Hope Podcast: Featuring Matta Zheng, MDiv candidate

On this episode of the Hope Podcast, we hear from third year MDiv candidate Matta Zheng who teaches us about the interconnections between justice, the mundane, and hope.

MICHAEL FURMAN: Welcome to the Hope Podcast, a podcast hosted by the Harvard Divinity School Office of Religious and Spiritual Life, where we talk to HDS students about their spiritual lives, what hope means to them, and how they work to cultivate it daily. 

My name is Michael Furman, one of the chaplain interns in the Office of Religious and Spiritual Life. Today, I sat down and talked with third-year MDiv candidate Matta Zheng. First, I just want to say thank you so much for coming and chatting with us today. We love to start these just by giving you a chance to introduce yourself and then sharing with us a little bit about your spiritual autobiography. 

MATTA ZHENG: Thanks for having me. It's fun to do this. My name is Matta. I am a graduating MDiv student, so finishing up here. And I use any pronouns. I come from California. I am a Chinese American dude, and I'd like to introduce myself as a queer Buddhist to set the tone of what people can expect from who I am. 

I have really enjoyed my time at Divinity School, and I think what I came in hoping for is what I got out of it, which was to strike a balance between having extra time before committing to really long-term life plans to develop both intellectually and spiritually at the same time. And HDS and the spaces proximate to it that I've spent time in while a student at HDS have been really good occasions for that kind of hybrid growth. 

I was not raised a Buddhist. I was raised in a pretty staunchly atheist family. My parents are both post-cultural revolution immigrants from China, which a lot of my fellow Chinese American, Chinese diaspora people will understand that a lot of our families are really staunchly atheist because of the cultural revolution. 

So I found Buddhism around the same time that I figured out that I was queer, and those two processes were really merged for me. But as a result, coming out of college, I really felt I wanted just more knowledge about Buddhism, period. 

And it was really great over the last three years to learn an unbelievable amount of information from classes and all kinds of things here. And so I think my spiritual autobiography, as you put it, has been pretty straightforward in those regards, at least in the sense of what has brought me up here to HDS. 

MICHAEL FURMAN: Yeah. Thank you so much for sharing. And you touched on this a little bit already, the idea of HDS being a place to take a pause in those long-term plans but also explore aspects of yourself and others spiritually. And I'd be curious to know both what that experience was like and how you came to Harvard's Divinity School as the place to do that in, if you would share a little bit more about that? 

MATTA ZHENG: Yeah. So I should say-- and I think this is something some people feel a little disillusioned by when they get here. That at the end of the day, HDS is a graduate school. It's not a temple or a church. It's not a spiritual community in any explicit sense. 

And sometimes I think I've observed peers very unfortunately being really disappointed that they don't find a complete spiritual home here. And that's the reality of it being a school and a school that is for people of any or no religion, as HDS always makes clear. 

So it's important for people to come in clear-eyed about what this environment can do. And for me, that's been really helpful because I've really wanted to not just be surrounded by Buddhists only while also wanting to be around Buddhists a lot of the time. 

So having the opportunity to be at a school that has really rich diversity in those ways has been a really fantastic way to grow and nuance my own Buddhism without being confined to just a single way of groupthink, which is something that I don't think any of us want. So HDS in that way struck a really good middle ground for me. 

I would also say that coming to HDS brings you into contact with a lot of opportunities for full-fledged spiritual and religious community experience outside of campus. And so a lot of my experiences that would not have been possible had I not come to HDS, even though they technically had nothing to do with the school or the campus, were really facilitated by the relationships, the ideas that I was able to find here, or at least start developing here. 

And for me, HDS was ultimately my top choice out of a few divinity schools I applied to because I was looking for a divinity school that had a totally fused relationship with an academic university, which HDS does. And that's not entirely exclusive to HDS. There are plenty of divinity schools that do. 

But for me, part of my strong academic interest is in anthropology, and Harvard Divinity School is one of the few divinity schools in the country, or even the world, that has a very close capacity for students to learn across an anthropology department and the divinity school simultaneously. So that was really, really important to me. 

And ultimately, I think that was the factor that won out more than anything. I was only looking at multi-faith, multi-religious divinity schools. I was only looking at divinity schools that held really progressive values, and not just like queer-tolerant but really queer-centered led. 

MICHAEL FURMAN: And you touched so much on in a great way that I think is an experience a lot of people have that it's not just being at HDS, but also the communities that you get to build relationships with because of HDS that can be so fulfilling spiritually. But I do also want to uplift we were in the same Introduction to Ministry Studies section together, which is a small group where we-- our first semester is on campus, and we're developing these small projects for ourselves. 

