Author: Qinming Gu
I conducted this interview in a very small office beside the main hall of the temple.
The woman sitting in front of me looked very young. She wore glasses and spoke in a soft voice. Almost as soon as I finished a question, she would have an answer. Sometimes, getting to a funny part of a story, she would start laughing herself; other times, when I asked something a little too big, she would quite frankly tell me, “I haven’t thought about that.”
She didn’t quite fit the vague image of a “female Taoist priest” I had in mind before coming.
Of course, this image hadn’t appeared out of nowhere. It came from the literary works I had read about women pursuing spiritual lives, from films, from the internet and the short videos I had scrolled through. There seemed to be something inherently distant about the word “Taoist.” I associated it with quietness, with having understood something about life, with leaving the secular world behind. Once someone is called a Taoist priest, it becomes very easy for us to imagine the rest of her based on pre-existing stereotypes: that perhaps she shouldn’t get angry easily; she should have clear answers to many of life’s questions, perhaps even possess some supernatural ability according to Chinese myths. She should, somehow, have figured everything out with the wisdom that comes with Taoism.
But she didn’t seem particularly interested in keeping up this distance. She spoke quickly and directly. She would tell me that she was tired, that a visitor had annoyed her, that sometimes, coming back to her room at night, she just wanted to go to sleep.
Taoism had actually been part of her life for a very long time. She was often ill as a child, and her family, who already believed in Taoism, had even arranged for her to have a “divine godmother” at a temple. But back then, she hadn’t understood any of this as a choice of her own. After graduating from university, she had planned to go to graduate school and study law. She prepared for the entrance exam for a year, only to suddenly decide, just before the exam, that she didn’t want to take it anymore. During those two days, instead of entering the examination room, she went to Baiyun Temple in Wenzhou and stayed there. Afterwards, she worked outside the temple and spent time with other Taoist practitioners. It took another year or so before she finally decided to enter the temple where she lives now.
She didn’t describe this decision as some mysterious revelation.
“There wasn’t really any particular reason,” she said. “I just wanted to leave secular life. I wanted to become a Taoist.”
Her family didn’t strongly oppose her. They believed in Taoism themselves; they just didn’t really want her to spend her whole life this way. At first, she said, they even thought she would probably only stay for a few years. But in her own mind, she had already decided that she would stay for the rest of her life.
After entering the temple, she found that her own expectations of the place began to change, too.
She described the temple as an interesting place somewhere in between. Some people go into the mountains to practice in solitude, while others live in cities. The temple is quiet, but it has never really left the world behind. Every day, she still meets all sorts of people, listens to their stories about work, marriage, family, and the things that trouble them. Sometimes, after hearing a visitor’s story, she finds herself asking: if this happened to me, what would I do?
When there are Taoist rituals to perform, she spends most of the day performing them. Otherwise, after breakfast, they gather for morning prayers and read the scriptures, and then she goes to clean the hall she is responsible for and sees what else needs to be done that day. If she has some free time, she reads or learns new ritual practices. When a visitor comes looking for her, they go upstairs, make a pot of tea, and sit down to talk.
On particularly busy days, after hours of chanting and performing rituals, she returns to her room and immediately lies down to sleep for two hours before getting up to wash. By then, she is too tired to do much else with her evening.
She also scrolls on her phone and watches short videos. She likes Yue opera, a traditional form of Chinese opera. Before entering the temple, when she lived in Hangzhou, she would go to a performance almost every week. She doesn’t go out as much now, but occasionally, if there is a performance she really wants to see, she will still go in the evening and come back to the temple afterwards. Her friends laugh at her for being so young and already living “like an old lady.”
I later realized that what surprised me wasn’t really any of these things themselves. A young person watching a play, scrolling on her phone, wanting to sleep when she is tired—these are all perfectly ordinary things. What I needed to ask myself was why, when it was a female Taoist priest doing them, I suddenly felt that they needed explaining.
She was very familiar with the things people imagined about Taoist priests.
She told me that some people enter a temple assuming that the priests know everything, that they can tell fortunes, perform magic, perhaps even communicate directly with the gods. People come up to her and immediately ask, “Master, can you tell my fortune?”
“But I actually don’t know how to tell fortunes,” she said.
Taoist priests, she explained, are people who have studied certain things, just as lawyers have studied law. “Really, we’re just ordinary people, too.”
But sometimes, people don’t seem to want her to be ordinary.
For a while, she had to interpret a lot of fortune sticks every day. Once, she was so tired that she fell asleep with her head on the table. Someone took a photo of her and posted it online, and people even began speculating that she must have gotten into the temple through connections.
The actual situation, she told me, was quite the opposite. She was the only person there who had approached the temple herself and stayed after passing its assessment.
