works. The writer Zhi'an once pointed out that "absurdity is actually the extreme of anxiety."

Sure enough, Midori continued, "You know, I don't feel happy at all doing these things."

In her imagination, quitting her job and traveling should be extremely happy and free, but during the trip, she only felt numbness, no happiness. Along the way, she was busy rushing, busy making travel guides, busy taking pictures, and the idea of ​​thinking about the meaning of life during the trip was long forgotten.

After the trip, she concluded: "Perhaps traveling can heal others, but it can't heal me. Instead of expecting to be healed by a chance beautiful scenery or enlightened by a chance passerby, I'd rather go to a place where I can face life issues head-on."

She began to recall that during the period before she quit her job, in order to offset the meaninglessness of her work, she had gone to the Yangtze River Conservation Base to interview volunteers and had also picked up trash on the street where she lived. These two things made her feel the long-lost happiness.

After thinking it through, she became more determined. "We have always been told that labor is the most glorious thing. In my opinion, labor is not necessarily about going to work for a paycheck, but about any output that can benefit others and satisfy oneself. In such labor, I can truly feel the meaning of life."

Midori immediately found her direction after resigning and went to volunteer at a temple.

2. From indifference to “openness” in the temple

At the beginning of this year, Xianghai Temple happened to be recruiting New Year volunteers, and she signed up without hesitation. A week later, she came to Tongxiang City, Jiaxing, Zhejiang, where Xianghai Temple is located. Tongxiang is close to Wuzhen, and Midori clearly remembers that she was the only one who got off the Tongxiang high-speed railway station that day in a full train.

The unfamiliarity of a foreign land made her a little scared and she was wary of everything. She recalled: "After I got the taxi, I moved my luggage to the trunk myself. The driver talked to me on the way, but I ignored him."

In this way, Midori arrived at the temple with a cautious and closed heart. At this time, she felt that her psychological defenses were being disintegrated. She said: "Seeing such a solemn, clean and orthodox temple, my original worries disappeared."

Compared to the bustling Lingyin Temple and Faxi Temple in Hangzhou, Xianghai Temple’s first impression on Midori was its tranquility.

Unexpectedly, Xianghai Zen Temple assigns work to volunteers based on their interests. Here, you just need to do what you are best at. Midori became a volunteer in the photography team, responsible for photographing the environment of the temple, the working scenes of the masters, meditation classes and ceremonies. The working hours are from 7:30 in the morning to 4 in the afternoon. The original life state of "working at sunrise and resting at sunset" is verified here.

Before one experiences for oneself what kind of changes temple life can bring to a person, even if one sees the answer with one's own eyes, one may not take it seriously.

For Midori, the rules of life in the city since she was a child emphasized the sense of boundaries between people. When she first came here, she set up a line of defense against all strangers around her. She didn't care about others, nor did she allow anyone to pry into her heart.

On the New Year's Eve of the Year of the Rabbit, Midori stood guard in front of the main hall. Most of the benefactors who came to burn incense were families. She suddenly felt homesick. At this time, the sound of fireworks suddenly rang out in the distance. Midori took out her mobile phone and the calendar showed 2023. She murmured to herself: "It turns out that the new year has arrived."

Seeing her sadness, a fellow volunteer from Tongxiang invited Midori to her home. Midori thought it was just a polite remark: "I often say this at work, but I didn't expect that she would come to see me the next day. I was very touched."

Gradually, the politeness and alienation shaped by modern society were transformed by the compassionate and altruistic atmosphere here. She also became less defensive and felt her heart gradually opening up.

One night, she cried loudly in the arms of a sister whom she had just met for 10 minutes. She said: "This kind of thing would never have happened before, and this is the magic of temple life - here, no one cares about each other's identity or status, it's just pure communication, listening, sharing feelings, and getting responses, without the entanglement of interests and relationships, communication has become the most essential and purest form."

The knot in Midori's heart that had been bothering her for more than 20 years was actually solved with just a few words from the other party. The saying "the great way is simple" was verified at this time.

Because of some traumas in her childhood, Midori was very afraid of the dark. Her sister did not ignore her, but listened carefully and said to her solemnly: "Don't think about why you are afraid of the dark. It doesn't matter if you are afraid. You have to believe that you have the answers to any problem and you have the ability to solve it. Because you are complete in nature."

After hearing this, Midori felt relieved: "If I get scared again the next time the night comes, then I'll be scared. It doesn't matter. One day I'll understand where this fear comes from and where I should put it."

Up to now, Midori has been in Xianghai Zen Temple for more than three months, and she has clearly felt that more and more young people are coming to the temple to volunteer.

The first batch of volunteers were mostly in their 40s and 50s, mostly retired middle-aged and elderly people. After the second batch, the proportion of people born in the 1990s and 2000s increased significantly, and by the third batch, all of them were college students. She added: "Half of them came after seeing my sharing on Xiaohongshu."