And I feel like starting there and then now being in our last semester together, I have also seen so much of the good work you've done for this campus community and how it deals and thinks and works with Buddhism as a heritage tradition, and not simply another one of the religions in the milieu of what a Divinity School tries to maintain. And I'd be curious if you'd want to share a little bit more about what that experience has been sort of doing that work on campus as well, too. 

MATTA ZHENG: Sure. Yeah. So I'm the founding director of a group that started here on campus, and we're now growing past it called the Burning Refuge Collective. And it's been one of the most important and special and intensive undertakings of my life. And I think everybody I'm on that team with would agree that it's very intensive and very large effort. That also means an equivalent amount to us. 

We held our inaugural conference last year in 2024. We welcomed hundreds of people. We had seven keynote speakers from all over the world and country, and it was a fusion of an academic and a practitioner gathering to talk about the kind of deeply inculcated problems, which are typically ignored by-- structurally ignored of race, capitalism, colonialism in and through Buddhism. I'll say more about that in a second. 

And then in 2025, this past year, we expanded that to include a retreat, an intensive retreat, as well as expanding out the conference. And we formed into a really kind of fully fleshed social, spiritual liberation collective, as we like to call it, that works specifically through Buddhism. 

Now, all of that work really is framed by a problematic that really arose for me as soon as I stepped foot on HDS campus, and which I was already working through in our Intro to Ministry Studies class, as you talked about, which was that I saw here and through HDS, saw how pervasive of a problem it is throughout the world, really, the kind of blatant erasure of Asian history and contemporaneity from Buddhism. 

And that that process has resulted in a completely whitewashed, culturally sanitized version of Buddhism that is easily converted into commodity products for corporate and racial hierarchical gain. That, to me, is a huge problem. 

And it also is a huge problem to me, how there are Buddhist communities today that are extraordinarily conservative and are, in fact, regressing in terms of their treatment of women, treatment of queer and trans people, and just general perspective on sociopolitical issues altogether. And I think those two sets of issues are actually very deeply tied together, even though they're often seen as on opposite poles of the Earth. 

So in that Intro to Ministry Studies class, I was already thinking about what-- I was deeply in the midst of feeling, just extremely disappointed and heartbroken about learning all of this, as I had come to veterinary school being like, oh, my god, I'm going to learn all this stuff about Buddhism, it's going to be so great only to come and realize-- which in retrospect shouldn't have been that big of a surprise, like, oh, there's a lot of work to be done within Buddhism at the very first place. Like, it's not going to be this wonderful, magical experience through and through. There's really deep violence imbricated in this. 

And the idea is that started percolating in that section in which grew into the Burning Refuge Collective was really to just start at the place of soliciting kinship building amongst Buddhists and Buddhists adjacent people in the very first place. The issue is so complicated, the issues are so deep that there's no possible way that I or a few, or even a group of people could figure it all out, even understand the scope and depth and nature of the problem. 

The only way to be able to begin doing that is to cast a really wide net. And to our surprise and our joy, that net casting attracted a lot of interest and attention. And I think one phrase that we hear over and over again is like, oh, this is what I've been waiting for this whole time, and I didn't even know it. These were the questions I didn't know how to put into words before, but now I realize I've been asking these my whole life. 

So the intervention that we hope to be making in and also around and beyond Buddhism is to fuse the questions of our social and our spiritual liberation, which when we point that out, like, oh, it's surprising, actually, how often those two things get divorced in very subtle and implicit ways, or sometimes very explicit and very direct ways. 

So it's not a very complicated intervention. It's not a very highfalutin idea. And we are doing it through this specific and therefore limited vantage of Buddhism. But for me, that's been one of the great transformations for me while being at HDS is doing that work, realizing how central I want that to be in my life. And I didn't come in here thinking those things would be part of what I would do at all. I had no inkling about that before I arrived on campus. 

MICHAEL FURMAN: Yeah. And what I think is so inspiring about the way you describe the development of the Burning Refuge Collective, and really the ideas themselves, is that you came to this place expecting for it to be what it says it is, which is trying to be a model for inter-religious life across hopefully the United States and maybe beyond, and immediately saw concerns that you knew if they're happening here, translate nationwide and globally as well too. 

And to be able to, I think, synthesize all that into that form of kinship building, to say I have all these ideas that I'm working through and I hope somebody can just sit beside me or join me in working through them with me, and then acting on them is so much of what people aspire to do with not only their time at graduate school, but also just being a moral citizen or trying to be an active citizen as well, too. 

And I sort of call it the container of this podcast is this idea of hope, which means so many different things to so many different people. And we would be curious to know, in the context of all that you've shared today or in new contexts, what hope might mean to you or how you see it play out in your life? 

