Crowds swarm to the Lingguang Temple in Beijing on Feb 19, the first day of the lunar new year. Jiang Dong / China Daily

Life in crisis

Despite a rise in the number of Protestants and Catholics, Buddhism remains the most popular religion in China. More than 6.7 percent of the population claim to be followers, according to a 2012 survey by Peking University. A report by the Pew Research Center in December of the same year estimated it was more than 18 percent, giving China the world's largest Buddhist population.

Wang Zuo'an, director of the State Administration for Religious Affairs, has attributed the swell in followers to the transformation of society and the divide in social classes. "People's living standards are rising, but competition is getting fiercer and uncertainties are increasing," the Study Times recently quoted him as saying.

Wen Jinhua, a 47-year-old full-time volunteer at Longquan Monastery, said overwhelming workplace stress resulted in her looking to Buddhism as a spiritual anchor. She was previously a white-collar worker with a foreign enterprise in Beijing.

"I wanted to be the best worker in the office. But I couldn't," she said. "The mental pressure that created backfired and I was left in state of constant fear and distress."

After failing to solve her problems through psychological counseling, in 2007 Wen quit her job and joined a foundation run by the monastery. "Previously I'd spent my life focusing only on my own feelings," she said. "Then I discovered that happiness can only be achieved through reaching out to others."

Today she helps manage Master Xuecheng's blog and his Web chats with other masters and Internet users. Through proofreading the questions and answers, she said she has found many other people who are going through similar situations to the one she found herself in several years ago.

"People have all sorts of worries and distress they simply cannot solve by themselves," she said. "My work is like looking at a microcosm of society."

Lu Yunfeng, a researcher in religious studies at Peking University's Department of Sociology, said Buddhism is quickly gaining momentum in urban areas. In places without easy access to temples, he said, lay Buddhists are congregating at homes or office buildings.

He said traditional Buddhists usually meet bi-monthly, but now they congregate weekly and hold "classics classes", a kind of Buddhist Sunday school, to teach and take care of their children during worship.

"More and more intellectual elites are devoting themselves to Buddhism, which will have a profound influence to the development of the religion," he added.