Not merely reading, but reading in company—forty evenings beside the light Nan Huai-chin left behind.
Nan Huai-chin (1918–2012) was a rare modern Chinese teacher who spoke of Confucianism, Buddhism, and Daoism by a single light. He grounded learning not in accumulated “knowledge” but in becoming a person, placed the scriptures before later treatises, and valued direct meditative practice above all. This room does not offer a conventional biography; it invites us to sit beside the lamp and read together.
Our guiding thread is Seven Days of Southern Chan, the record of seven days of talks delivered in February 1994 at the Chan hall of Nanputuo Temple in Xiamen, formally titled Research on Life Science and the Practice of Chan. We divide it into forty installments, one evening at a time. The talks are not reproduced wholesale: each essay retraces the argument in new words and quotes the original only briefly at key points.
Forty readings, one each evening beside the lamp. Part one is public; parts two and three are coming soon. From part four onward, essays will open gradually on the members’ shelves.
In 2008, approaching ninety, Nan Huai-chin delivered his last major sequence of lectures: twenty talks on traditional cultivation of body, mind, nature, and life. As with the Seven Days series, every guide is newly written here and quotations are kept to a minimum. This second series reads with him from both intellectual and everyday perspectives.
Twenty talks in all. The preface, first three readings, and special essay are available now; later parts will follow.