Looking Back at Charles Bridge: What Can It Make Us Think About? BK23

BK23 | Looking Back at Charles Bridge: What Can It Make Us Think About?— Religious Conflict and the Choices of Ordinary People, Seen Through Saints and Martyrs

Why does Charles Bridge stand crowded with saints and martyrs? Some were once condemned as criminals, imprisoned, or killed by those in power. Centuries later, Falun Gong practitioners facing persecution walked across the same bridge. What connects their stories? This book explores faith, science, persecution, media, and conscience—and asks a deeper question: Is my judgment truly my own?

A Note Before the Book

This book begins with the author’s personal experience of revisiting Prague’s Charles Bridge in 2026. When discussing the lives of saints, it seeks, wherever possible, to distinguish historically verifiable facts from religious tradition and later legend. When discussing religious freedom, persecution, and contemporary China, it distinguishes between government positions, reports by human rights organizations, and the author’s own reflections.

This book does not ask readers to accept any particular faith. Instead, it hopes to leave the judgment to the reader: understand first, then judge. When encountering people different from ourselves, we should not surrender our conscience and judgment to power, public opinion, or labels.

Prologue

Eight Years Later, Why Did I Walk Across Charles Bridge Again?

Photo caption: Falun Gong practitioners march across Charles Bridge in Prague on 19 Sep 2026, photograph: The Epoch Times

In 2018, I came to Prague for the first time. As I walked across Charles Bridge, I noticed the enormous sculptures lining both sides. They were unlike many religious sculptures I had seen before. They were not hidden deep inside churches, nor placed far away to be gazed upon from a distance.

They stood right beside the bridge. Some figures held books. Some embraced crosses. One had lions crouching at his feet. Beneath one group of sculptures was even a prison, with people confined behind iron bars. At the time, I had no idea who these people were.

I simply wondered: Why were there so many religious figures on a bridge?

Eight years later, in September 2026, I returned to Prague. This time, after the parade had ended, I deliberately walked across Charles Bridge again. I carried two mobile phones and photographed the sculptures one by one.

One side of the bridge was backlit, leaving many of the figures as little more than silhouettes. On the other side, the light fell from behind me, making the faces, hands, books, chains, animals, and inscriptions on the pedestals much clearer. After returning home, I began using AI and historical sources to identify these figures and search for their stories, one by one.

Only then did I realize that what I had photographed might be more than thirty groups of sculptures. It might be a history of European faith written in stone.

Here are saints, martyrs, missionaries, nuns, church leaders, and prisoners. Some are revered by millions today, yet in their own time they may have been treated as criminals.

Some were persecuted. Yet after religion itself acquired power, religious institutions also sometimes condemned other people’s books as “heresy” and even brought people of different beliefs before tribunals.

I gradually realized that the most important question raised by Charles Bridge is not whose statue is tallest, or whose story is most miraculous. It is a much more difficult question:

If I had lived in their time, where would I have stood?

If the government told me that someone was dangerous, would I have believed it?

If the media told me every day that a certain group of people was problematic, would I gradually stop caring about what was actually happening to them?

If I were merely a civil servant, a police officer, a teacher, or an ordinary employee, and my superior ordered me to enforce a regulation targeting a particular faith, what would I do? If none of it happened to me personally, would I tell myself:

“This has nothing to do with me”?

When I walked across Charles Bridge again in 2026, I was no longer seeing only sculptures. I was seeing questions that remain relevant even today.

Part I　

Today’s Saint May Have Been Yesterday’s Criminal

Chapter One　Saint Vitus: Why Did the Man Above the Lions Later Become a Patron Saint?

Saint Vitus: the young saint stands upon a rocky pedestal, while the lions at his feet refer to the traditional account of his martyrdom. Photograph by the author.

I photographed one particularly striking sculpture. A young man stands upon a rocky outcrop. Several lions gather around his feet. Carved into the stone is his name:

VITUS.

He is Saint Vitus. Anyone visiting Prague today can hardly avoid that name. One of the most famous buildings within Prague Castle is St. Vitus Cathedral.

But if we turn the clock back more than a thousand years, the name Vitus represented not glory, but an early Christian who suffered persecution.

According to Christian hagiographic tradition, he was persecuted by the Roman Empire because of his faith and was at one point thrown among lions. The lions beneath his feet on Charles Bridge are an artistic representation of that tradition.

Here we should first make an important distinction. Miracles described in the lives of saints are not the same as facts independently verified according to the standards of modern historical scholarship. We cannot prove today exactly what happened with the lions.

But that does not prevent us from seeing another very real historical phenomenon: A man once persecuted for his faith later became someone commemorated by an entire civilization.

That fact alone deserves reflection. Living within our own age, it is easy to fall into an illusion: What society considers right today must probably be right.

What the law prohibits today must probably be wrong. Whoever is unanimously condemned by public opinion today must probably be a bad person.

History tells us again and again: Not necessarily. Today, tourists stand beneath the statue of Saint Vitus and take photographs. No one regards him as a dangerous man. The state protects his statue. One of Prague’s most important cathedrals bears his name.

But what if we had actually lived in his time?

What we might have seen was simply a believer being punished by the state.

Then how would we have judged him?

Perhaps this is the first reminder Charles Bridge gave me: Do not judge whether a person is right or wrong merely by the position he occupies in the society of his own time.

Time sometimes reverses those positions completely. Those who hold power may disappear into history. Those who were thrown into prison may later be carved in stone.

Chapter Two　The Cross: Why Did an Executed Man Change the World?

The Crucifix and Calvary on Charles Bridge: golden Hebrew lettering can be seen surrounding the crucifix. Photograph by the author.

Continue walking and you come to the most immediately recognizable religious symbol on Charles Bridge: the Cross. Jesus is nailed upon it.

Today, few symbols in the world are more recognizable than the cross. It appears atop churches. It appears in cemeteries. It hangs from necklaces. Hundreds of millions of people regard it as sacred.

But what if we turn the clock back two thousand years?

The cross was not originally a sacred symbol. It was an instrument of execution. This creates an extraordinary historical contrast.

What people look up to today was once used to execute criminals. The person revered today by hundreds of millions was, within the political order of his own time, a condemned man.

Suppose mobile phones had existed then. Someone takes a single photograph of Jesus nailed to the cross and asks:

“Who won?”

The answer seems obvious. The Roman Empire won. It had armies. It had laws. It had courts. It had prisons.

It had punishments. The man on the cross had none of these. But pull the camera back across two thousand years, and the answer looks very different.

The Roman Empire has passed into history. The cross is found throughout the world. This, of course, cannot prove all the religious claims of Christianity.

It simply reminds us that the power we see before us is not necessarily the power that ultimately prevails. Human beings easily confuse “having power” with “being right.”

Who controls the government?

Who controls the law?

Who controls the media?

Who can silence the other side?

That side appears to have won. But the scale of history is not the same as the scale of present-day power.

Today’s victor is not necessarily history’s final victor. And those forced into silence today may not remain silent forever.

Now return to the sculpture of Jesus on the cross. The thirty statues of saints lining the balustrades of Charles Bridge have been described as an “open-air gallery of Baroque sculpture,” yet the earliest decoration on the bridge was this crucifix, first erected there in the fourteenth century.

Today, seven other sculptures associated with Jesus can still be seen on the bridge. Among the principal ones are the Crucifixion and Calvary on the north side—Jesus on a bronze cross, with the Virgin Mary and John the Evangelist beside him—and, opposite it on the south side, the Lamentation of Christ, in which Jesus, taken down from the cross, lies across Mary’s knees while Mary Magdalene kisses his hand.

There are also statues of Saint Joseph holding the infant Jesus; Saint Anne with her grandson Jesus; Saint Christopher carrying the child Jesus across the river; Saint Anthony of Padua holding the Christ Child; and the risen Christ the Saviour.

For many readers from mainland China, the story of Jesus may go little further than the four words “a Western religious figure.”

According to the New Testament, about two thousand years ago Mary conceived Jesus through the Holy Spirit and gave birth to him in Bethlehem. He preached in Galilee, proclaiming that the Kingdom of God was near. He healed the sick, gave sight to the blind, raised the dead, and taught people to love God and to love their neighbours as themselves.

Religious leaders of the time regarded him as blasphemous and as a threat to the established order, and handed him over to the Roman governor Pontius Pilate.

Jesus was crucified. On the third day, according to the New Testament, he rose from the tomb, appeared to his disciples, and later ascended into heaven.

Christians believe that he is the Son of God, that he willingly died for human sin, and that through his resurrection he conquered death.

The central teachings of Christianity can be summarized in a few sentences: There is one God, existing as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit—the Trinity.

Human beings are separated from God by sin and cannot save themselves. The death and resurrection of Jesus provide the way of salvation. Through faith—not simply through accumulating good deeds—human beings can be reconciled with God and receive eternal life.

The Church therefore emphasizes repentance, baptism, love for one another, and the Bible as the highest authority for faith and life. The sculptures on the bridge place these stories and beliefs before passing pedestrians in stone and bronze.

Chapter Three　Saint John of Nepomuk: The King Demanded a Secret. Why Did He Refuse to Speak?

Saint John of Nepomuk: five stars, a palm branch, and a crucifix form his most recognizable attributes. Photograph by the author.

One figure on Charles Bridge is particularly easy to recognize: a priest bows his head and embraces a crucifix, while five stars form a halo around him.

He is Saint John of Nepomuk. For most Chinese readers, the name will probably be unfamiliar. Yet within Czech and European Catholic tradition, he became an enormously influential saint.

The best-known story goes like this: King Wenceslaus IV suspected that his queen was having an affair. He demanded that Nepomuk—said to have been the queen’s confessor—reveal what she had said during confession.

Nepomuk refused, maintaining the confidentiality of confession. Enraged, the king ordered him tortured. Finally, on the night of 20 March 1393, he was thrown from Charles Bridge into the Vltava River and drowned.

According to legend, five stars suddenly appeared above the water after his body entered the river. Those five stars later became the most recognizable symbol above his statues.

There is also a small cross on the bridge railing marking the place where tradition says he was thrown into the river.

In 1683, his bronze statue was erected on Charles Bridge. It was the first statue of a saint placed there.

Reliefs on the two sides of the pedestal show the queen confessing to him and Nepomuk being thrown from the bridge.

Visitors touch the reliefs, now polished bright by countless hands, because tradition says doing so may bring good fortune—or ensure that they will return to Prague.

More firmly documented historical records suggest that the immediate cause of the conflict concerned church appointments. The king wanted his own candidate installed at a monastery, while Nepomuk, acting under canon law, confirmed another abbot, angering the king.

The story about the secrecy of confession became prominent later. His remains were placed in St. Vitus Cathedral. When his tomb was opened in 1719, what was believed to be his tongue was reportedly found preserved. This became an important element in the later process of his canonization.

Chinese readers may find his story easy to understand, because traditional Chinese culture speaks of “a promise worth a thousand pieces of gold” and also says that one should not yield before force.

If a promise counts only when there is no pressure, is it still really a promise?

But here, again, legend and history must be separated. The five stars later acquired another symbolic interpretation. They were associated with five letters of the Latin word:

TACET.

“He is silent.”

Thus “silence” became his emblem. A man was ordered to reveal a secret. He did not. Later generations commemorated his silence with five stars.

Even more striking is what happened afterward. In 1393, his body was thrown from the bridge into the river.

About three hundred years later, in 1683, people raised his statue high upon that same bridge—and it became the bridge’s first saintly statue.

It is a remarkable historical reversal. The king of his time possessed everything: power, soldiers, prisons, instruments of torture.

John seemed to possess nothing. He could not even preserve his own life. Yet more than six hundred years later, how many people visiting Charles Bridge know the names of the officials who tortured him?

Who remembers the soldiers who dragged him away?

Almost all of them have disappeared. The man thrown into the river is still standing on the bridge. Returning to our own lives, what would I do if a superior ordered me to do something that violated my conscience?

That question takes Saint John’s story beyond Catholicism. Suppose someone has promised to keep another person’s secret, but a superior orders him to reveal it.

What should he do?

Suppose the law requires someone to do something he believes is unjust.

What should he do?

If the price of refusal were not merely losing a little income, but losing a career, freedom, or even life? Today it is easy for us to say:

“Of course you should stand by your principles.”

But what if it actually happened to us?

What if you had a family?

Children?

A mortgage?

What if all your colleagues had already complied?

What if everyone around you said:

“Why are you being so foolish? Just tell them and get it over with.”

At that moment, the words “stand by your principles” are no longer so easy. So the question John truly leaves me with is not:

Was he a perfect saint?

It is this: When power demands that a person surrender his conscience, how high a price is he willing to pay to say one word—

“No”?

Part II　Does Something Cease to Exist Because the Naked Eye Cannot See It?

Chapter Four　What Did a Blind Nun “See”?

The Vision of Saint Lutgardis: the blind nun looks upward toward Christ bending down from the cross. Photograph by the author.

On the south side of Charles Bridge is a group of sculptures that made me stop. My first thought was not about theology. I simply felt that the stone was “moving.”

A woman kneels, her face slightly raised. Christ bends down from the cross. His right arm has come free from the wood and reaches around her neck.

Their faces are close. Several small angels surround them. Most of the thirty groups of saints on the bridge stand upright, hold something aloft, or gaze into the distance.

This group is different. It seems to take an intensely private encounter and suddenly place it before the eyes of every passer-by.

Her name was Lutgardis—Lutgarde in French. She was born in 1182 in Tongeren, in what is now Belgium, and died on 16 June 1246 at the Cistercian abbey of Aywières. She lived for about sixty-four years.

This was not originally the path planned for her. Her father was a merchant and had prepared a dowry for her. After his business failed, the family sent her, at the age of twelve, to the Benedictine convent of St Catherine.

That was not unusual at the time. For a daughter whose prospects for marriage had diminished, a convent could provide a respectable alternative.

At first, she herself was not especially devout. Her biography describes her as sociable and fond of conversation, and she even entertained thoughts of romantic attachment.

The turning point came through a vision. According to tradition, while she was speaking with a young man, Christ suddenly appeared before her, covered in wounds and flowing with blood.

At that moment, she understood that the one she should truly love was not the young man before her, but this bridegroom who had been crucified.

At about twenty, she formally took her vows. Experiences of this kind were later said to have occurred repeatedly.

On one occasion, Christ extended an arm from the cross and embraced her, allowing her to kiss the wound in his side.

On another, she asked to understand Latin so that she could better comprehend the Psalms in the daily offices. When she gained greater understanding, she still felt empty. Christ asked what else she wanted. She answered:

“I want Your heart.”

Christ replied:

“Rather, it is I who want yours.”

And so, according to the account, they exchanged hearts. This is one of the earliest and most famous medieval accounts of a “mystical exchange of hearts,” predating the better-known visions of the seventeenth-century French nun Margaret Mary Alacoque by roughly five hundred years.

The sculpture on Charles Bridge does not directly depict this “exchange of hearts.” The twenty-six-year-old sculptor Matthias Braun chose a subtler moment:

the blind nun raises her face toward the cross, while Christ bends down from it to embrace her. Many regard this as one of the most beautiful and emotionally expressive works on the entire bridge.

It was commissioned by the abbot of the Cistercian monastery at Plasy in Bohemia. A Cistercian institution commemorating a Cistercian saint was hardly surprising.

What Does “Exchanging Hearts” Mean?

When we first encounter this story, an obvious question arises:

How can a human being love God with emotions that seem so human?

And why would God need a human heart?