I found it hard to forget this story.
She had only fallen asleep at a table for a little while. Somehow, a single photograph was enough for strangers to start writing the rest of her story.
They hadn’t seen what happened before the photograph. They had only seen a “Taoist priest” not behaving the way they thought a Taoist priest should, and everything they didn’t know was quickly filled in by what they imagined.
One word kept coming up throughout the interview: xiuxing, spiritual cultivation.
I had thought that, if I asked her what this meant, she would have a somewhat definite answer. But the first thing she said was that it was too big a word to decipher.
Some people think cultivation means chanting scriptures, meditating, and practicing internal exercises every day. Others think that living in a city and interacting with different people can also be cultivation. Everyone has their own way of doing it.
Her answer for herself was quite simple.
“If I live each day well and take good care of every visitor, that’s cultivation.”
She didn’t even think you had to enter a temple to practice it.
An ordinary person living their life well, taking care of their responsibilities, and putting effort into the things they enjoy could also be practicing cultivation. On the other hand, she didn’t agree with someone leaving behind their family and children, abandoning all these responsibilities for the sake of so-called spiritual practice.
She told me about a visitor who kept asking who they really were, what the ultimate meaning of life was. She had told them to first take care of their own life, take on the responsibilities they needed to take on, and do the things they liked. To live each day well and let themselves be a little happier.
This was very different from what I had imagined cultivation to be.
I had always thought of it as something far away. But as she spoke, I began to associate it with very simple things: doing what you need to do, taking responsibility.
I asked her whether, after becoming a Taoist priest, she still got annoyed, whether she still lost her temper.
“Of course,” she said, almost immediately.
She told me about a man who had come to draw a fortune stick a few days earlier. He was asking whether he should divorce his wife, while also admitting that there was another woman. The more she listened, the angrier she got. In the end, she only explained the meaning of the fortune to him. As for whether he should get divorced, she refused to make that decision for him. “That’s up to you.”
I asked what she did, then, when something really bothered her.
Her answer was much simpler than anything I had expected to hear about finding peace.
“Sleep.”
Sleep first. Once you have the energy, you can deal with it.
But the visitors didn’t only bring her things to be annoyed about.
She remembered another woman, older than her, who had been brave enough to leave a bad marriage and then change her career and start a different life. Over time, they had become friends. “She really inspires me,” she said. Seeing someone in her thirties start over made her think about how she herself was only in her early twenties. “What do I have to feel so sorry for myself about?” Even if she took a wrong turn, it wasn’t that frightening. She could try again.
People often go to a temple hoping to get answers from the priests. I hadn’t thought as much about what she was telling me now, about how she, too, could come to understand her own life a little differently through the people who came to see her.
Cultivation hadn’t taken away her frustrations or emotions. She still got tired, still got annoyed with people, still felt anxious about the things she hadn’t learned yet. When I asked which Taoist idea she agreed with most, she said, “Letting things take their natural course.” As she explained further, she eventually came back to a very simple sentence: “Living each day of my own life well.” She didn’t expect herself to reach a certain level of cultivation in this lifetime. She didn’t feel that she had to give it an endpoint.
I noticed this same lack of urgency when she spoke about reading the scriptures.
She recites them every day, but she doesn’t think she has understood all of them. When she doesn’t understand something, she looks it up, reads other sources. If she still doesn’t understand, she leaves it for a while. After reading it a few more times, reciting it a few more times, “maybe one day you’ll suddenly understand it yourself.”
She mentioned a saying: “Recite the scriptures ten thousand times, and their subtle meanings will become clear.”
Sometimes, if her mind is elsewhere, the chanting does feel boring. But when she really pays attention to what she is reading, she finds it interesting. Sometimes she even feels happy just reciting it.
I think this was what moved me most about the way she understood cultivation.
If she didn’t understand a passage, she could leave it for a while. If something didn’t make sense yet, she didn’t have to make sense of it immediately. She could give herself time to read it again, to live a little more, and perhaps understand it later.
The scripture itself hadn’t changed. But each time she returned to it, she might have changed a little. I began to understand cultivation this way, too: as something that continues through these very ordinary days, as she keeps learning, adjusting, and trying to understand.
Towards the end of the interview, I asked her what made her happiest about being a female Taoist priest, and what troubled her most.
She thought about it for a while and said that there didn’t seem to be anything that made her particularly happy, or anything that particularly troubled her. Sometimes, she had trouble handling relationships with other people. That could bother her. And happiness might just be learning something new that day.
Then she added, “It’s quite ordinary, too.”
I kept thinking about this sentence afterwards.
At least in the life she had described to me, cultivation was there, somewhere in all these ordinary things.