Embodied Practice and the Rearticulation of Ethical Life in Chinese Buddhist Mindfulness

The same act of attending to breathing may function as a step on a Buddhist path, a stress-regulation technique, or an exercise in a public meditation course. This article asks how the relations that give embodied attention religious and ethical force are reorganized when practice moves across institutions. It first traces how Indic sati/smṛti was rendered through Chinese nian (念) and incorporated into broader Chinese contemplative systems, then examines modern reformulations by Taixu, Yinshun, Sheng Yen, and Hsing Yun, and finally compares three primary contemporary settings: Dharma Drum Mountain, Fo Guang Shan, and modified Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction in Chinese healthcare, using published ethnographies as participant-level corroboration. The comparison follows five questions: who authorizes the practice, how entry techniques are organized, how bodily experience is interpreted, what conduct is expected, and how efficacy is judged. Three recurrent configurations emerge as ideal types—therapeutic decoupling, hybrid translation, and Buddhist normative reintegration. Bodily awareness acquires ethical significance when sensation and affect are linked to discernment, restraint, relational responsibility, communal discipline, and a horizon of cultivation that can order action beyond immediate self-regulation. This relational account shifts the analysis of Buddhist modernity toward the decoupling and recoupling of normative connections across institutions.