If we understand the story through the language of medieval Christian mysticism itself, the “heart” here is neither an anatomical organ nor romantic love between a man and a woman.

Human beings can only use human language to describe their relationship with what transcends them. When Christianity speaks of the “Heavenly Father,” it borrows the human word father to express the giving of life.

When it says that “God loves the world,” it uses a human word—love. In Buddhism, another vocabulary might speak of compassion.

When people speak of “returning to God’s embrace,” they again borrow from human bodily experience. Finite human beings trying to describe their relationship with the infinite can hardly avoid human language.

Thus, “giving one’s heart to Christ” does not mean that God lacks a heart. It is closer to asking:

Are you willing to surrender your deepest desires, attachments, and judgments so that your inner self can change? And “receiving the heart of Christ” does not mean that another physical heart has literally been placed inside your body.

It means hoping that you may treat others with the compassion, sacrifice, and love represented by Christ. Here, two stories must also be distinguished.

The sculpture on Charles Bridge does not depict the moment of the “exchange of hearts.” Braun chose another vision: Lutgardis looking upward toward the crucifix while Christ bends down from the cross to embrace her.

The “exchange of hearts” belongs to another mystical episode in her biography. Keeping these two accounts separate actually makes it easier to understand why the sculpture is so restrained.

And the story of the “exchange of hearts” leaves behind a question more important than the miracle itself: Is genuine faith about hoping that God will change the world according to my wishes—or being willing first to change my own heart?

In 1206, Lutgardis entered the stricter Cistercian abbey at Aywières, where she spent nearly forty years. She barely spoke the local French. Her biography says that she could hardly even ask properly for a piece of bread.

The isolation of language pressed her more deeply into silence. Three times she undertook seven-year periods of severe fasting, praying for divisions within the Church to be healed and for sinners to return.

She also became known for healing and prophecy. About eleven years before her death, she became blind. Thomas of Cantimpré, a Dominican who knew her personally, completed his Life of Lutgardis less than two years after her death.

The work contains a striking idea: the outer eyes went dark, while the inner light grew brighter. At first, what saddened her most was that she would no longer be able to see her spiritual friends in this world.

According to tradition, Christ told her that she must endure this blindness, and that she would see those friends again in the eternal homeland.

She therefore also became one of the patron saints of the blind. On 16 June 1246, the day after Trinity Sunday, she died.

Tradition says that she had been told beforehand when her death would come. The nuns of the convent said that when she died, her eyes remained open, turned upward, and could no longer be closed.

A woman whose physical eyes could no longer see the world left behind a story about “seeing.” That is an intriguing paradox.

What do we mean when we say “see”?

Does something exist simply because the eyes can see it?

Does something not exist simply because they cannot?

If “seeing” means only the formation of an image on the retina, then during her final years Lutgardis saw almost nothing.

Yet her biography, her devotees, and the group of stone figures placed on a Prague bridge five hundred years later were speaking not about eyeballs, but about another kind of attention:

When a person directs the whole of the mind toward something the naked eye cannot grasp, can that thing still be “present” to that person?

Here we must stop immediately. A medieval saint’s biography is not a laboratory report. Thomas knew her personally, which makes his account closer to the source than legends written centuries later.

But “closer to the source” does not mean “verified as an external objective event.” A vision may have been experienced as a sacred presence.

It may have been an inner image arising during profound prayer. Or perhaps, within the experience of the person herself, those two categories were never separable.

Standing outside the thirteenth century, we have no instrument capable of replaying that night. What matters is not rushing to label her experience either a “miracle” or a “hallucination.”

What matters is that she expressed a possibility with which modern people are often uncomfortable: when sensory perception shuts down, experience does not automatically become zero.

The history of science has repeatedly offered a similar warning in another language. In the 1670s, the Dutch microscopist Antonie van Leeuwenhoek pointed his handmade microscopes at rainwater, dental plaque, and well water.

He saw countless “little animals.” Those organisms had always been present—in human mouths, in water, in wounds. Bacteria did not suddenly come into existence after the invention of the microscope.

What changed was that human beings acquired the ability to see them. Before that, people still became ill. They simply attributed disease to other causes: foul air, anger, punishment, and so on.

Radio waves are similar. They emit no visible light. They have no smell. We cannot feel them with our hands.

Before Heinrich Hertz demonstrated their existence in the late nineteenth century, the world was not “without electromagnetic waves.” Human beings simply lacked the appropriate receiver.

Today, an ordinary mobile phone is constantly receiving things that the naked eye of an earlier age could never detect.

X-rays make the point even more vividly. When Wilhelm Röntgen discovered them in 1895, even the image of the bones in a hand was astonishing.

The bones had always been beneath the skin. X-rays did not create the skeleton. A new way of “seeing” revealed a structure that skin had previously concealed.

So the history of science itself continually reminds us: Human senses have boundaries. Human instruments also have boundaries. What we can measure today extends far beyond what people could measure a thousand years ago.

But it does not logically follow that whatever cannot be measured today therefore does not exist. Of course, the reverse is equally important:

this does not prove that everything Lutgardis experienced necessarily existed as an objective external reality. Both conclusions go beyond what we can presently establish.

The more defensible position is a third one: We do not know. Modern people are sometimes uncomfortable with those three words.

True. False. Exists. Does not exist. Science. Superstition. We want immediate categories. Yet when confronted with questions far beyond the range of our own experience, “I don’t know” may sometimes be the more honest answer.

Perhaps that is where the power of this sculpture lies. It does not make the judgment for you. It simply leaves a blind woman and a figure bending down toward her before your eyes, asking:

Where are the limits of what you call seeing?

On the Same Bridge, Another Kind of “Not Seeing” The sculpture of Lutgardis is not the only work on Charles Bridge connected with Jesus.

On the north side stands the Crucifixion and Calvary. On the south side is the Lamentation of Christ. There is Saint Joseph holding the infant Jesus, Saint Anne with her grandson, and Saint Christopher carrying the child upon his shoulder.

These stones tell different moments in the same narrative: birth, carrying, suffering, being taken down from the cross, remembrance.

Tourists generally “see” them with their eyes, take photographs, and move on. But to the people of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries who placed these images on the bridge, they were not decorations.

They were public reminders: the most important things may not be happening where the eyes are busiest. The Lutgardis sculpture makes this especially striking because it turns “not seeing” into its subject.

The point is not that she could still see the scenery. It is that after the scenery closed itself to her, the story did not end.

“Inner Seeing” in Another Tradition

This way of speaking does not belong only to Christianity. Chinese readers are not unfamiliar with it. Zhuangzi wrote of not listening merely with the ears, but with the heart, and then not merely with the heart, but with qi. In Zen Buddhist kōans, masters likewise ask:

Your eyes are open—but what have you actually seen?

If all one sees are names and appearances, perhaps one has not truly seen. These traditions are not the same, and there is no need to force them into one system.

But they share one recognition: The senses are an entrance, not the whole. Lutgardis deserves a section of her own because she places this abstract proposition inside the life of a concrete human being:

entering a convent at twelve, taking vows around twenty, spending more than forty years in religious life, and living the final eleven years in blindness.

She did not discuss “seeing” from the safety of a study. She lived the question through her own body.

Chapter Five　Does Science Tell Us “Not Yet Discovered”?

One of the greatest achievements of science is not that it tells humanity: We already know everything. Quite the opposite.

Science repeatedly overturns humanity’s assumptions about the boundaries of the world. The microscope expanded the scale of what we can see.

The telescope pushed human vision deep into the universe. New detectors have allowed us to discover worlds that the naked eye could never directly perceive. Therefore,

“There is currently no reliable evidence that it exists”

and

“It has been proved not to exist”

are two completely different judgments. The first expresses scientific caution. The second requires additional evidence. The neutrino seems almost designed to illustrate this distinction.

In 1930, Wolfgang Pauli, trying to preserve the law of conservation of energy, was forced to propose the existence of an electrically neutral particle that interacted with matter only extremely weakly.

He himself thought the proposal almost outrageous. He described it as a terrible thing to have done: postulating a particle that might never be detected.

The effort to find it was sometimes spoken of as a search for a “ghost.” Twenty-five years later, in 1956, Frederick Reines and Clyde Cowan finally detected evidence of the neutrino near a nuclear reactor.

Their telegram to Pauli was brief: They had detected it. Pauli’s reply was equally concise: Everything comes to him who knows how to wait.

Notice the gap in time. Between 1930 and 1956, the neutrino did not “not exist.” It had simply not yet been captured by the instruments available at the time. If someone in 1940 had declared,

“Science has proved that no such thing exists,”

the statement might have sounded confident. But in reality, it would merely have turned the limitations of an instrument into the limitations of the world.

Modern cosmology still confronts analogous problems with dark matter and dark energy. There are anomalies involving gravity and cosmic expansion, yet directly “seeing” what lies behind them remains extraordinarily difficult.

Scientists can construct models and design new generations of detectors. But before the evidence is complete, “we have not yet detected it” should not be turned into “it has been disproved.”

Nor should “we have not yet detected it” be turned into “it has already been confirmed.” Radio waves, X-rays, bacteria, and neutrinos all repeat the same lesson:

The history of our ability to observe is shorter than the history of the world. So when confronted with accounts such as those of Lutgardis, what science can responsibly say is actually quite limited.

It can say: Experiences of this kind cannot presently be reproduced through shared experimental procedures and therefore cannot be treated as verified physical events.

It cannot say: Because they cannot be reproduced, the person’s inner experience amounted to nothing, or the category of reality to which she believed she had access has therefore been conclusively excluded.

The latter claim requires not an absence of evidence, but evidence to the contrary. At the same time, we must not rush to the opposite extreme:

because science does not yet know everything, every mysterious claim must therefore be true. That is no more scientific.

Echoes in caves, hallucinations during fever, collective suggestion, epileptic auras, and severe sleep deprivation can all produce subjective experiences that feel overwhelmingly real.

An honest approach must place these possibilities on the table rather than using “science has not explained everything” as a universal pass.

A genuinely open attitude should be capable of holding two statements at the same time: When there is no evidence, do not believe too easily.

And equally: When the evidence is insufficient, do not too easily declare absolute nonexistence. This is not merely a scientific attitude.

It is a form of epistemic humility. That humility operates in two directions. One faces the external world: The world is larger than the eye, and larger than the laboratory.

The other faces our own experience: Even if you truly have “seen” something, what you saw may still have been only a fragment.

If Lutgardis has anything to say to contemporary readers, the last thing she should become is a slogan proclaiming:

“Therefore all mysticism is true.”

She is better understood as a question mark carved in stone, standing beside the bridge and asking those who pass to slow down.

There is another detail that is easy to overlook. When Thomas wrote her biography, he was himself one of the more learned men of his age. He later studied with Albert the Great and wrote an encyclopedic work on the natural world.

In other words, the person recording this act of “seeing” was not someone uninterested in observing nature. The Middle Ages did not simply mean “a refusal to observe.”

People of that period divided the levels of observation differently from the way we do today. We need not return to a thirteenth-century picture of the universe.

But neither need we pretend that our own century was the first to understand that what cannot be seen may nevertheless exist.

And so we can return to the bridge. Braun carved Christ’s arm in a position that is about to encircle Lutgardis, yet has not completely closed around her.

The stone is dead. The gesture is suspended in the middle of happening. Tourists point fully functioning eyes and cameras at it.

She, meanwhile, continued this kind of “seeing” until the end of her life after losing her sight. Science repeatedly changes “nothing there” into “not yet discovered.”

Religious narratives often describe what has “not yet been seen by everyone” as something “revealed to a particular person.”

These are not the same statement. Weld them together and both science and religion suffer. Separate them completely, however, and we may miss a simpler question:

On what basis do human beings dare to assume that the limits of what they can presently perceive are the limits of reality itself? That leads to the next question:

Even if we have “seen” something, does that mean we already possess the truth?

That is another problem. If Lutgardis’s statue could continue speaking, perhaps it would say: First, let go of the arrogance of the eye. As for what you may see afterward, she offers no guarantee.

Once We Have “Seen,” Do We Necessarily Know the Truth?

Different civilizations have preserved enormous numbers of accounts of religious experiences, contemplative experiences, and experiences said to transcend ordinary sensory perception.

Christianity has them. Buddhism has them. Daoist traditions have them. Indian yoga, Islamic Sufism, and Jewish Kabbalah also contain accounts of such moments:

a sudden sense that a curtain has lifted slightly and the world is no longer limited to the layer our eyes habitually perceive.

Modern psychology and neuroscience approach these phenomena from another direction. They discuss states of consciousness, narrowed or intensified attention, brain activity during deep prayer or meditation, hypoxia, epileptic auras, sleep deprivation, and collective suggestion.

They may also investigate experiences that cannot yet be reduced to known mechanisms. Such research is valuable. It reminds us that something subjectively overwhelming does not automatically become an objective description of the external world.

But research cannot simply close the question either. Measuring a pattern of brain activity tells us that the brain was active at the time.

It does not necessarily mean that the object the person believed he or she encountered has thereby been fully explained.

The map is not the territory. A scan is not the experience itself. There is no need to pretend that different traditions are identical.

A Cistercian nun kissing the wound in Christ’s side and a Zen practitioner speaking of “seeing one’s true nature” belong to different vocabularies, doctrines, and paths of practice.

Forcing them together is usually an exercise in convenience. Nor must we rush to find a single answer for every such experience.

Answers unified too quickly are usually false. What is worth considering is something else: Why do experiences of this kind recur across different civilizations, regions, and centuries?

One explanation is that human brains share similar structures and therefore generate similar inner dramas. Another is that some form of reality enters through different doors, while the carvings on each door differ.

There is also a third possibility—the attitude we have been practising throughout the preceding chapters: At present, we do not know.

Not knowing does not mean emptiness. It means putting down the conclusion already waiting in our mouths, putting down the arrogance in our eyes, and becoming more cautious with the words:

“I have already seen.”

For people engaged in spiritual cultivation, there is another warning. Do not assume that because you have had a certain experience, you therefore know the whole truth.

Seeing a little may mean only seeing a little. Feeling a little may mean only feeling a little. It should not be enlarged beyond what it was.

In medieval saints’ lives, visions are often followed by a very sober sentence: She kept the matter in her heart, continued working, continued observing the rules, and continued praying for others.

Lutgardis’s biography follows much the same pattern. The visions did not turn her into a public platform. She barely spoke the local language and could not travel around giving speeches about what she had seen.

After she became blind, she was even less able to build a position for herself by displaying her visions.

That matters. Because “seeing” does not automatically produce wisdom. Still less does it automatically produce humility. It provides material. That material can become compassion. It can also become pride. If it finally becomes:

“I have seen, therefore I am above other people,”

then the act of seeing may itself become another attachment. One harder to cure than blindness. A person who cannot see at least knows that something is missing.

A person convinced that he has already seen everything may decorate the missing piece and turn it into a temple.

Look carefully at the sculpture on the bridge. Braun did not carve the nun’s face as triumphant. She looks upward, almost receiving, almost pleading.

Christ’s arm is not raised in proclamation. It bends downward and reaches around her. The centre of gravity of the entire sculpture is not:

“I have seen.”

It is:

“Something is bending down toward someone who cannot see.”

Tourists point their healthy eyes toward it. Their cameras are sharp. But what those cameras capture clearly is only the surface of the stone.

If Lutgardis were still standing there, perhaps she would not ask whether your photograph was accurate. Perhaps she would ask:

After seeing it, have you become a little smaller?

