During the COVID-19 pandemic, Hong Kong Chinese adolescents who reported higher levels of mindfulness experienced lower stress, greater life satisfaction, and stronger beliefs in their ability to savor positive experiences. The findings suggest that mindfulness may support well-being in adolescents facing significant stressors.
The revival of Buddhism and Chan, along with the growing popularity of transnational meditation practices, has opened new opportunities for Chinese women to practice meditation in contemporary China. Over the past two decades, more Han Chinese monastics and lay people have engaged in practices like samādhi, vipassanā, and mindfulness, often traveling to meditation centers in Southeast Asia. Despite restrictions on women in Chan halls, some nuns and laywomen have traveled to learn meditation, and returning female travelers have played key roles in organizing retreats and establishing meditation centers. The transnational meditation movement is thus influencing gender equality and the development of Chinese Buddhism, with female meditators helping to reposition the Chan School.
In contemporary Chinese Buddhist communities, transnational meditation practices such as vipassanā and mindfulness are being adapted as a trendy way to heal depression. Based on an ethnographic study of a meditation retreat at a Buddhist monastery in South China, the paper describes how monastics promoted a hybrid approach combining embodied Buddhist meditation, mindfulness exercises from secular programs, and psychoanalytic exercises to treat depression in lay people. The author argues that this hybrid mode reflects younger-generation Buddhist communities responding to a societal yearning for individualized bodily practices and a subjective turn toward self-reflexivity, re-contextualizing meditation within Chinese Buddhism.