Chenxing Han: Listening in Every Register

Writer and Buddhist chaplain Chenxing Han joins Nicole to widen what listening can mean. She begins in Buddhist temples—not only the chanting, but the knives on the cutting board, the kitchen that sounds boisterous at one temple and completely silent at another where the meal is eaten in meditation—and arrives at a line that reframes the whole show: temples are listening salons in their own way. Chenxing is the author of Be the Refuge: Raising the Voices of Asian American Buddhists, built from interviews with eighty-nine people, and One Long Listening, a memoir of grief, friendship and spiritual care. She talks about what high school students notice in a temple that adults have stopped seeing, why she never calls a wandering mind a distraction, and what her cello teacher means by saying we can only place our attention in one place at a time. Along the way she makes a claim worth sitting with: that the practice of listening rests on a foundation of rest. A generous, unhurried conversation for anyone who has been told to listen better and never told what that would actually require.