Across different traditions, those who seem most trustworthy rarely treat their experiences as passports granting authority. More often, they treat experience as responsibility:

Someone who has seen light should be more afraid of bending that light in the wrong direction. Someone who has felt love should be more afraid of using that love to control others.

If an experience cannot be transformed into honesty, patience, and kindness toward others, then it remains only an inner firework.

A firework can be very bright. When it fades, the sky is still dark. So what we are trying to preserve here is neither:

“All mystical experiences are true,”

nor:

“All mystical experiences are false.”

It is something narrower, and more painful: Seeing is not the same as exhausting the truth. Experiencing is not the same as completing the journey.

Having encountered light does not mean that one is already standing at its source. A person who later lost her sight forces those of us who still have our eyes open to ask:

How much have we really seen?

After asking the question, perhaps it is best not to answer too quickly. Carry it back onto the bridge.

Carry it back into ordinary life. Our eyes are still looking. Our instruments are still measuring. Our scriptures and classics are still being read. All of that is good. Just do not allow any of them quietly to become a new verdict:

“I have already seen.

Therefore I know. Therefore I can stop.” Those who stop earliest are often not those who have seen the most.

Chapter Six　Saints of Many Different Kinds

The thirty groups of sculptures on Charles Bridge form two rows, almost like a procession being pushed forward by the wind.

Earlier, we paused for some time before Lutgardis, the Crucifixion, and the Lamentation—works that force the question of “seeing” directly before us.

But if we pass too quickly over everyone else, the bridge will once again become what it is to many tourists:

“a lot of stone statues.”

Before Part III turns specifically to faith and power, we will first meet several saints whose stories are more scattered and do not require chapters of their own.

This chapter will not become a catalogue. Catalogues are useful for guide apps. For this book, it is better to choose a few figures and allow them to continue a line of thought:

How does a person believe?

How does a person fear?

How does someone refuse power?

How does someone care for the sick?

How does a message enter another language?

And how does someone, while standing beside what he considers sacred, learn to see another person’s wounds? Before beginning, we will keep the rule established earlier:

A sculpture is a memory, not proof. A legend is a tradition passed down, not an archival record. The fact that someone was made a saint does not guarantee that every word he spoke was correct.

Still less does it guarantee that the institution venerating him will always remain pure.

I. Saint Adalbert: If I Believe I Am Right, May I Demand That You Abandon What You Believe?

Saint Adalbert (Vojtěch): the bishop is depicted holding a book or scroll. Photograph by the author.

Another figure on the bridge is deeply connected with Czech history: Saint Adalbert, known in Czech as Vojtěch. He was born around 956 into an aristocratic family and later became Bishop of Prague.

But he was not a man who simply sat comfortably in his episcopal seat. He came into serious conflict with the social practices of Bohemia at the time, including the slave trade and blood feuds involving his own family.

For a period, he left Prague and entered monastic life in Rome. Later he returned. Then he left again.

In 997, he travelled to the Baltic coast to preach Christianity among the Prussians. His mission there was brief.

He was killed. Christian tradition regards him as a martyr. Modern scholarship also accepts that he died at the hands of local Prussians who still followed their traditional religion.

Seen only from the Christian side, this can easily become a standard martyrdom story: a bishop sacrifices his life to carry what he believes to be truth to others. The story is complete. Its emotional logic is complete. But this book can take one more step.

What if we stand in the position of the Prussians?

A foreign religious figure enters their land carrying another God, another ritual system, another understanding of sacred space, and tells them:

What you have always believed is wrong. You should accept what I believe. Early sources suggest that such incursions could sometimes be understood as challenges to local sacred sites and even to the political order itself.

Modern scholarship therefore also places his death within the tension between “the missionary’s calling” and “the local society’s defence of its own sacred space.”

None of this justifies killing a missionary. To kill an unarmed person who comes to speak about what he believes is still killing. But the question in the opposite direction must also be asked:

Because I am convinced that my faith is true, may I force others to abandon theirs?

If both sides answer with violence, nothing remains of the encounter but ruins. There is an essential boundary between spreading a faith and imposing a faith.

That boundary is choice. I may tell you what I believe. I may explain why I believe it. I may invite you to understand it.

Whether you finally believe should be yours to decide. Adalbert places the difficult question that comes after “I believe” upon the bridge:

Conviction is a person’s right. Turning one’s conviction into another person’s obligation is something else.

II. Saints Cyril and Methodius, and Those Who Carried Words into Other People’s Ears

Statue group of Saint Francis Xavier: the missionary stands above figures on the pedestal reflecting eighteenth-century European imaginings of overseas missionary worlds. Photograph by the author.

In the ninth century, two brothers travelled from the Greek world to Great Moravia. They translated sacred texts into a language the Slavic peoples could understand and helped create a writing system for that purpose.

This group of sculptures was among the last added to Charles Bridge. It was erected in 1938, replacing a work lost to flooding.

It reminds us of something simple: If faith cannot enter a person’s mother tongue, it easily becomes a foreign administration.

What these brothers practised was not conquest. It was translation. Translation carries a risk. Once something is translated, control over it begins to disperse.

But without translation, the light remains outside the door. For Chinese readers, these two figures are particularly worth considering.

The world of Chinese characters has likewise spent centuries finding its own words in which to accommodate Buddhism, Daoism, and Christianity.

Once language becomes mutually intelligible, conflict and understanding can both begin. Adalbert died on a frontier where language had not yet truly sat down to converse.

Cyril and Methodius turned a frontier into sentences through which dialogue became possible. Two forms of mission. Two outcomes.

Both stand on the same bridge. Saint Francis Xavier carries this line still farther. He was one of the earliest companions of the Jesuit order. From Europe he travelled to India and Malacca, and finally died on Shangchuan Island, facing the worlds of Japan and China that he had hoped to enter.

On the bridge he is often represented reaching outward. A reaching hand can mean evangelization. Later generations can also write it as expansion.

Historically, the two have indeed sometimes become entangled. To portray Xavier only as a hero would be too easy.

To portray him only as a pioneer of empire would also be too easy. He leaves behind the same troublesome question as Adalbert, only now the setting has moved to the sea:

When someone deeply believes that he carries a message capable of saving lives, how should he enter another civilization without first trampling that civilization into an empty field?

III. Saint Philip Benizi: Why Is the Crown at His Feet?

St. Philip Benizi / Philip Benitius, behind his feet is papal tiara.

Photo by the author.

When I photographed Saint Philip Benizi, what drew my attention was often not his face but what lay beneath his feet.

There is a very unusual crown there: the papal tiara. It symbolized one of the highest religious offices in the Western Christian world of that age.

Why is the crown not on his head, but at his feet?

Philip was born in 1233. He was educated in medicine and philosophy, later joined the Servite Order, and eventually became its superior general.

In 1268, Pope Clement IV died, leaving the papal office vacant. According to the tradition preserved by his order, some people regarded Philip as a possible candidate.

His response was not to campaign for the position. He fled. He hid in a mountain cave until the election was over.

When a spiritual practitioner can let go of personal interests in the face of persecution, we find it admirable. But there is another kind of test:

What if no one is trying to take something away from you?

What if the highest honour is being offered to you?

Can you let that go?

We should not invent an inner monologue for Philip that we cannot prove. What can be said more cautiously from Servite tradition is that he did not wish to pursue the office and actively avoided it.

His reasons may have involved humility, his understanding of religious life, or an unwillingness to place his soul in that particular chair.

We do not need to diagnose his psychology. The crown at his feet already says enough. It is easy to say that money does not matter when one is poor.

It is easy to say that power does not matter when one has none. The real test may come when money and power are already within reach.

Philip’s “no” points in the opposite direction from Nepomuk’s. One said no when power came to take something away.

The other said no when power came to give something. Both kinds of “no” are costly. The second may be rarer.

To Chinese eyes, stories resembling that of Saint Philip Benizi have appeared many times across five thousand years of history.

The closest parallel may be Xu You. According to legend, the sage-king Yao wanted to hand the realm over to him.

Xu You not only refused it, but went to the Ying River to wash his ears, saying that the very offer had polluted them.

Chao Fu arrived leading an ox and declared that even his ox would not drink downstream from water in which such words had been washed.

The story is extreme and cannot be treated as reliable history. But the fact that Chinese people have told it for two thousand years reveals that people have long recognized a particular kind of difficulty:

It is not that you cannot obtain something. It is that it has already been placed in your hands—and you still say no.

Philip hid in a cave until the election ended. Xu You washed his ears. One hid himself. The other washed away the words.

The forms differ. Both tear the highest position away from the self. Zhuangzi offers a more recognizably human example.

The king of Chu sent messengers inviting him to become prime minister. Zhuangzi was fishing. He asked whether the sacred tortoise used in ancestral rites would prefer to be dead and honoured in a temple, or alive dragging its tail through the mud.

The messengers answered that of course it would prefer to be alive. Zhuangzi replied: Then go away. I will drag my tail in the mud.

This is not merely cynical withdrawal from the world. It is a fear of being placed upon an altar.

The seal of a prime minister and the papal crown are both forms of elevation. Once elevated, a person may no longer easily remain the person he was.

Philip was educated in medicine and philosophy and had already served as superior general. He was not unfamiliar with authority.

What he fled was not poverty. It was the chair that might reshape the person sitting in it. There is also Yan Guang.

He had studied with Liu Xiu, who later became Emperor Guangwu of the Eastern Han. After becoming emperor, Liu Xiu sought him out, even sharing a bed with his old friend, and wanted him to take office.

Yan Guang is said to have placed his feet on the emperor’s stomach. He nevertheless returned to fishing on the Fuchun River.

Later generations wrote poetry about his fishing terrace, sometimes turning the story into something almost too elegant. Beneath that elegance is a hard statement:

The emperor placed office before an old friend. The friend still chose to remain himself. Philip did not face an old classmate.

He faced what was then the highest crown in the Western Church. The pressure was greater. But the structure of the test was similar:

What arrived was not punishment. It was honour. To say “no” when punishment comes is integrity. To say “no” when honour comes may be an even deeper form of letting go.

Some Chinese readers may also think of Fan Li. After helping Yue defeat Wu, he did not remain to enjoy his success. He departed by boat and, according to later tradition, became the wealthy Tao Zhu Gong.

That is another path: after accomplishing something, he saw the danger expressed in the old saying that when the birds are gone, the good bow is put away.

He left before the ending arrived. Philip left before the beginning. Fan Li feared what might happen after great achievement.

Philip feared the crown itself. One feared the ending. The other feared the beginning. Both represent a kind of clarity at the moment fame and advantage come within reach.

Jie Zitui is also sometimes brought into such comparisons. He had followed Chong’er during exile and rendered great service. After Chong’er became ruler and rewarded his followers, Jie Zitui did not compete for recognition. He withdrew into the mountains, where later tradition says he died in a fire.

That story is closer to “not seeking reward.” It is still half a step away from deliberately refusing the highest position.

The closest parallels to the papal tiara remain Xu You, Zhuangzi, and Yan Guang: The position offered is the realm itself, or something close to it.

The answer is flight, fishing, washing. To say that one does not love money while poor involves neither audience nor real test.

To say that one has transcended status while possessing none may describe circumstances rather than choice. Choice begins when the hand can already touch the edge of the crown.

If Servite tradition is correct that Philip hid in a cave until the election ended, what he let go of was not an ornament.

It was the immense illusion of being able, from then on, to speak on behalf of God. Xu You let go of the possibility of speaking for the realm.

Zhuangzi let go of being supported by the state. Yan Guang let go of sharing the world with an emperor.

Chinese scholars have called this lofty detachment. Sometimes they have called it performance. Either may be possible. Xu You’s story has been polished until it is almost too clean, more parable than history.

Yan Guang’s fishing terrace eventually became a tourist attraction, and tourist attractions can turn renunciation into scenery. Philip’s crown was carved beneath his feet, and tourists photographing it may see nothing more than composition.

Stone and fishing terraces alike can be misunderstood. But misunderstanding does not mean that the act of stepping back carried no weight.

The most powerful thing about fame and gain is not that they are dirty. It is that they are reasonable.

A crown is meant to be worn. A ministerial seat is meant to be occupied. If an old schoolmate becomes emperor, helping him govern the country sounds entirely reasonable.

Philip, Xu You, Zhuangzi, and Yan Guang disturb us precisely because they pushed away what seemed perfectly reasonable. After pushing it away, the world had one fewer official— and one more person still capable of saying to himself:

“I do not need this.”

Not everyone needs to flee. Flight itself can become another attachment. Perhaps there is only half a sentence worth learning:

Before something comes into your hands, ask yourself— Do I want it because I want to do something with it,

or because I want it to turn me into someone else?

If the answer is clear, perhaps the crown can be worn. If the answer is not clear, placing the crown beneath your feet may be only another pose.

The power of Philip’s statue does not lie in proving that he was purer than everyone else. It lies in what the sculptor did:

he moved the highest crown from the man’s head to the ground beside his shoes. Xu You washed his ears.

Zhuangzi kept his tail in the mud. Across different faiths and civilizations, they seem to stand on opposite sides of the same bridge and nod toward the same truth:

“What can truly be let go of is never something you never possessed.

It is what has already been placed within reach—and the hand that can still release it.”

IV. Saint Cajetan: Seek First His Kingdom—and Then What?

St. Cajetan—the tall triangular shape in the background symbolizes the Trinity;

photo by the author.

Seen from the front, this statue shows him holding a book. Behind him rises a structure resembling an obelisk, surrounded by clouds and angels, the whole composition pointing toward the Trinity. A verse associated with him says:

“Seek first His kingdom and His righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well.”

But I want to know something more concrete:

When a person who believes those words encounters an epidemic, what does he actually do?

Does he merely pray?

No. Cajetan was born in Vicenza in 1480. He was trained in law, later became a priest, and helped found the Theatine Order.

Reliable sources from his order and the Church record his long involvement in hospitals and charitable work. In Vicenza, he helped establish a hospital for people then regarded as incurable.

In Venice, he became involved in similar institutions. Later, he continued caring for the sick, orphans, and people pushed to the margins of society.

During the devastation and epidemic that followed the Sack of Rome in 1527, hospitals quickly filled. Tradition records that he and his companions repeatedly entered the wards.

So what “method” did he use?

Here we must be precise. There is no reliable evidence that Cajetan possessed some secret cure for plague. His method was remarkably simple:

Enter the hospital. Care for the sick. Help ease their suffering. Provide food and practical assistance. Offer religious comfort.

And when someone could not be saved, remain with that person until the end. That makes his story more powerful, not less. Faith here does not mean:

“I believe in God, therefore disease cannot touch me.”

It means:

“Precisely because I believe, when everyone else is afraid to approach the sick, I am willing to move closer.”

“Seek first His kingdom” is no longer merely a sentence carved into stone.

It becomes a hand. A hand gets dirty. A hand may become infected. But without the hand, the scripture remains suspended in the air.

V. Bruncvík: Why Does a Knight Stand Among the Saints?

The legendary Czech knight Bruncvík. His hands are joined, leaving open the question: Where does courage come from? Photograph by the author.

Strictly speaking, he is not one of the thirty groups of saints lining the bridge. People in Prague like to pose a question:

How many statues are there on Charles Bridge?

Many answer thirty. If Bruncvík, standing beside the bridge pier, is included, the answer becomes thirty-one. Official sources have also called him the “31st statue.”

He is not a saint. He is a legendary Czech knight. According to legend, he travelled far from home in search of a nobler coat of arms. He encountered a lion fighting a monster, helped the lion win, and the lion thereafter became his companion.

