Born Like an Ant, Dying Like Dust: The Meaning of Life Is Worthless

Because of my profession, I have, so to speak, grown accustomed to life and death.

Every year I witness the process by which a great many cancer patients move from life to death.

I had a patient who, while alive, was a truly remarkable person, but in her final days she suffered terribly. Once, when I was talking with her, she told me that the torment she was undergoing had canceled out all the good things in her life.

Few people can truly bid farewell to this world at the end of their lives with calm and no regrets; we always have so much we cannot bear to let go. The saddest thing about life is that death is simply unavoidable.

The writer Wang Meng once said: "No one's youth was ever vegetarian." Most people have a period of wild recklessness when they are young, and some even live their whole lives in that reckless frame of mind, insolently thinking themselves extraordinary. But in the eyes of doctors like us, who face life and death every day, human arrogance is the most ridiculous quality a person can possess, bar none.

No matter how remarkable a person is, no matter how great his or her achievements are regarded in the secular world, in the boundless vastness of the universe, each of us is born like a speck of dust and dies like an ant—small and helpless.

Because medical care has grown ever more advanced, few people in modern society now finish the last stage of their lives without being tormented by illness.

We always hope we can hold death at bay, yet death is so utterly unyielding. Many people, near the end, are covered in all kinds of tubes, simply because their families hope a miracle will occur and death can be stopped.

In reality, this fantasy ultimately only makes one's loved ones spend the final moments of their lives in coldness and suffering. Every time I face such a cruel situation, I feel deeply for the dying person.

I am not a born pessimist, nor have I become one through experience. But the way I now look at the world and at life is, in the eyes of many people, somewhat pessimistic.

Actually, I do not feel that my view of life and the world is pessimistic.

It is only that, through my own unusual life experience, I have come to feel the emptiness of fame, wealth, position, and gain; I have felt the smallness and helplessness of human beings; I have come to realize that a person ought to live more realistically, rather than living like someone hyped up on stimulants, driven by his own ridiculous sense of self-importance, going through life in a dopey daze.

How much less worthwhile it is to live, for the sake of all sorts of nonsensical life goals, putting on every possible disguise and living in a state of utter frustration like a servile grandson. Only at the very end, racked with torment, does one regret having lived such a cramped life.

A person should live a little more freely and uninhibitedly, more truthfully, more expansively, with less pretense and less burden—only then is one being fair to oneself. Don't spend a lifetime, for the sake of those absurd life ideals and so-called great values, wearing yourself out endlessly.

How much of the so-called value and meaning of life is merely spiritual opium by which humanity anaesthetizes itself? And how many warmongers, goaded on by various life ideals, have gradually lost their humanity?

Humans, these creatures with two legs and one mouth, should originally be content once they have eaten their fill and are warm. But after human society formed, they developed into a unique species whose desires can never be filled. For the sake of inexplicable private cravings, they are always putting on airs, forcing smiles, and pleasing the multitudes, all the while glorifying it as striving for an ideal—utter nonsense, really.

I now treat myself as though I were reduced to the simplest, most primitive animal state: as long as I harm no one, I will live however I please. Because I know that everything being endured by some patient groaning in pain whom I rescue at the bedside today may one day befall me as well. When that time truly comes, all the halos of life will become utterly hollow.

If I must say there is anything I still want to keep doing, I suppose my lifelong passion is still the study of medicine. But in my eyes, the concept of "medicine" has grown ever broader, and has gradually become so broad as to be somewhat blurred.

I used to think medicine was simply a body of knowledge for treating illness; now I no longer believe that. Medicine in the broad sense embraces everything; it is not merely about curing disease, or rather, "disease" in the broad sense embraces everything—it is not merely the mental and bodily suffering that can be diagnosed. Every tiny detail of our lives, every visible and invisible place, bears the shadow of medicine.

And the highest realm of a healer can be described as: "probing the ways of Heaven and humanity, exhausting one's knowledge of the world, attaining the root and returning to authenticity." That is to say, a truly qualified physician must possess extraordinarily profound learning and insight; not only that, he must also unify knowledge and action, himself comprehending the essence of life and returning to the authentic state of life.

This is not easy.

Fortunately, the parting of life and death that faces us every day is, at every moment, like the evening drums and morning bells in a temple, reminding us: life and death are swift, and our lives are small!

With this realization, one will not live too nonsensical a life!