MATTA ZHENG: Yeah. Actually, I'll start with saying what I have learned hope is not. I have increasingly realized how upsetting and bizarre it is when people blanket over all of their hopelessness, all of their despondence, all of their rage and sadness and yada, yada yada, all the things happening in their lives in the world with certain techniques or technologies like mindfulness or meditation, where they just kind of institute a state of calm over themselves, or they institute a state of blissfulness. 

And those things are very important and amazing, and I really rely on those as well. And then it becomes really problematic when we stop there and we just bliss out for our own sake, and we completely divorce ourselves from the reality of our lives and the lives of others in the world. 

A teacher I once had once called that a cave on the dark side of the moon. You just get lost there. And to institute and insist upon an artificial state of calm in the face of catastrophe and disaster, I've started just outright naming that as spiritual insanity, in my view. 

It is actually very normal, very healthy, and actually the correct reaction to feel hopeless and to feel heartbroken when there are awful, incomprehensible things happening right in front of us, at least in my view. Of course, we also can't remain there, because then we will not be able to live and we won't be able to act. 

So in my view, traversing through feelings of hope and hopelessness is at least how I want to live my life. These states, these feelings I want them to be natural reactions to the reality at hand. And I also don't want to insist on myself residing in any of them beyond what is actually needed or appropriate. 

And even though that's kind of-- I don't want to be like, oh, and the secret trick is that's actually hope. But the truth is that when I feel really kind of filled with joy and amazing emotions and the endorphins are flooding and I feel so hopeful, that's actually not a very sustainable or real state of being. 

I think what is actually much more meaningful or grounded is being able to return to a state of baseline commitment and discipline and determination to what you're doing. So much of the work that we all do here just feels really mundane and quotidian and every day, most of the time. I think that's a good thing. It should feel like that. Otherwise, we're just writing crazy highs and falling into desperate lows all the time, which I'm tired of feeling like that. 

So in a kind of convoluted way, to get back to answering your question, I think that for me is the pragmatics of hope, the pragmatics of working towards something is moving through those states of hopefulness, hopelessness, joy and sorrow, celebration and devastation, but returning back to the solid Earth of our lives and of ourselves. Yeah. No emotion, no calmness, no groundedness, nothing like that should be forced on ourselves. 

MICHAEL FURMAN: And learning a kind of consistency, I think, as you say it, that to be able to have those days where we have the bliss but know that it's temporary, as is the hopeless, devastating feeling that can come as well too. And I think we would love to know that, as we all acknowledge, we do have those days, though, where we find ourselves in the pit of despair or on a spiritual high. 

And would be curious to know from you if there's anything that you do in the form of a ritual practice or a reading you find yourself turning back to or anything else that helps you maintain that consistency or find your way back to that middle ground, as you've sort of described it today.

MATTA ZHENG: Yeah. This is not going to be a widely helpful practice, I think, because it's just what makes sense for me and what I've experienced and come from. But at this moment in time, what I'm really savoring doing, especially when I'm in a negative emotional state, is just feeling it, not responding to it with a particular action or practice and then just feeling it. 

A really important advisor to me-- or I should say like spiritual mentor, advisor makes it sound academic. So a really important mentor to me once said, when you are feeling really angry or annoyed or really upset and you're trying to do all these things to relieve that emotion, don't you realize that you're just trying to distract yourself from what's actually happening? Which is you just feel bad. You just don't feel good. 

Why are you trying to move out of that so quickly? Which is something I definitely do. And realizing how many secondary emotions of being really angry, being really antsy, all those things at the core of a lot of them is just this feeling of feeling really awful, feeling really sad, to be honest, feeling really heartbroken. 

And helped me to see, oh, yeah, I really don't just let that feeling flower and do what it needs to do. Yeah, and it kind of very basic, elemental way, that's what I'm trying to do right now. I don't think that that's broadly helpful for all situations because yeah, that's just not going to work for everybody. 

MICHAEL FURMAN: But I do think it's helpful to have as an option on the table in those moments that the recognition that these feelings oftentimes do come for a reason and may be a sign of a lack of resource on one end or an injustice on another, or also just a delusion towards something good in our lives as well, too, those other high feelings that come as well, too. That there is something to be learned just sitting in them. 

And I almost hear from you a sense of-- the word that's coming to mind is a kind of a trust that you know where that middle ground is. Even if we don't need to rush back to it, that it's still somehow present in those other sorts of spectrums of emotions that come as well, too. 

Thank you so much for taking the time to sit down and have a chat with me today. I really appreciate it and look forward to graduating together in just a few weeks. 

MATTA ZHENG: Yeah, thank you. 

MICHAEL FURMAN: It's a wrap.