The story later became connected with a magical sword, the Czech silver lion, and the idea that a knight would reappear when the nation faced mortal danger.

The present statue was reconstructed in the nineteenth century by Ludvík Šimek and also carries symbolism associated with civic authority.

His hands are joined. In Western art, joined hands may indicate prayer, devotion, supplication, or humility. But we cannot conclude from the gesture alone that he must be praying to God at this particular moment.

Official accounts explain his sword, lion, civic symbolism, and legend in detail, but do not provide a single definitive explanation of this gesture.

The best approach for this book is therefore not to decide on the sculptor’s behalf, but to ask: Most figures on the bridge speak about faith. Bruncvík speaks about courage.

When a person confronts danger, where does courage come from?

Is it because he believes he cannot die?

Or because, knowing that he may fail, he still believes there are things worth defending?

Here, the knight meets the saints. In the end, they are asking the same question:

When danger truly arrives, what is a person willing to protect?

VI. Saint Ludmila, Saint Vitus, and Saint Ivo: Court, Altar, and Courtroom

Saint Ludmila is often portrayed teaching her grandson Wenceslaus to read.

Photograph by the author

In stone, she does not look like a martyr. She looks like a grandmother at home: one hand supporting the child, perhaps the other holding the veil that would later become the instrument of her death.

She was born around 860 and was among the earliest royal women in Bohemia to profess Christianity openly. After her husband Bořivoj was baptized, the royal court did not become a church.

Her sons had their own ambitions. Her daughter-in-law Drahomíra increasingly regarded the grandmother as an obstacle. In 921, Ludmila was strangled in the castle at Tetín.

Tradition says the instrument was her own veil. Faith entering a royal court does not guarantee that the court becomes cleaner.

It merely adds another layer of meaning to its conflicts. What had once been a struggle for power can now also be written as a struggle between sacred and secular.

Her grandson Wenceslaus pushed Christianization further. He too died at the hands of his own family. Around 935, he was killed by his brother Boleslaus.

The relief on the pedestal of Ludmila’s sculpture group records this later act of violence. Grandmother and grandson both died through those closest to them.

The Christianization of Bohemia was no pastoral idyll. It was a bloody domestic history. A visitor sees “a grandmother teaching her grandson to read” and may find the scene tender.

Beneath that tenderness lies the mark of strangulation. The book did not remove the knife. It merely gave the knife another interpretation.

Saint Vitus gave his name to the great cathedral above the city, and to one of the most frequently spoken names in Prague.

Tradition describes him as a Sicilian youth who refused to sacrifice to the Roman gods. He was subjected to boiling oil, lions, and finally death.

On the bridge he stands upon a rocky pedestal surrounded by lions. The lion is an instrument of execution in his saintly tradition.

Later it also becomes the companion of Czech heraldry. The same beast can devour a human being or guard a nation.

Because Vitus’s name became so widespread, the individual himself can easily become blurred. Epilepsy, storms, actors, travellers—all came to invoke him.

But the hard core of the story remains: Refuse to worship, and you will pay the price. Unlike Nepomuk, Vitus’s “no” occurs before an imperial altar.

One refused to reveal a secret demanded by a king. The other refused to kneel before images demanded by the state.

The forms differ. The structure is similar: Power defines what constitutes acceptable worship. The individual places his body across the path of that command.

Vitus later became an honoured figure because time reversed the positions. While alive, he looked more like a condemned child.

Saint Ivo pulls the story out of the palace and away from the altar, into the mud of ordinary life.

He was Ivo of Kermartin in Brittany, born around 1253 and dying in 1303. He was a priest and a canon lawyer.

People remember him not because his judgments were elegantly written, but because he represented poor people in court—even when they could not pay him.

Widows, orphans, and people wrongly accused were his clients. The statue on Charles Bridge, completed by Matthias Braun in 1711, was commissioned by the Faculty of Law at Charles University.

Ivo wears the robe and cap of the period. From an elevated seat he bends downward. At his feet are a widow with children and an elderly man pleading for help.

Justice here is not a blindfolded goddess. It is a back bending downward. That the law faculty erected this statue was no accident.

If law serves only those who already possess power and resources, the saint’s image becomes decoration. Ivo drags law out of the hall and brings it to the doorway.

There is wind at the doorway. There is crying. There are cases people cannot explain clearly. A court can be very busy.

The party receiving most of its attention is not necessarily the weakest one. Walking past this statue, you do not need to become a Catholic. You need only ask a very secular question:

Whom do all those laws I have studied ultimately protect?

Seen together, the three figures create three spaces on the bridge: home, altar, court. Ludmila dies at home. Vitus dies within the logic of the altar.

Ivo lives at the doorway of the courtroom. Faith can enter all three spaces. Once it enters, none becomes automatically holy.

What can become holy is only the human choice made in that moment: whether one is willing to bend down, and whether one is able to say that word—

“No.”

Saint Barbara, Saint Margaret, and Saint Elizabeth form a group of three women: refusal of marriage, legendary courage, and the exchange of a crown for hands extended toward the poor.

The layer of legend is thick. Not every detail can be accepted as fact. But the thickness itself is part of history:

Europe needed such images to give form to women whom royal courts could not easily absorb. Not everyone on the bridge is a bishop or hermit.

VIII. Saint Anthony: The Child in His Arms and the Things That Are Found Again

Saint Anthony of Padua is often shown holding the Christ Child.

He was born in Lisbon in 1195. Originally an Augustinian, he later joined the Franciscan Order. He died near Padua in 1231 at only thirty-six years of age.

During his lifetime he became famous as a preacher. Tradition says he could explain the hardest passages of scripture in a way ordinary people could understand.

He was canonized soon after his death. Popular memory, however, remembers less of his theology than of his association with “finding things”:

lost keys, people who have wandered away, even a peace that someone cannot put into words. People ask Anthony to help them find what has been lost.

In the 1707 statue on Charles Bridge, he stands between vases of flowers holding the child Jesus in his arms.

Popular does not mean shallow. Popular means that someone crossing the bridge does not need to finish reading a theology textbook before pausing for half a second.

And in that half-second, what the person sees is intimacy. The sacred does not always have to shine from a great height.

Sometimes it can be held, somewhat awkwardly, in the arms of an ordinary-sized human being. The Lutgardis sculpture is about bending down and blindness. The Anthony sculpture is about holding and recovering. One says:

“What you cannot see may still be there.”

The other says:

“What has been lost may still be found.”

People entrust their lost objects to him. Sometimes that may be superstition. Sometimes it is simply a way of giving anxiety a name and a place.

That act of placing anxiety somewhere can itself be childish. But inside that childishness is a serious truth: Human beings lose things.

They lose keys. They lose direction. They lose patience with themselves. If religion can speak only about the structure of the cosmos and cannot speak about the thing missing from a drawer, it has moved too far away from ordinary life.

Anthony remains close because he allows ordinary life to call the sacred by a smaller name. Once it becomes smaller, people dare to speak.

Of course, something found again is not necessarily a miracle. Sometimes memory simply turns a corner. To call every recovered object a miracle is popular enthusiasm.

To dismiss all such popular enthusiasm as ignorance is another kind of arrogance. Perhaps the best way to read this statue lies somewhere between the two.

You do not have to believe that Anthony literally finds lost keys. You can still recognize that a person willing to stop for another person’s loss is already doing something more like an embrace than many sophisticated sermons.

VIII. Cosmas, Damian, and the Saviour: Hands That Heal, and Illnesses That Cannot All Be Healed

9, The Saviour with the physician saints Cosmas and Damian. Photograph by the author.

This group was a gift from the Faculty of Medicine. It was completed in 1709 by Jan Oldřich Mayer and funded by the medical faculty of the University of Prague.

At the centre stands the risen Christ—the Saviour. On either side are Cosmas and Damian. Tradition describes them as brothers of the third century, Greek physicians who treated patients without charging fees and who were later martyred during persecution.

In Eastern Christianity they are known as the “Unmercenary Physicians.” In the West they became patron saints of physicians.

The vessels and medicine containers on the bridge, together with inscriptions referring to Hippocrates and Galen, all point toward the same idea:

Healing is a sacred form of work. But healing is not itself the sacred. The medical faculty placed its patron saints and salvation upon the same pedestal.

That can be read humbly: Those who treat disease know that they cannot cure everything. A person may recover from an illness.

That person will still one day die. If resurrection occurs, it does not occur on the operating table. But the sculpture can also be read more proudly:

We stand beside the Saviour. Medicine almost participates in salvation. Both readings are present in the stone. The viewer must decide at what angle to bow.

Do not turn physicians into saints. And do not turn saints into physicians. The virtues of a doctor are to observe, ask, act, and acknowledge limits.

The brothers in saints’ legends are also said to have cast out demons and restored severed limbs. That is the grammar of hagiography.

It is not a hospital record. Let each do its own work. When they meet, a bow to one another is enough.

The bow means: You treat this portion of the body. I ask whether there is consolation beyond this portion of the body.

Neither should invade the other’s jurisdiction. Placed within the larger argument of this book, this sculpture is closely related to the story of Cajetan.

Cajetan entered plague wards without possessing a secret cure. These brothers were remembered as hands that did not charge fees.

Whether one charges or does not charge is a matter of system and institution. Whether one is willing to approach the sick is a choice.

The medical faculty erected this statue because it hoped that choice would be remembered. After remembering it, physicians must still read the medical record.

They must still wash their hands. They must still not treat a “patron saint” as permission to skip diagnosis.

X. Saint Barbara, Saint Margaret, and Saint Elizabeth:

Three Women Written into History The group of three women dates from 1707 and was produced by the Brokoff workshop, with Ferdinand Brokoff’s style particularly evident.

At the centre and sides stand Saint Barbara, Saint Margaret of Antioch, and Saint Elizabeth of Thuringia. One refuses marriage.

One carries a legend of dragon-slaying courage. One exchanges a crown for hands extended toward the poor. Barbara’s story lies in the mist of the late Roman world.

Her father locked her in a tower. She opened a third window in the wall herself, symbolizing the Trinity.

She refused marriage. She refused to worship the old gods. In the end, tradition says, she was killed by her own father.

Tower, window, sword: these are the components of her iconography. The details cannot be treated as archival records. But the components are trying to say something:

A woman refused the marriage and worship arranged for her. The price was death. Margaret’s legend is even more dramatic.

In prison she encounters the Devil in the form of a dragon. Her cross breaks the dragon open, and she emerges from its body.

Medieval pregnant women prayed to her for safe childbirth precisely because of this image of “coming out of the monster.”

The dragon need not have existed. What certainly existed was the fear of childbirth. And alongside that fear was a hope:

that a person might be brought out by a power greater than the dragon. Elizabeth is the most historically grounded of the three.

She was born in 1207 and became a princess of Thuringia. She married at fourteen. Her husband later died of illness while participating in the Crusades.

She opened the storehouses to the hungry and increasingly adopted a life of poverty herself. After 1227, she cared for the sick in Marburg.

She died in 1231 at only twenty-four years of age. She was canonized rapidly. Her story is not one of towers and dragons.

It is the story of a woman who spent her aristocratic status. The crown was not taken from her.

She removed it herself and exchanged it for bread and bandages. Placed together, these three figures layer three ways in which women have been written:

chastity and refusal of marriage, courage and childbirth, charity and voluntary descent from status. The layer of legend is thick.

So thick that many individual details cannot be believed literally. But that thickness is itself history. Europe needed such images in order to give form to women whom royal courts could not easily absorb:

the daughter who would not obey, the female body that refused to exist only for dynastic reproduction, the wife who would not keep the storehouse locked.

Not everyone on Charles Bridge is a bishop or hermit. There are also women written into stone. Most of those who wrote their stories were men.

When men write stories of women refusing marriage and defeating dragons, the stories change shape. Yet through the distortion, we can still glimpse a spine that refused to be arranged by others.

Walking past this group, you do not first need to determine who holds the chalice and who stands upon the dragon. You can simply carry away three questions:

Can I refuse a destiny that someone else has arranged for me?

When I am most afraid, can I still hope to be brought through it?

When I still possess something, can I open the storehouse door just a little?

Ask those questions, and the three women step out of the catalogue and return to the wind. The wind knows neither tower nor dragon.

What the wind knows is this: Someone once refused to live an entire life according to someone else’s script.

Part Three When Faith Meets Power

Chapter 7

Should Faith Ever Be a Reason for Losing One’s Freedom?

Statue group of St. John of Matha, St. Felix of Valois, and St. Ivan. Below them, iron bars, prisoners, and guards form a striking contrast. Photograph by the author.

Another massive group of sculptures made me think about freedom. It is one of the largest ensembles on Charles Bridge, and was also among the most expensive of its time. Completed by Ferdinand Brokoff in 1714, it places three figures above: St. John of Matha, St. Felix of Valois, and the Slavic hermit St. Ivan, who was added to the composition.

Below them, however, is something quite different: a cave-like prison. Behind iron bars are captives in chains. There are guards, weapons, and a dog. In keeping with the visual conventions of early eighteenth-century Europe, the guards are portrayed as “pagans” or “Turks.”

The monument commemorates the Order of the Most Holy Trinity for the Redemption of Captives—the Trinitarians. John and Felix founded the order in the late twelfth century. Its members raised money to ransom Christians who had been captured and enslaved in North Africa and across the Mediterranean.

This was not a metaphor. From the Middle Ages into the early modern period, people on both sides of the Mediterranean were captured and enslaved. Members of the order even vowed, when necessary, to offer themselves in exchange for captives. The three chained figures at the base of the monument, looking upward in prayer, tell that story.

But looking at the sculpture today requires another layer of historical awareness. It is not a neutral news photograph.

It reflects the way early eighteenth-century Catholic Europe imagined the Ottoman world, religious conflict, and the boundary between “us” and “them.” The prisoners have faces. They pray. They can be rescued. The guards on the other side are reduced to symbols: the unbelieving Other, the dangerous Other, the Other who holds the key.

The dog and the weapons carry the visual language through which that age portrayed the “infidel.” Two things can be true at the same time.

First, people really did suffer because they were imprisoned on account of their faith. Ransoming human beings from chains was genuinely an act of mercy.

Second, a public monument can celebrate rescue while also reinforcing hostility. It invites the viewer to stand with “us” and look at “them.” It seldom asks whether, on the other side of another set of bars, people of a different faith might also have been imprisoned by people like us. Yet the bars themselves ask a question older—and more contemporary—than all the Baroque symbolism surrounding them:

Should a person lose his freedom simply because of what he believes?

If the answer is no, another question immediately follows:

Should freedom of belief belong only to those whose beliefs resemble mine?

It is not difficult for a Christian to demand religious freedom for Christians. It is not difficult for a Buddhist to demand freedom for Buddhists. Nor is it difficult for an atheist to defend the freedom not to believe.

The real test comes when the person being suppressed believes something I do not believe at all—something I dislike, perhaps even something I consider harmful.

Do I still recognize his freedom?

If freedom belongs only to “our people,” then what we are defending is not a principle. It is a faction.

When a faction is in power, it calls its position tolerance. When it is out of power, it calls the same treatment persecution. Change the positions, and the entire argument can be reused by simply changing the subject of the sentence.

If our answer remains yes—yes, that person too must be free—then we are defending something larger than the interests of one group.

We are defending a principle: A person's body and conscience should not be imprisoned merely because the object of his worship is different from mine.

