The Ladder of Time

Summary

What do I take from my father before I lose him, and how do I prepare to heal from a wound that has no cure? 

In this sixth and final episode Kin opens with his father's near-fatal fall from a ladder while pruning trees during COVID lockdown, using it as a lens to reflect on aging, mortality, and anticipatory grief. He then turns to what his father's philosophy of death and forgiveness — captured in a recorded chant of blessing for listeners and his father's counsel to "smile, not cry" when a loved one dies — have taught him about parenting, anger, and inherited wounds. Reflecting on the values, storytelling, and unspoken love passed down through his working-class Cantonese immigrant household, and on how he is consciously repeating and correcting those patterns with his own children, Kin closes the series by embracing "strong agnosticism" as a stance toward qi, healing, and knowledge itself, and urging listeners to seek out genuine disagreement — popping their own epistemic bubbles — as the surest path to growth.

See also:

• Lucy Allais on Forgiveness https://philosophybites.com/podcast/lucy-allais-on-forgiveness/ 
• Dr. Rima Vesely-Flad on Hard Knock Radio: Baldwin, Lorde, and the Discipline of Liberation https://kpfa.org/episode/hard-knock-radio-july-3-2026/ 
• Vesely-Flad 2026 - The Fire Inside: The Dharma of James Baldwin and Audre Lorde https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/790233/the-fire-inside-by-rima-vesely-flad-phd/ 
• Medine, Carolyne M Jones - bell hooks, Black Feminist Thought, and Black Buddhism_a Tribute https://scholarworks.iu.edu/iupjournals/index.php/jwp/article/download/5479/440/24124  
• Nguyen - 2018 “Escape the echo chamber” https://aeon.co/essays/why-its-as-hard-to-escape-an-echo-chamber-as-it-is-to-flee-a-cult 
• Schulz - On Being Wrong https://ed.ted.com/lessons/on-being-wrong-kathryn-schulz 

Dr. Kin Cheung is Priscilla Payne Hurd Chair in the Arts and Humanities and Associate Professor of East and South Asian Religions at Moravian University, where he chairs the Religion and Society Department and Philosophy Department. His research investigates how contemporary agents use Buddhist doctrine and ritual practices in Chinese and American contexts as well as transnational networks. Topics include Buddhists in relationship with healing, meditation, ethical dilemmas, economics, capitalism, secularism, whiteness, masculinity, science, and technology. He is editor of Teaching Asia during a Resurgence of Anti-Asian Racism  (Association for Asian Studies, 2024) and co-editor of Buddhism and Healing in the Modern World  (University of Hawai‘i Press, 2024). 

Find Dr. Cheung at moravian.academia.edu/KinCheung and on X: x.com/ProfKinCheung  

Read his latest (open-access) article "A Chinese American Node of Healing: Taiji, Acupuncture, Qigong, and Buddhist Medical Arts" published in Transnational Asia here: transnationalasia.rice.edu/index.php/ta/article/view/127.

Brought to you by Axis Mundi Media, Between Qi and Science is a limited series from the Institute for Religion, Media, and Civic Engagement (IRMCE), in collaboration with the Asian Pacific American Religions Research Initiative (APARRI) through generous funding from the Henry Luce Foundation as part of the Under Gods project. 

Host: Dr. Kin Cheung

Executive Producer: Dr. Bradley Onishi

Producer: Andrew Gill

Original Music, Scoring, and Engineering: Scott Okamoto

Story Editor: Dr. Leah Payne

Production Assistance: Kari Onishi

Cover Art: Eric Zwierzynski