Midori also saw a commonality in this group of young people. At first, everyone had various anxieties and wanted to seek solutions. But later, they paid less and less attention to themselves and began to want to help others and create value to the best of their ability. The truth that the temple taught everyone is difficult to summarize, but it is easy to perceive.

3. Find the anchor of life

If divided by time, temple volunteers can be simply divided into long-term volunteers and short-term volunteers. Midori is the former and Eva belongs to the latter.

By chance, Eva saw that Beijing Fangshan Yaoshi Temple was recruiting volunteers, so she found a free weekend and traveled across the city. Unlike Midori, Eva did not set any questions for this trip before coming, but the busy temple life gave her peace and satisfaction, and she also found sleep unexpectedly.

For a long time, Eva suffered from anxiety and insomnia, which was related to her challenging work environment and her own personality. Eva's career experience is not only rich, but also has been in the right place at the right time.

On Xiaohongshu, she introduced herself as a senior variety show producer, operator of a large Internet company, and brand content consultant. Faced with the transition between these three professional identities, Eva thinks it is a very natural thing, and she simply summarized it with four words: "go with the flow."

Eva once had a colleague who had worked in a long video company for more than five years, and he wanted to stay there even if he had to take a pay cut or a job demotion. In this regard, she said that she did not want to have a certain inertia and wanted to see growth at any stage.

On the road to changing industries, Eva was not without hesitation. Headhunters once offered her some sugar-coated offers, and there were times when she questioned her decision. But no matter what, she firmly believed that she must keep going uphill. If she persisted, the road would become wider and wider, and she would be able to do more and more things.

But the whole process was not easy, the pressure continued to increase, and Eva had been trying her best to adjust herself, but her condition was still up and down.

During the two days and two nights she volunteered at the temple, she temporarily pulled herself away from her original life, and the tasks one after another temporarily occupied her body and mind. She attended evening classes, washed the offering plate, placed the offerings, sorted out the scriptures, cut flowers and arranged flowers, cleaned the yard, washed vegetables in the dining hall, and took time to play with cats and dogs. She slept very soundly every night, and the physical fatigue actually relaxed her tense nerves.

According to her recollection, that weekend, Yakushiji Temple was unprecedentedly busy. With the birthday of Guanyin Bodhisattva, Buddhist conversions, and the passing of the master, everyone in the temple was busy. Monks and lay Buddhists from other temples also came here, and people came to participate in an endless stream.

After spending a fulfilling and busy weekend at Yakushiji Temple, Eva was inspired to use the weekend to experience "100 lifestyles" to benefit others and herself and find more meaning in life.

Eva mentioned: "Many times, hard work cannot change the current situation in life. When I have no way to change objective factors, I can only do as many actions as possible to make myself happy, in a better state, and to keep growing and improving at all times."

Soon after communicating with Eva, she checked two more boxes on her "to do list" - she would build a house by herself, doing everything from the architectural layout, decoration style to soft and hard furnishings; she would give herself half a year to give up everything she had worked hard for in Beijing and go to work and live in the south.

She divided the experience of "100 Lifestyles" into four types. The first is the professional type, such as script-killing DM, wedding planner, and florist; the second is the companionship type, such as assisting the blind in running and mountain climbing partners, etc. (Partners: a new type of social relationship in a vertical field based on interests); the third way is skill improvement, such as building houses and diving, etc. The last one is the public welfare type, such as mobile children's library manager, crocheting small octopuses for premature babies, helping 88 young people improve their workplace skills (29 people have been helped), etc.

She not only hopes to help more people through actions, but also hopes to influence more young people with her strong execution ability and help them find the anchor of life. Eva said: "Instead of thinking about it all the time, the most important thing is to take the first step bravely."

4. Temples take in people who have saved themselves

Much later, when looking back on her career choice, Midori mentioned: "When I re-examined that job, I found that the choice I made was not based on my interests and hobbies, but I had been using society's standards and referring to other people's life goals to set my own life goals."

Eva said: "I need to produce results regularly, so I put pressure on myself. Even if others don't ask me to do anything, I will ask myself to do it."

Faced with the fading of their sense of meaning, Midori and Eva chose different attitudes and solutions at different stages of life. Although their paths were different, they tried to save themselves and succeeded. Even the realization of their values ​​and self-meaning converged on the same coordinate - "self-benefit and benefiting others". Coincidentally, this view can also be found in Buddhist scriptures.

Whether it is temple tours or temple volunteering, the temple itself cannot solve the problem of hardship. As the golden rule of new-age entrepreneurs, the Navar Code, says: Doctors cannot make you healthy, nutritionists cannot make you slim, teachers cannot make you smart, Zen masters cannot make you calm, wise men cannot make you rich, and coaches cannot make you strong. Ultimately, you must take responsibility for your own salvation.

Author: Yi Tong; Editor: Director

Source: Hedgehog Commune (ID: ciweigongshe), observation and research on the Internet content industry.