Principle is colder than sympathy, but it is also stronger. Sympathy sees “one of our poor people” suffering. Principle must be able to look at someone who makes me uncomfortable, whose scriptures I do not believe, whose rituals may even seem absurd to me, and still say:

Unless he has actually harmed another person, those bars should not be built for his beliefs. So perhaps the contemporary meaning of this monument should not stop with, “How courageous those monks were.”

Nor should it stop with, “This reflects a colonial view of the Other.” Both observations can be valid. Neither is enough. The more important question is the test posed by those iron bars:

Are you willing to give the key to a principle—or only to people on your own side?

Chapter 8

Why Is St. Augustine Standing on “Heretical” Books?

St. Augustine stands upon books associated with heresy. Christians themselves had once been condemned as heretics and imprisoned. The next statue makes the question more complicated.

St. Augustine—Augustine of Hippo. Born in North Africa in AD 354, he died in 430 while Hippo was under siege by the Vandals. Few figures have carried greater weight in the history of Western Christian thought. Original sin, grace, The City of God, the restless heart of the Confessions—Catholics and Protestants alike are still, in different ways, conversing with him.

The statue on the north side of Charles Bridge, dating from around 1708, came from the workshop of Jeroným Kohl and was commissioned by the Augustinians of St. Thomas Church in Prague.

Augustine wears episcopal robes. In his right hand he raises a flaming heart. At his feet, a child uses a shell to pour water into a small hole in the sand. This refers to a famous legend: Augustine is contemplating the mystery of the Trinity when he encounters a child by the sea. The child tells him, in effect, that putting the ocean into a tiny hole is no more impossible than trying to contain God within the human mind.

But there is another, more disturbing detail. Under Augustine’s feet lie books identified as “heretical.” Accounts associate them with Pelagianism, Donatism, and Manichaeism—movements Augustine spent much of his life opposing.

At this point, the meaning of the bridge suddenly changes. Until now, we have largely encountered victims of persecution: John of Nepomuk thrown into the river; the Trinitarians seeking to free people from captivity. Now another question confronts us:

Who gets to define heresy?

Augustine’s own life provides an unusually revealing footnote. As a young man, he spent about nine years as a follower of Manichaeism. Its dualistic story of light and darkness once provided him with a framework in which to make sense of suffering.

Later he left it, became a bishop of the Catholic Church, and spent much of the rest of his life arguing against his former teachers, as well as against Pelagius and the belief that human beings could attain salvation through free will without the necessity of divine grace.

A man who would later become a pillar of orthodoxy had himself once stood on the side represented by some of the books eventually placed beneath his feet.

“Heresy,” therefore, is rarely a label that simply falls from heaven.

Very often, it is a name applied after one side has prevailed. A person revered as a saint today may once have been regarded as dangerous by his contemporaries. Yet when a religion gains social standing—when it acquires courts, schools, institutions, and even statues on public bridges—it too may begin calling others heretics. An unsettling cycle can then emerge. When persecuted:

“Please give me freedom of belief.”

After acquiring power:

“Your belief is wrong, therefore it should not be allowed to exist.”

This problem belongs to no single religion. Buddhist history has seen disputes among schools. Confucian tradition used the language of “heterodox teachings.” Modern political systems, too, have at times suppressed conscience in the name of science, progress, or some supposedly unquestionable future.

Change the vocabulary, and the structure can remain the same. This is a human problem. Once people hold their convictions and the instruments of coercion in the same hand, it becomes remarkably easy to forget that they, too, were once a minority.

One distinction is essential. Intellectual disagreement is not itself persecution. Augustine wrote against teachings he opposed because he genuinely believed that some of them led people away from what he understood as grace. A tradition that is no longer permitted to say, “I believe this is wrong,” is scarcely a tradition at all.

The question is not whether right and wrong exist. The question is whether our judgment of right and wrong must become iron bars, banned books, fires—or a pile of crushed covers beneath a saint’s feet.

A burning heart can signify love. A burning heart can also burn another person’s manuscript. The same heart. Two possible uses.

The stone sculpture chooses the posture of the victor: the heart raised high, the books beneath the feet. We do not need to demand that a three-hundred-year-old statue conform to a twenty-first-century syllabus on liberalism.

But perhaps we can stand before it for another thirty seconds and ask a question the statue itself cannot ask:

When you are certain that you possess the truth, will you still allow someone else to open a book that says the opposite?

If the answer is no, then the iron bars from Chapter 7 have already stretched from one end of Charles Bridge to the other.

Only the guard has changed. What Part Three seeks to preserve is not the idea that “all beliefs are equally correct.” That would be an evasion.

The principle is narrower: Faith may be absolute. Power must have limits. A person may believe with all his heart that he has seen the light. That conviction does not give him a license to imprison someone else.

The bridge is still there. The chains are still carved into the stone. The books are still beneath the saint’s feet.

If we pass by praising only redemption, or praising only orthodoxy, we have read only half the stone. The other half says:

When you stand outside the bars today, remember the person inside them. And if tomorrow you are the one holding the key, remember that you too might once have been the prisoner.

Chapter 9

Is a Religious Institution the Same as the Teaching of God?

This is another question I found myself returning to after walking across Charles Bridge. Almost all of the thirty statues of saints on the bridge were chosen, commissioned, financed, and placed there by some human institution.

Religious orders paid. Bishops paid. Universities paid. Noble families paid. Once the stone is standing, it can look as though Truth itself has stepped onto the bridge.

But human beings placed the stone there. Human beings also decided who would stand upon it. Religion and the teachings of God may not be the same thing.

The teachings of Jesus are one thing: love God; love your neighbor as yourself; turn the other cheek; remove the beam from your own eye first.

The great religious institutions later built by human beings are another: dioceses, religious orders, courts, taxes, alliances with kings, decisions about who may preach and who must remain silent.

The two can overlap. They are not automatically identical. The teachings of the Buddha are one thing: suffering, its origin, its cessation, the path, and the letting go of attachment to the self.

The monasteries, sects, incense offerings, interests, and institutions that developed in later centuries do not necessarily equal what Siddhartha himself understood beneath the Bodhi tree.

The “Dao” of Laozi and the systems later promoted by governments and administered through Taoist institutions likewise have many generations of human hands between them.

Any organization composed of human beings can acquire distinctly human things: Power. Interests. Status. Factions. Fear. Even corruption. That is not an insult. It is an observation.

A hospital can become corrupt without proving medicine false. A university can become consumed by struggles for position without proving that the pursuit of knowledge is meaningless.

Likewise, a religious institution can deteriorate without proving that there was never any light in its scriptures. To reason from “some people did bad things” to “the source must therefore be false” is intellectually lazy.

But so is reasoning from “the source is true” to “therefore the institution can never be wrong.” They are the same shortcut, taken in opposite directions.

Religious institutions can, of course, also do exactly what they ought to do. They can copy and preserve scriptures so that one generation can still read the words read by the previous one. They can feed people during plague and war, care for orphans, and give frightened communities a shared rhythm in which morality becomes more than a private feeling.

Charles Bridge itself is an example. Without religious orders, civic authorities, and donors, those stones would not have remained standing in the wind for three hundred years.

So the point is not that “religious organizations are bad.” That would merely flatten the complexity of human life into an expression of anger.

What needs to be distinguished are four things: sacred teaching, personal faith, religious institution, and political power. They may hold hands. They are not the same concept.

A teaching is the word heard at the source. Faith is a person’s decision to make that word a direction for life.

An institution is the vessel that gathers people together and carries the teaching across generations. Power is what grows teeth when that vessel comes into contact with courts, armies, schools, and tax registers.

Without these distinctions, it becomes very easy to confuse “defending the institution” with “defending the truth.” Criticism of the organization becomes an attack on the sacred.

Questions about accounts become sabotage by outsiders. Someone who leaves is declared fallen. And the very thing that should most urgently be measured against the original teaching—the conduct of the institution itself—is granted immunity from examination.

The next step is more dangerous still. Because people are convinced that they possess the truth, they begin deciding for others:

You should believe this. You must not believe that. The means do not always have to be chains. They can be ridicule. Dismissal from a job. A ban on publication. Exclusion from education. A closed door.

Some bars are made of iron. Others are made of air. The bars made of air are usually invisible in photographs.

At that point, the distance between persecuted and persecutor may be much shorter than we imagine. The same person who prayed behind the bars yesterday may stand outside them tomorrow, counting the keys.

Human nature has not changed. Only the person’s position has. Once the position changes, will yesterday’s appeal to “freedom of belief” be placed quietly in a drawer and replaced by a new sentence:

“For the sake of truth, order must now be restored”?

The saints on the bridge cannot answer. They were placed there only after institutions had chosen them. Only those of us still walking can answer:

What do you revere—the teaching itself, or the table that pays salaries, confers titles, and decides who receives the pulpit?

Both can exist. We simply should not confuse their names. Because once we do, people may begin hurting others for the sake of the table while believing that they are protecting the light above it.

Chapter 10

What Happens When the Persecuted Gain Power?

When people are weak, it is easy for them to understand the importance of freedom. They need it. On the night John of Nepomuk was thrown into the river, any observer could understand something very simple: a man should not be hurled into the water because he refuses to reveal words he believes he must keep secret.

When the three chained prisoners in the cavern stretch their hands upward, sympathy is easy. We are standing outside the bars. The wind around us is free. From where we stand, everything looks clear.

But what happens when we become the majority?

What happens when we acquire political power?

Can we still give the same freedom to someone else?

That is the harder test. For the weak, asking for freedom is survival. For the strong, granting freedom requires restraint.

Survival is almost instinctive. Restraint depends on memory. And when memory is lost, yesterday’s prisoner can become today’s guard while sincerely believing:

This time is different. This time, we possess the truth. That is why the prisoners behind the bars on Charles Bridge and the “heretical” books beneath Augustine’s feet should be viewed together.

One shows us what the loss of freedom looks like. The chains are concrete. So are the dog and the weapons. A human being has been reduced to someone waiting to be redeemed from captivity.

The other warns us about what can happen once someone acquires the authority to define what is true. Words with which we disagree can be placed beneath our feet, and the act of crushing them can be called the defense of orthodoxy.

Books do not bleed. But what is crushed is another person’s space to think and speak openly. The two sculptures stand apart on the bridge.

One narrative celebrates rescue. The other celebrates victory. Viewed separately, each can be moving. Put them together, however, and an uncomfortable light appears:

Do you oppose only the chains placed upon your own people, while admiring the foot placed upon someone else’s ideas? Perhaps the mark of a mature civilization is not simply:

“At last, I am free to profess my own faith openly.”

That is only the first lesson. It is an essential lesson. Without it, human beings suffocate. But passing the first lesson is not graduation. The harder sentence is:

“Even if I believe your faith is wrong, I will not use power to force you to believe mine.”

There are two halves to this sentence, and neither can be removed. The first half acknowledges that I may sincerely believe you are wrong. I do not have to pretend that all roads are equally true.

The second acknowledges that my conviction is not an arrest warrant. People may argue. They may write books. They may leave. They may persuade. They may criticize one another openly.

But a person should not be placed in a cavern simply because he refuses to kneel before the same image, nor should his books be piled beneath the feet of a saint merely because they contain a different belief.

This is not relativism. Relativism says that right and wrong do not matter. The principle here is different: Right and wrong matter deeply—which is precisely why they should not be turned into a club.

Once the club becomes legitimate, no one can know who will be allowed to define right and wrong the next time.

The Manichaean writings Augustine read in his youth later became trophies beneath the feet of his sculpted image. History has a way of making jokes.

The cost of the joke is usually paid first by whoever happens to be the minority at the time.

People walking across Charles Bridge readily photograph the polished relief of John of Nepomuk and make a wish that they will someday return.

They may also photograph the iron bars and reflect on the importance of humanity. Far fewer are willing to place those two images on top of one another and ask themselves:

If tomorrow I am no longer part of the minority, will I still defend the right of someone I dislike to remain a minority?

If the answer is yes, then perhaps we have finally read the stones on Charles Bridge to the end.

If the answer is no, then Part Three need not really be called When Faith Meets Power. Power was there all along.

The only thing that changed was whose hands were holding it. What Part Three leaves with those still walking across the bridge is not a verdict on any particular religion.

It is a touchstone: When judging a person—or an age—do not look only at what they say while they are being persecuted.

Look at what they do when the keys are finally in their own hands—and which lock they choose to open or close.

Part Four

Why Did China Not Follow Exactly the Same Path?

Chapter 11

Why Did China Experience Fewer European-Style Religious Conflicts?

Looking back at China from Europe, one notices an interesting difference. The difference is not that “Europe was cruel while China was tolerant.” Chinese history certainly witnessed religious suppression, sometimes on a severe scale: temples were destroyed, monks forced back into lay life, books prohibited, clergy killed, and popular religious movements prosecuted as threats to the state.

To portray China as a naturally tolerant paradise would simply replace one misconception with another. Yet China experienced relatively few of the prolonged, large-scale religious wars that occurred during certain periods of European history—wars fought over competing religions or denominations claiming to represent the one true orthodoxy.

Conflicts like the Thirty Years’ War, in which doctrinal divisions became entangled with dynastic interests, territory, and political power, were not a dominant pattern in Chinese history.

More commonly, the imperial state moved against a religious institution that had grown too powerful, or against a popular religious movement perceived as threatening social or political order.

After the suppression ended, temples might reopen. Incense might burn again. What changed was often the scale of an institution and the degree of state control—not necessarily a permanent declaration that only one doctrine of salvation could ever be permitted.

One important reason may lie in the different ways the two civilizations structured religious belief. In late medieval and early modern Europe, people were often expected to define where their souls belonged.

Were you Catholic? Lutheran? Calvinist? Anabaptist?

Denomination was not merely a private sentiment. It could determine legal status, inheritance, eligibility for public office, and where and how one’s children were baptized.

The stones on Charles Bridge are a public expression of this structure: Orthodoxy had a visible form. Heresy had a name.

And chains had an intended occupant. For centuries, however, Chinese people commonly spoke of the Three Teachings: Confucianism, Buddhism, and Daoism.

The three were certainly not identical. Confucianism emphasized human relationships and social order. Buddhism addressed liberation, karma, suffering, and transcendence. Daoism emphasized nature, stillness, the cultivation of life, and harmony with the Dao.

For a thousand years, officials and intellectuals wrote attacks against one another at court. Yet an ordinary person did not usually feel that reading Confucius meant he could never enter a Buddhist temple; that believing in Buddhism meant he could never accept Daoist ideas about health, life, and death; or that honoring his ancestors required him to choose one exclusive religious identity from among the three.

In everyday life, several traditions could coexist within a single family. A funeral might be conducted according to Confucian ideas of filial piety. Buddhist monks might be invited to chant for the deceased. The location and orientation of a home might be considered according to another body of ideas associated with Daoist cosmology and feng shui. Chinese intellectuals could speak of:

“Confucianism for governing the world, Daoism for cultivating the body, and Buddhism for cultivating the mind.”

The saying became so familiar that it almost turned into a cliché. Yet the very survival of such a cliché tells us something: the cultural structure allowed this kind of overlap.

In certain periods of European history, precisely this kind of layering was difficult to permit. Two mutually exclusive doctrines of salvation could not both be called one’s own orthodoxy.

Traditional Chinese society therefore produced fewer prolonged sectarian wars centered on the question of the “one true faith.” Its religious conflicts more often arose along a different fault line:

religious institutions versus the imperial court; monastic wealth versus the state’s registered taxpayers; popular secret religious associations versus public order.

These were questions of power and social order, not entirely questions of “which scripture alone can take you to heaven.”

But this certainly does not mean that ancient China lacked religious repression. Having fewer European-style wars of religion did not mean possessing more freedom of conscience in the modern sense.

The justification for repression might instead be written in terms such as “disrupting government,” “draining state resources,” or “heterodox teaching,” rather than, “Your doctrine of the Trinity is wrong.”

Walking in our minds from Charles Bridge back to Chang’an or Kaifeng, therefore, we do not discover that “China was kinder.”

We discover something more interesting: the two civilizations placed faith in different locations within the social order. In one, religious identity could resemble a form of registration.

In the other, it could resemble furniture in a household—several pieces might stand in the same room at once, until one piece grew so large that it blocked the path of imperial power.

Chapter 12

The “Three Wu and One Zong” Suppressions of Buddhism: Were They Really Driven by Hatred of Buddhism? Among the best-known episodes of religious suppression in Chinese history are the persecutions traditionally grouped under the name “Three Wu and One Zong” (San Wu Yi Zong).

They involved four emperors in different periods: Emperor Taiwu of the Northern Wei; Emperor Wu of the Northern Zhou;

Emperor Wuzong of the Tang; and Emperor Shizong of the Later Zhou. All four imposed large-scale restrictions on Buddhism.

The first three rulers had the character Wu in their imperial titles, which is why the first three suppressions are also known collectively as the “Disasters of the Three Wu.”

If we see only the phrase “suppression of Buddhism,” it is easy to form a simple picture: these emperors hated Buddhist doctrine and wanted to uproot Buddhism entirely from the minds of the Chinese people.

History is considerably more complicated. In the case of Emperor Taiwu of the Northern Wei, the background included the influence of the Daoist-associated official Cui Hao, cultural anxiety about Buddhism as a foreign religion, and political concerns arising from weapons reportedly discovered in temples and suspected connections with rebellion.

Emperor Wu of the Northern Zhou also imposed restrictions on Daoism. A major concern was bringing monastic populations and temple property back under state control so that the government could obtain resources for warfare and military support.

Tang Emperor Wuzong personally favored Daoism, and edicts of the Huichang era did indeed contain rhetoric condemning Buddhism as a foreign teaching.

But a major force behind the scale of the suppression was the weakened fiscal position of the central government after the An Lushan Rebellion.

Monasteries enjoyed tax privileges. Monks and nuns could stand outside ordinary taxation and labor obligations. Bronze statues and bells also represented large stores of metal that could be converted into coinage.

Later Zhou Emperor Shizong inherited the devastation of the Five Dynasties period. His reforms likewise concerned temple property and the regulation of ordination.

He was not sitting in a monastery rewriting the Mūlamadhyamakakārikā. A research overview held in the University of Melbourne’s special collections describes the background to these persecutions as involving a combination of religious, ideological, political, ethnic, social, and economic factors.

Temple land and wealth, tax exemptions, the removal of monks and nuns from the state’s tax and labor system, and the fiscal pressures created by war all formed part of the background.

During the Huichang suppression, monastic property was confiscated, large numbers of monks and nuns were forced to return to lay life, and metal from Buddhist statues was recovered for other uses, including coinage.

Contemporary imperial records themselves offered striking figures: more than 4,600 major monasteries destroyed, more than 40,000 smaller temples and shrines abolished, some 260,500 monks and nuns returned to lay status, and enormous quantities of land reclaimed.

So it is not entirely accurate to interpret these events simply as “emperors hating Buddhism.” Hostility certainly could be present. Buddhism could be attacked as foreign, as incompatible with obligations to ruler and family, or as removing too many people from the registered population.

But behind some of the largest campaigns lay another concern: The state lacks resources, while the monasteries possess too much wealth and too many people.

None of this excuses forced laicization, the destruction of temples, or the melting down of sacred images. People were expelled from monasteries. Scriptures were destroyed. Bronze Buddhas became metal for coins.

The suffering was real. Distinguishing motives does not diminish the harm. It simply prevents us from using the wrong measuring stick.

It allows us to distinguish two phenomena that can overlap but are not identical: The suppression of a religious institution does not necessarily arise entirely from hatred of its doctrine.

Wars fought over the possession of the one true orthodoxy come closer to the logic of “heresy” we encountered on Charles Bridge.

In Chinese history, imperial governments more often confronted another question: What relationship should a religious force possessing large populations, landholdings, wealth, and social influence have with the power of the state?

If monasteries began to resemble a state within the state, an emperor could perceive them as a threat—regardless of whether the temples contained Buddhas or something else. Some European religious conflicts contained an additional question:

Which doctrine, and which church, had the right to represent the one true orthodoxy?

The “wrong” religion was not merely one that should lose its tax privileges. It might be a religion that should not exist at all.

The two patterns could overlap. Northern Wei edicts contained ideological elements. Tang Emperor Wuzong also condemned Buddhism as damaging established moral and social teaching.

But the central axes were not always the same. One pattern resembles a state reclaiming estates that have escaped its control.

The other resembles a marketplace of souls in which only one shop is allowed to remain open. On Charles Bridge, we see doctrine cast into iron bars.

In the fiscal records of the Huichang era, we see bronze Buddhas turned into money. Both could be brutal. But the reasons for that brutality were not written in exactly the same scripture.

Chapter 13

Why Were the Three Teachings Able to Coexist?

One of the most interesting features of traditional Chinese civilization is its relatively strong capacity to accommodate different religious and philosophical traditions.

Accommodation does not mean a poster advertising harmony. Confucianism, Buddhism, and Daoism competed. They criticized one another. They came into conflict.

Han Yu called for Buddhist books to be burned and Buddhist institutions dismantled. Neo-Confucian thinkers accused Buddhism and Daoism of undermining proper human relationships. Some Buddhists, in turn, regarded Confucianism as concerned only with affairs of this world.

Daoist priests entered the imperial court. Buddhist monks entered the imperial court. They competed for the emperor’s attention and favor.

The persecutions of the “Three Wu and One Zong” demonstrate that when accommodation broke down, it could break down violently.

Yet after the rupture, the structure often came together again. Destroyed temples were rebuilt. Monks forced back into lay life might be followed in another dynasty by the issuing of new ordination certificates.

A scholar-official could denounce Buddhism in public and then return home and commission Buddhist rites for his deceased mother.

This flexibility arose from several overlapping habits. First, the central concerns of mainstream Chinese political culture were for a long time closer to government and human relationships than to the monopoly of a single path of salvation.

Who should rule?

How should one practice filial piety?

How should an official behave?

These questions occupied more of the imperial court’s attention than whether the doctrine of the Trinity in the neighboring village constituted blasphemy.

Fine distinctions concerning the soul largely remained within temples and religious traditions rather than being transformed wholesale into state law.

Second, the Three Teachings often served different functions. Confucianism dealt largely with public order: family, state, ritual, education, and the examination system.

Buddhism addressed death, suffering, the afterlife, karma, and compassion. Daoism addressed the body, nature, fortune, withdrawal and engagement, and ways of living in harmony with larger patterns.

Once the functions were differentiated, a person could make use of all three without automatically being considered an apostate.

At the heart of some European sectarian conflicts lay precisely the opposite structure: salvation could not be divided into separate functions.

There was one channel. If the channel was wrong, the entire person was wrong. Third, imperial power placed itself above the Three Teachings rather than simply becoming one of them.

An emperor might perform traditional state sacrifices. He might promote arguments about the reconciliation of the Three Teachings. He might also suppress Buddhism.

The ultimate arbiter was the imperial court, not a universal religious authority comparable to the papacy in Rome. This produced repression.

But it also produced a kind of cold equilibrium. No single one of the Three Teachings could easily expel the other two permanently from the empire.

The person with the power to expel was the emperor, not the abbot. Ordinary people turned this balance into everyday life.

Ancestor worship, reading the classics, burning incense, and observing the rhythms of the traditional calendar could all appear within the same household.

None of this means that ancient China possessed religious freedom in the modern sense. Imperial power could and did intervene in religion.

The White Lotus tradition, Luo Teaching, and various popular religious associations classified by the authorities as “heterodox teachings” were at times subjected to severe suppression.

The traditions that could coexist most easily were often those that had already become accepted pieces of the civilization’s furniture.

Those that had not been accepted could still become evidence of rebellion. Chinese history should therefore not be romanticized.

The coexistence of the Three Teachings was not a declaration of human rights. It was closer to a civilizational technique: where “one exclusive orthodoxy” had not become the organizing principle of the entire society, several ancient ways of speaking about life could continue to exist side by side.

And here, the questions raised by East and West begin to converge. Charles Bridge asks the question through iron bars and books beneath a saint’s feet.

The suppressions of Buddhism ask it through bronze Buddhas melted down and transformed into something else. Both ultimately ask:

Can a person believe deeply in his own path while allowing other paths to exist?

The Chinese experience suggests that, in everyday life, this was possible to some extent. But Chinese history also shows that when a religious institution became wealthy enough to resemble a government—or when a popular religious movement came to be regarded as resembling an army—the boundaries of tolerance could rapidly contract.

The European experience shows another danger: when doctrine becomes a kind of compulsory identity card, freedom tends to disappear first from the homes of minorities.

Neither historical path automatically leads to the modern principle of freedom of conscience. That principle still has to be stated separately:

Believe deeply in your own path without needing to destroy another’s. Govern institutions without trying to govern another person’s soul.

If Part Four can be reduced to one final thought, perhaps it is this: East and West followed different paths not because one civilization was inherently more compassionate than the other, but because history placed “faith” in different parts of their social structures.

Understanding that difference should help us see the principle more clearly—not begin another competition over which civilization was superior.

Part Five

How Does Persecution Become Possible?

Stop Organ Harvesting in China. ( Photograph: The Epoch Times)

Chapter 14

If Only a Few People Carry Out Persecution, Why Does the Majority Remain Silent?

By this point, I found myself asking a larger question:

How does large-scale persecution actually happen?

Those who formulate the policies are always a minority. Only a few draft the decrees. Only a few sign them. Even those who directly carry them out are usually a minority.

So where is everyone else?

Research by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum on the role of “bystanders” reminds us that the word can easily flatten a much more complicated reality.

Some people truly remained silent. Some were afraid. Some felt powerless. Some yielded to the expectations of neighbors and colleagues. Some already held prejudices against the victims. And some received very tangible benefits from the jobs, businesses, homes, and property that victims were forced to surrender.

Silence is not a single expression on a face. Silence is a list. This made me realize that persecution does not require turning an entire society into evil people. It merely requires different people to retreat one step at a time. Someone says:

“It has nothing to do with me.”

Someone else says:

“The authorities must have their reasons.”

Another says:

“No one else is speaking up. Why should I?”

Someone says:

“I have a family and a job. I cannot afford to make trouble for myself.”

And someone else asks:

“If there were absolutely nothing wrong with them, why would they be singled out?”

Society does not suddenly fill with millions of monsters. Instead, it fills with ordinary people, each with a reason to look away.

Each reason, taken by itself, sounds almost mundane. But put all these ordinary reasons together, and they create a very wide corridor through which persecution can pass.

Policy enters from one end. Victims are taken away through the other. The people standing in between mostly believe that they have done nothing.

But sometimes, doing nothing is itself a form of doing. The iron bars on Charles Bridge are carved from stone. The bars in human society are often built first from silence. First comes:

“It is none of my business.”

Only later does it become possible to say:

“Then it is acceptable to imprison them.”

The pens held by a small number of people require the blank faces of many others. And if those faces remain blank long enough, the writing produced by those pens grows larger and larger. So when we ask how persecution happens, we should not ask only:

Where were the monsters?

We should also ask: In that year, on that street, where were ordinary people looking—the people who could still buy groceries, go to work, and take their children to school?

Chapter 15

From “It Has Nothing to Do with Me” to “There Must Be Something Wrong with Them” There is another, more subtle transformation that can occur in a bystander.

It does not happen in the public square. It happens in the private conversation a person repeats inside his own mind.

The first time someone sees a neighbor treated unjustly, he may think: This should not be happening. There is still a thorn inside him.

But suppose the injustice continues for years and he does nothing. Then one thorn begins pressing against another. On one side:

What is happening to them is unfair. On the other: But all these years, I have done nothing to help them.

How does a person continue sleeping at night?

One possibility is to change his behavior. He can speak up. He can bring someone a bag of food. He can refuse to pass along a defamatory story. He can pull his child away from a crowd that is mocking someone.

Such choices carry risks. The degree of risk varies from one historical period to another, but the risk can be real.

There is, however, an easier solution: Change the way you think about the victim. Perhaps there really is something wrong with them.

Perhaps the authorities know something I do not. Perhaps what the newspapers say is true. Perhaps they themselves are too extreme, too conspicuous, too unlike us.

Research discussed by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum also points to this mechanism: when people repeatedly witness serious harm to others without acting, they may reduce the resulting inner conflict by distancing themselves from the victims, devaluing them, or even beginning to believe that the victims somehow deserved what happened to them.

Once injustice has been rewritten as “there must have been a reason,” the bystander no longer has to confront his own inaction.

He is not cold-hearted. He has simply “thought it through.” Silence no longer looks like cowardice. It can now be presented as rationality.

And rationality is a very polished badge. Wearing it, someone can sit at the dinner table and say something very heavy in a very light voice:

“Well, what happened to them probably wasn't entirely without reason.”

This is also why many campaigns of persecution are accompanied by prolonged, repetitive, highly detailed negative portrayals of the targeted group.

Propaganda does not need every sentence to be absurd. It merely needs to move “them” out of the category of “people who might be like me.”

If a society continues to see victims as ordinary human beings—people who become ill, raise children, worry about their families, and lie awake at night—sustained persecution becomes much harder.

One effective way to make ordinary people accept injustice against others is first to convince them: They are not like us.

The difference might be religion. It might be ancestry. It might be an accent. It might simply be a portrait that has been darkened again and again.

Once that portrait has been repeated for long enough, a neighbor stops being a neighbor. He becomes a category.

Categories are easier to process. Categories have no faces. And when people without faces are taken away, it becomes easier for the neighbors to finish washing the dishes. The silences of Chapter 14—each with its own justification—can now acquire a second skin. The first was:

“I am afraid.”

The second becomes:

“They deserve it.”

The first allows a person to retreat. The second allows him to feel at peace. And a bystander who feels at peace is much harder to awaken than one who is merely afraid.

Chapter 16

“I Was Only Following Orders”: The Banality of Evil

Beyond the bystanders is another kind of ordinary person: someone who actually participates in persecution. Yet such people may look nothing like the villains in storybooks.

They get up in the morning and go to work. They sit in offices. They fill out forms. They stamp documents.

They register names. They classify files. They inventory confiscated furniture. They arrange railway carriages. They move a list from one desk to another.

Then they go home in the evening, eat dinner with their families, ask their children about school, and return to work the following morning.

The history of Nazi persecution shows that the machinery depended not only on senior leaders and those who directly pulled triggers.

Financial officials could process confiscated Jewish property. Clerks could mark identities in official records. Teachers could teach according to prescribed narratives.

Railway employees could keep trains running on schedule. Police could carry out roundups. Looked at separately, many of these actions could appear to be merely “part of the job.”

Connected together, however, they became a conveyor belt carrying human beings toward destruction. This brings us to the disturbing phrase Hannah Arendt used after the trial of Adolf Eichmann:

“the banality of evil.”

It is a phrase that is very easy to misuse. It does not mean that evil is ordinary and therefore less serious.

Nor does it mean that Eichmann was merely obeying orders and therefore bore less responsibility. Arendt drew attention to something else: the possibility that immense wrongdoing can operate through routines, administrative language, divided responsibilities, and people who cease to examine what their work is actually doing to other human beings.

“I only handled transportation.”

“I only signed the document.”

“I only processed the paperwork.”

“The policy wasn't mine.”

“If I hadn't done it, someone else would have.”

Each person sees only one small step. No one believes that he created the final result. History, however, sees all those small steps joined together into one enormous machine.

One qualification is important here. A number of later historians have challenged aspects of Arendt’s portrayal of Eichmann himself. They argue that she underestimated both his ideological commitment to Nazism and the degree of initiative he exercised in his position.

How Eichmann should be understood—and how broadly the phrase “banality of evil” should be applied—remains debated. The concept is therefore more useful as a moral and philosophical warning than as a simplified claim that the perpetrators were all thoughtless clerks.

Some were fanatics. Some actively devised new methods to make the machinery work more efficiently. Some benefited from houses, jobs, or property taken from others.

And some, surrounded by repetitive paperwork, gradually allowed their capacity to distinguish right from wrong to go numb. The warning nevertheless remains powerful.

Modern societies are especially capable of dividing responsibility into tiny pieces. Evil does not have to grow horns. It can put on a uniform.

It can learn precise administrative language. It can finish work on time. And the finer the division of labor becomes, the easier it is for each individual to say:

“That part wasn't mine.”

But the victim does not encounter one part. The victim encounters the whole river.

Chapter 17

If the Law Allows It, Does That Mean I Bear No Responsibility?

This brings us to an even more difficult question.

What if everything I do is perfectly legal under the law of the time?

What if my superior has already signed the order?

What if everyone in my department follows the same procedure?

What if refusing would cost me my job—or something worse?

Do I still bear responsibility?

If “it was legal at the time” could serve as a complete moral defense, then anyone who controls the law would need only to write injustice into legislation first.

Everything that followed would then become nobody’s responsibility. The statute book would become a method for washing one’s hands.

And the cleaner the hands appeared, the more the actions performed by them would resemble ordinary public administration. History has not accepted that conclusion.

After Nuremberg, humanity recognized at least in principle that positive law is not the ceiling of morality. An institution can define a person's position.

A superior can issue an order. A law can establish a procedure. But none of these can completely take over a person's most basic moral judgment:

Is what I am doing treating another human being as less than human?

That is why the most dangerous aspect of the sentence “I was only following orders” is not merely that it may later be used to escape punishment.

The greater danger is that, in saying it, a person may already have surrendered something more important: the responsibility to judge right from wrong.

Once that responsibility is surrendered, the person becomes a conduit. And a perfectly efficient conduit is particularly well suited to carrying an enormous wrong.

This does not mean that every junior official is expected to rewrite the constitution. That would be unrealistic. The requirement is much narrower.

When an order is clearly harming innocent people, a person should at least still know that harm is being done.

Knowing and pretending not to know are two different ways of living. To know and still participate is one kind of wrongdoing.

To pretend not to know is another kind, wrapped in different packaging. And the more that packaging resembles ordinary work, the more carefully it needs to be opened and examined.

The law may mitigate a person’s position before a particular court. It cannot automatically erase what he says to himself in the middle of the night.

And if that private question never arises at all, the problem may be deeper than illegality: the faculty of moral judgment has already left its post.

Chapter 18

Must Ordinary People Become Heroes?

At this point, however, we must avoid rushing to the opposite extreme. Are we demanding that every ordinary person become a hero under conditions of severe repression?

No. In a genuinely coercive environment, open resistance may mean losing one’s job, one’s freedom, or even one’s life.

It is unfair to stand safely in a later age and award courage scores to every ordinary person who lived through the danger.

Morality after the event can be as cheap as a tourist souvenir. The people living through it did not have that luxury.

Historical research also shows that ordinary choices are pulled in many directions by fear, conformity, authority, self-interest, and inherited prejudice.

Yet people living under similar conditions still made different choices. Some participated. Some remained silent. And some did take risks: hiding someone, carrying a message, leaving a door unlocked, or deliberately making an error on a list.

Such acts of courage do not make a dark age look better. But they do demonstrate something important: The age did not succeed in confiscating every last fragment of human choice. So perhaps the most useful question is not:

“Why didn't everyone become a hero?”

It is:

“What, at the very least, could an ordinary person refuse to do?”

Perhaps he cannot change the entire system. But he can refuse to inform on a neighbor. He can refuse to invent accusations against someone.

He can refuse to humiliate another person publicly because of that person’s faith, background, or silence. He can refuse to reach out and take the furniture that suddenly became cheap because somebody else had been dispossessed.

He can refuse to repeat the propaganda of the day word for word as a bedtime story to his children.

If his position leaves even a narrow gap, he can use it to reduce the harm done to one person.

If he can still speak one fair sentence, then one sentence matters. These things seem small. Too small to be carved onto monuments.

But persecution itself is constructed from countless small choices: a form, a stamp, a nod, a moment when someone turns his eyes away from the window.

If persecution can be built from small choices, then resistance to persecution may also begin with one small refusal after another.

A refusal may not win. But at least it does not personally hand over another brick. And that is why, in the end, I chose to place a few very ordinary words in the subtitle of this book: the choices of ordinary people.

Part Six

What If It Were Happening Today?

Chapter 19

Why Should Europe Be Able to Understand What Is Happening in China Today?

Falun Gong parade in Prague, 2026 09.19. Leaving the streets and returning to Charles Bridge, history and the present seemed to meet. Photograph by Epochtimes.

When I returned to Prague in 2026, I personally witnessed a large Falun Gong parade calling for an end to the persecution.

Falun Gong, also known as Falun Dafa, has been subjected to a nationwide campaign of suppression by the Chinese Communist Party since 1999—a campaign that has now lasted for more than twenty-six years. The people in the parade came from different countries. Most of their banners carried messages such as:

“Stop the Persecution of Falun Gong.”

“Falun Dafa Is Good. Truthfulness, Compassion, and Forbearance Are Good.”

Some participants carried photographs of Falun Gong practitioners from mainland China who, they said, had died as a result of persecution. Others carried small display boards in different languages.

As I came down from Charles Bridge and thought again of the figures who had once suffered persecution and were later carved into Europe’s memory—the man thrown into the river, the prisoners behind iron bars, the books crushed beneath a saint’s feet—I suddenly realized how close history and the present could become.

Beginning in July 1999, the Chinese government launched a nationwide crackdown on Falun Gong. Amnesty International reports from 1999 and 2000 documented allegations of mass detention, torture, unfair trials, and deaths in custody.

More than two decades later, the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom continued to report that Falun Gong practitioners were being imprisoned because of their beliefs. Its 2026 reporting and related statements continued to describe China as a country where systematic, ongoing, and severe violations of freedom of religion or belief occur, including the imprisonment of Falun Gong practitioners and reports involving elderly practitioners sentenced or dying in custody in 2025.

The Chinese government, for its part, has long characterized Falun Gong as a prohibited organization and has defended its actions through its own legal and political framework.

The sources, types of evidence, and individual cases behind these claims should of course be examined separately. A report is not scripture.

Individual cases need verification. The government's defense should also be heard—and then compared with the evidence, rather than treated automatically as the final word.

But one question of principle is not especially complicated: Should a person, simply for peacefully maintaining a spiritual belief, be subjected to arbitrary detention, torture, or other serious violations of fundamental rights?

If the answer is no, then that answer cannot apply only to medieval European heretics. It cannot apply only to the priest thrown into the Vltava.

It cannot apply only to Christians carved in stone behind the iron bars on Charles Bridge. A principle that protects only the saints we already recognize is not yet a principle.

Europe's own history should make this question familiar. Charles Bridge does not stand there to tell us that humanity has graduated from persecution.

It reminds us that graduation may be an illusion. Change the vocabulary. Change the century. Change the spiritual practice declared dangerous.

The bars can appear again. Recognizing them does not require first having a favorable opinion of Falun Gong. It requires remembering why Europe erected a statue to John of Nepomuk in the first place.

Chapter 20

“I Don’t Believe in Your Faith” Is Not Yet the Most Difficult Problem

When we discuss religious freedom, we often ask:

If I do not believe in your faith, am I still willing to defend your right to believe it?

That is an important question. Chapter 7 already asked it. If an ordinary person in Britain, Germany, France, or the Czech Republic were asked, “Even if you do not believe in a religion, do you recognize another person’s right to believe it?” many would answer:

“Of course.”

That idea has become part of the basic civility of modern society. Civility matters. But civility can also remain merely verbal. A more subtle difficulty may lie in another sentence, one that sounds far less aggressive:

“I don't know anything about Falun Gong, and I don't want to.”

That may sound perfectly reasonable. There are so many religions, philosophies, and spiritual practices in the world that no one can be expected to investigate them all.

Not knowing is a person's freedom. Not being interested is also a person's freedom. For most beliefs, there is nothing inherently wrong with such an attitude. A bookstore is enormous; everyone has the right to walk past a particular shelf. But there is another question that is easy to overlook:

Why don't I want to know?

Is it because I have seriously examined something and concluded that it is not for me?

Or had I already reached a conclusion before I truly learned anything about it?

“This is a religion.”

“This is qigong.”

“This is something Chinese.”

“This isn't scientific.”

“It has nothing to do with me.”

Or simply:

“I heard something about it years ago.”

If it is the latter, then what prevents further inquiry may no longer be reasoned judgment. It may simply be an assumption we have never tested for ourselves.

An assumption weighs almost nothing. It does not require reading the original book. It does not require listening to one actual person tell his story from beginning to end. All it needs is a label. Once the label is attached, curiosity can clock off for the day.

Part Five

Discussed how sustained persecution often begins by making people feel:

“They are not like us.”

In a safe country, the police are not necessarily required to perform this first step. The sentence “I don't want to know” can move an entire group outside the circle of people we regard as understandable.

Once they have been moved outside, later information becomes only distant noise. Noise has no face. And people without faces have difficulty entering our principles. So the difficulty of religious freedom today may not simply be whether someone is prepared to say:

“I will defend your right to believe.”

The more difficult question is whether, before defending that right, we are willing to rescue the person himself from the label and regard him as someone who can be asked questions. Asking is not conversion. Asking simply means refusing to let prejudice do the work of our own eyes.

Chapter 21

What If One Day You Really Need Help?

At this point, perhaps we should first answer the most basic question:

What exactly is Falun Gong?

According to the Falun Dafa official website, Falun Dafa, also known as Falun Gong, is a Buddhist-school cultivation practice introduced publicly by Mr. Li Hongzhi in 1992. Its guiding principles are Truthfulness, Compassion, and Forbearance.

The practice includes both cultivation of the mind and physical exercises. On one side, practitioners seek to conduct themselves according to Truthfulness, Compassion, and Forbearance in everyday life, cultivating their xinxing, or moral character, when faced with personal interests, conflicts, grievances, and temptations.

On the other side are five exercises—four standing exercises and one seated meditation. The movements are gentle and relatively simple to learn and do not require a particular time, location, or direction.

Falun Dafa's principal books, exercise music, and instructional videos are available free of charge through its official website, while local practice sites generally teach the exercises without charge.

If that were the whole story, perhaps Falun Gong would not have spread so rapidly through China during the 1990s.

Many people initially went to the practice sites for a very practical reason: They believed their health had improved after they began practicing.

In September 1998, a survey team that included physicians and medical professors conducted a questionnaire on physical and mental health among 12,553 Falun Gong practitioners in ten cities in Guangdong Province, including Guangzhou, Foshan, Zhongshan, Zhaoqing, Shantou, and Meizhou.

Of these, 10,475 reported having suffered from one or more illnesses before beginning the practice. According to the survey report, 77.5 percent considered themselves “recovered or basically recovered,” while another 20.4 percent reported improvement. Added together, the report described an overall “health improvement effectiveness rate” of 97.9 percent.

It also reported that 89.4 percent of respondents believed that their xinxing and moral condition had improved. Ninety-seven point nine percent is an extraordinarily high figure. A reader encountering it today has every reason to ask:

Can that be trusted?

That question should be asked. By the standards of modern evidence-based medicine, this was not a randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled clinical trial.

The respondents were themselves Falun Gong practitioners. Much of the information about illness and improvement was self-reported, and there was no randomly selected non-practitioner control group. We therefore cannot translate “97.9 percent” into:

“Modern medicine has proved that Falun Gong cures 97.9 percent of diseases.”

It has not. But that does not mean the survey tells us nothing. More than ten thousand people are not merely one or two extraordinary anecdotes.

Even without establishing causation, the survey records a phenomenon worth investigating: Why did so many people at that time believe that their physical and mental condition had changed significantly after beginning the practice?

While writing this book, I also encountered many personal stories from practitioners. Some initially approached Falun Gong not because they were looking for religious faith, but because they were in poor health.

Some had been raised as atheists and did not believe in gods or Buddhas at all. Others initially practiced simply because family members or friends were doing so.

Yet years later, when they explained why they had continued, what they spoke about most was often no longer illness.

They spoke about changes in their temper. Changes in family relationships. Changes in their attitudes toward personal gain and loss.

Even changes in their understanding of the meaning of life. One example is Li Li, a Falun Gong practitioner in Britain.

She began practicing in 1997, when she was only in her thirties but was already suffering from numerous health problems. She recalled that various treatments had produced unsatisfactory results.

After she began reading Falun Gong books and doing the exercises, people around her felt that she had become noticeably more energetic.

But in her own view, the more important change was not physical. The practice changed the way she thought about life and morality.

She had grown up with an atheistic education and previously did not believe in gods or Buddhas. Later, she came to believe the traditional Chinese saying:

“What people do, Heaven sees.”

She began using that belief to discipline her own words and actions. One person's story cannot substitute for a clinical trial.

But neither does a human life become meaningless simply because it is not a clinical trial. It is better to keep both standards in view.

In ordinary times, this distinction may not seem particularly important. A healthy person living a stable life can quite reasonably say:

“I am not interested.”

That sentence works on sunny days. But a human life does not remain sunny forever. One day we may face serious illness.

We may face aging. We may encounter an inexplicable catastrophe. We may face death. We may even reach a point where doctors have done everything medicine can presently do, and what remains is waiting and uncertainty.

At that point, a question may suddenly become very practical: If there is a mind-body cultivation practice that I have never seriously investigated, and many people believe they have experienced physical, mental, or moral changes through it, would I at least be willing to spend some time finding out what it is?

To understand that question, we also need to return to China in 1998 and 1999. Exactly how many people practiced Falun Gong at the time is now difficult to determine. Estimates vary considerably.

Human Rights Watch later noted that Falun Gong sources put the number of practitioners in mainland China in 1999 at more than seventy million; the Chinese government had estimated roughly forty million at the end of 1998, while after the crackdown began official figures fell to around two million. Other sources recorded estimates of seventy million or more.

The exact figure is disputed. But the scale was plainly substantial. And the changes practitioners described were not limited to the body.

Many said that, after beginning to follow Truthfulness, Compassion, and Forbearance, they tried to look first at themselves during conflicts, to fight less, deceive less, and harm others less.

Some said they gave up bad habits. Some said family relationships improved. Some said they began, for the first time, to think seriously about why human beings live and what it actually means to be a good person.

These are, first of all, practitioners' own testimonies. We can observe them. We can investigate them. We can doubt them.

But if even part of what they describe is real, then the question is no longer simply whether a form of qigong has health benefits. The question becomes:

Can a cultivation practice genuinely change a person's body, conduct, and inner life?

Yet according to Falun Gong founder Li Hongzhi's own teachings, even that is not the principal purpose of the practice.

In Falun Gong's teachings, the exercises are not simply intended to cure illness or improve fitness. The central emphasis is placed on transforming one's xinxing: whether a person can struggle less for personal gain, look inward during conflict, restrain his behavior when harmed, and through cultivation continually elevate his moral character and what the teachings describe as the level of his being.

Falun Gong refers to this as cultivation toward “higher levels.” For those who accept the cultivation framework, the ultimate question is not how to make this lifetime more comfortable.

It is whether human life itself can genuinely be elevated. That question is obviously beyond what modern medicine can presently answer.

Science can investigate blood pressure, immune markers, sleep, pain, and psychological states. It is much harder to design an instrument that measures a “level of being.”

Whether cultivation can bring a person to a higher spiritual realm is also not something I can prove for the reader in this book. But we can ask the question in another way.

What if?

What if a substantial part of the health improvements described by practitioners is real?

What if living according to Truthfulness, Compassion, and Forbearance really can make someone more honest, compassionate, and tolerant—and thereby improve families and society?

And one step further: What if what Mr. Li Hongzhi describes is not merely a way of improving physical and mental well-being, but really is, as he says, a cultivation practice that guides people toward higher levels and enables human life to rise through cultivation?

Then what should we do?

I think the first response need not be belief. Nor need it be rejection. It can simply be: Find out.

We can obtain a copy of Zhuan Falun and see what it actually says. We can look at the five exercises.

We can talk to people who have genuinely practiced for many years and ask why they practice, what they believe they have gained, and what it has cost them.

At the same time, we can read critics, government accounts, human-rights reports, and whatever medical research is available, and compare them for ourselves.

Understanding is not acceptance. Reading a book does not make someone its believer. Learning a set of exercises does not require accepting every explanation it offers about life and the universe.

Independent judgment should allow us to open the door first, see what is inside, and only then decide whether to go farther.

Chapter 22

Falun Dafa in European Countries. ( Photograph: The Epoch Times)

Falun Gong, Too, Should Be Understood Before It Is Judged In 1998, on mornings in parks and green spaces across many parts of China, groups of Falun Gong practitioners could be seen doing the exercises together.

One year later, everything changed dramatically. In April 1999, a magazine in Tianjin published an article that portrayed Falun Gong as a danger comparable to the White Lotus movement. More than forty practitioners who went to raise objections were detained.

According to accounts of the episode, Tianjin authorities told practitioners that resolving the matter required action from Beijing. On April 25, 1999, more than ten thousand Falun Gong practitioners therefore gathered peacefully near the State Council's petition office in Beijing. Their requests included the release of those detained in Tianjin, an environment in which they could practice normally, and permission for Falun Gong books to be published.

The gathering remained peaceful. Then-Premier Zhu Rongji met with representatives. The Tianjin detainees were subsequently released, and the petitioners quietly left that evening.

Jiang Zemin, however, adopted a harder line. The Chinese leadership subsequently created the “610 Office” on June 10 to coordinate the campaign against Falun Gong.

On July 20, the nationwide crackdown began. A group that only months earlier had practiced openly in public parks became the target of a concentrated state campaign.

Practitioners from around the country subsequently traveled to Beijing to petition or unfurled banners in Tiananmen Square. One of the things they sought to explain was why they practiced and how, in their experience, the practice had changed their health, character, and moral outlook.

At the same time, newspapers, television, and radio in mainland China began a sustained and intensive campaign against Falun Gong.

On January 23, 2001, five people set themselves on fire in Tiananmen Square. Chinese authorities immediately identified them as Falun Gong practitioners and repeatedly broadcast footage that included images of a severely burned child.

Falun Gong representatives denied that the participants were genuine practitioners, pointing to teachings against killing and suicide and raising questions about the official footage and circumstances of the incident.

A Washington Post reporter later traveled to Kaifeng, where one of those who died, Liu Chunling, had lived. Neighbors interviewed by the newspaper said they had never seen her practice Falun Gong.

CNN journalists witnessed the beginning of the incident, but their recording equipment was quickly seized by police. Because independent journalists were unable to freely interview the hospitalized participants, the event remained sharply contested.

What can be said is that the self-immolation became an important turning point in the government's anti-Falun Gong propaganda. The Washington Post later reported that public attitudes toward Falun Gong changed markedly after the repeated official broadcasting of the images.

Beyond propaganda, there were prisons, labor camps, and detention centers. Human Rights Watch's 2002 report documented accounts of beatings, electric shocks, coercive ideological “transformation,” detention through the reeducation-through-labor system, and confinement in psychiatric facilities.

The Washington Post, drawing on interviews with Chinese government sources and practitioners, also reported systematic use of violence and coercive pressure in efforts to force practitioners to renounce their beliefs.

None of this means that because Falun Gong has been persecuted, every claim associated with Falun Gong is therefore true.

Whether people are persecuted and whether a doctrine is true are two different questions. But the reverse is equally important.

Falun Gong should not automatically be judged “not worth understanding” simply because of the Chinese government's characterization, media reporting, social impressions, or ideas a person formed years ago.

Understanding something does not mean accepting it. If we want to know what Falun Gong is, one direct method is to read its freely available books and see what Zhuan Falun actually says; examine what Truthfulness, Compassion, and Forbearance ask of practitioners; look at the five exercises; and then ask why some people continue practicing after twenty or thirty years.

At the same time, we can read medical studies, human-rights reports, government documents, and critics. As far as possible, all of these materials should be placed on the same table.

If practitioners say their health improved, we can listen. If researchers say the existing evidence is insufficient to establish medical causation, we should listen to that too.

If someone says the practice changed his character or family life, that can be recorded. If critics raise specific questions, those can be examined one by one.

We can read what the Chinese government says in its original documents. We can also examine what international human-rights organizations found and what evidence they relied upon.

Real inquiry does not allow only the material we already agree with onto the table. In the end, a person may believe or disbelieve.

He may accept part of it and consider other aspects beyond his worldview. Those are his choices. The important point is that the choice should ideally come after understanding, not before it.

Understanding is not a declaration of faith. It is not conversion. It is simply placing the evidence on the table and keeping the final judgment in one's own hands.

Chapter 23

European Parliament Resolutions on Organ Harvesting in China As the persecution continued, more information became available outside China. In 2013, the European Parliament adopted a resolution on organ harvesting in China. It expressed deep concern over what it described as “persistent and credible reports” of systematic organ harvesting from non-consenting prisoners of conscience, including large numbers of Falun Gong practitioners imprisoned for their beliefs.

In 2022, the European Parliament adopted another resolution specifically addressing continuing reports of forced organ harvesting in China. The resolution cited the 2020 final judgment of the independent China Tribunal.

After hearing witnesses and experts and examining a large body of evidence, that tribunal concluded that forced organ harvesting had taken place on a significant scale in China for years, and that Falun Gong practitioners had been one source—and probably a principal source—of organs.

The European Parliament resolution also referred to a 2021 statement by United Nations human-rights experts. Those experts said they had received “credible information” that detained minorities, including Falun Gong practitioners, were being subjected without free and informed consent to blood tests and organ examinations such as ultrasound and X-rays.

The Chinese government has consistently denied allegations of forced organ harvesting and says that China has established a voluntary organ-donation system.

The European Parliament called for an independent and transparent investigation. In 2024, the European Parliament returned to the issue in a resolution specifically addressing the persecution of Falun Gong.

The resolution stated that the Chinese Communist Party had systematically persecuted Falun Gong since 1999. It said that thousands of practitioners had been documented as having died as a result of persecution and that practitioners were frequently detained and reportedly subjected to torture, psychological abuse, and organ harvesting.

The Parliament called on China to end the persecution and release detained Falun Gong practitioners, and called on the European Union and its member states to support an international investigation into the persecution.

More than two decades later, therefore, this is no longer only an experience described by Falun Gong practitioners themselves.

It has become an issue repeatedly addressed in international human-rights discussions and formal resolutions of the European Parliament. And that is why, more than twenty years later, when I saw Falun Gong practitioners again in Prague, I was no longer thinking only about the 97.9 percent figure from 1998, or about what the five exercises might or might not do for the human body.

I found myself asking something else: What kind of faith enables some people, after living under such prolonged pressure, to continue choosing nonviolence and simply keep telling others what they believe and what they have experienced?

That is also why I watched the procession for so long when it crossed Charles Bridge in 2026. Among the saints standing above them were people whom the authorities of their own times had once judged wrong, dangerous, or even criminal.

Centuries later, beneath them walked people who had endured more than two decades of persecution and yet continued to hold to their beliefs. I could not help wondering:

What would those standing high above the bridge say to those walking across it below?

Chapter 24

The Hardest Wall to Break Through May Be an Invisible One At this point, I find myself thinking once again about Charles Bridge.

The prison on the bridge is made of stone. The story of St. John of Nepomuk contains a king.

The story of St. Vitus contains the Roman Empire. Europe's long religious history contains courts, prisons, banned books, and stakes for burning people.

All these things can be seen. But human beings can also live inside an invisible prison. Sometimes it consists of only four words:

“I already know.”

“I know what religion is.”

“I know what qigong is.”

“I know what Falun Gong is.”

“I heard about it more than twenty years ago.”

Sometimes such statements come from genuine knowledge. But sometimes they become a lock. If we examine ourselves carefully, do we know the thing itself—or do we know what someone else once told us about it?

Between those two kinds of knowledge, there can sometimes be an entire bridge. Most people do not have time to investigate an unfamiliar faith personally, nor do they collect and compare everything said by supporters and critics.

Our first encounter is often a news report, a television image, a government statement, or an offhand remark from a friend.

Once a first impression has formed, later information finds it much harder to enter. This is especially true when the first thing we encounter is strongly negative. It is easy to develop the feeling:

“I already know what this is.”

At that point, a person has not investigated and then disagreed. He has closed the door before the investigation began.

Falun Gong gives us a particularly useful case through which to examine this problem. After 1999, the Chinese government launched a nationwide campaign of suppression and propaganda. For a long period afterward, what an ordinary Chinese citizen could or could not see in official media was not something he himself controlled.

Western societies are of course different. Their media environments are more pluralistic, and there has been extensive reporting critical of the Chinese government as well as reporting documenting the persecution of Falun Gong.

But Western information environments are not entirely insulated from practical interests either. Governments manage trade, diplomacy, and national interests.

Companies consider access to the Chinese market. News organizations need journalist visas, access to interviewees, and local staff. Restrictions imposed by the Chinese government on foreign journalists covering sensitive issues have also long been documented by press-freedom and human-rights organizations. None of this means we should leap to the opposite conclusion and say:

“Every negative Western media report about Falun Gong is false.”

That would merely replace one preconception with another. The media can criticize. Scholars can question. Governments can state their positions.

The real questions are more specific: Did a report claiming to be neutral and objective actually give the reader the important facts?

Whom did it quote?

Whom did it not quote?

Did it allow the people being reported on to speak for themselves?

Did it distinguish among verified facts, government allegations, participants' testimony, and the journalist's own judgment? This is why looking back after more than twenty years can reveal striking contrasts.

A reader may have formed the impression from older news coverage that the Falun Gong issue was settled long ago.

Yet in 2024 the European Parliament adopted a formal resolution stating that the Chinese Communist Party had systematically persecuted Falun Gong since 1999 and calling for the persecution to end, detained practitioners to be released, and international investigation to be supported.

At minimum, this shows that the issue cannot simply be closed by relying on an impression formed more than two decades ago.

So when we ask, “Is my judgment really my own?”, the key question is not whether I have watched the news.

It is whether I have gone beyond someone else's first layer of interpretation and looked at original material for myself. If someone tells me Falun Gong is bad, I can ask:

Why?

Where is the evidence?

If Falun Gong practitioners tell me that their health improved after practicing, I can ask:

Was there a survey?

How was it conducted?

If they say that practicing Truthfulness, Compassion, and Forbearance made them better people, I can observe how they actually behave.

If Mr. Li Hongzhi says that the true purpose of the practice is not merely healing and fitness but the cultivation of xinxing and guiding people toward higher levels, then at the very least I can obtain Zhuan Falun and see what he actually says.

Reading a book is not the same as believing it. Understanding a cultivation practice does not mean accepting its entire worldview.

Understanding simply means taking back into our own hands a judgment that we had previously allowed someone else to make for us.

And only then does a larger question appear. What if a substantial portion of the physical changes described by Falun Gong practitioners is real?

What if trying to live according to Truthfulness, Compassion, and Forbearance really does make a person less deceptive, less combative, less resentful—improving family relationships and adding a little more honesty and kindness to society?

And one step further: What if what Mr. Li Hongzhi teaches is also true—that cultivation can do more than improve health and morality, and can genuinely elevate human life to a higher realm? Then we are no longer facing the small question:

“Do I like this form of qigong?”

If those claims are not true, a person who seriously investigates them can still walk away. But if there is something there that we did not previously know, then what might we lose by closing the door for decades because of a news report, a political campaign, a social label, or simply because “everyone says so”? That is why I increasingly feel that saying “I don't know” is not frightening.

“I don't know, so I will take a look” is the beginning of understanding the world.

What may be truly frightening is:

“I have never looked, but I already know.”

Every life contains countless unopened books and doors we have never entered.

But what if one day a person reaches an exceptionally difficult point in life?

What if doctors have already done everything they can?

What if something that once supported his life suddenly collapses?

What if, for the first time, he seriously asks:

Why am I alive?

What happens after death?

Does suffering have any meaning?

And at precisely that moment, he discovers that he had never seriously investigated a mind-body cultivation practice simply because of a label? Whether or not that practice ultimately suits him, there is at least one question worth asking:

Should I look for myself?

There may be no answer behind the door. There may be nothing there at all. After opening it, a person remains entirely free to close it again.

But if the door has never been opened, we can never know whether what stopped us was reason—or prejudice. I do not want to tell the reader here:

“You should believe in Falun Gong.”

If this entire book ended by simply telling people what to believe, then many of the distinctions explored in the preceding twenty chapters would lose their meaning.

What I would rather preserve are two kinds of freedom. The first is another person's freedom of belief. No one should be imprisoned or tortured because of his faith, nor should he lose his fundamental rights as a human being simply because the majority does not understand what he believes.

The second is our own freedom to understand. Do not surrender your power of judgment merely because a government, a newspaper, a friend—or even the author of this book—has told you what something is.

You can read. You can ask questions. You can doubt. You can find out for yourself what the five exercises are.

And then you can decide. Protecting freedom of belief means protecting another person's right to choose. Keeping a mind willing to re-examine what it does not know protects another freedom:

our own right to see the world again with our own eyes. And so I think again of the Falun Gong practitioners who walked across Charles Bridge that day.

Above them stood saints, martyrs, and believers from centuries ago. Below them walked people who today continue to face persecution because of their beliefs.

People who lived six hundred years ago cannot answer the questions of today. Stone statues certainly cannot speak. But if those who once experienced faith, power, persecution, and death really could see the people walking beneath them now, I still cannot help wondering:

What would those standing high above the bridge say to those walking across it below?

Perhaps the people who really need to answer that question are not the statues. They are us. We do not have to believe something simply because someone else believes it.

Nor do we have to reject something simply because someone else rejects it. At the very least, we can open the door ourselves and see what is actually behind it.

If there is nothing there, then after looking, we can close the door ourselves. But what if, behind that door, there really is something we have been searching for all along?