Death Is So Beautiful: I Genuinely Praise It

I write this title not because I loathe life, but because, just as I love life, I also love death.

I live joyfully, and I hope to die joyfully—cleanly, peacefully.

Since death is the unavoidable end of all life, there is nothing to reject about it.

If one day I die, I hope that my living relatives and friends, when they think of me, will smile and think: this fellow, so open and funny and warm while alive—now that he is dead, if another world exists, he is surely over there, tirelessly hunting for new pleasures.

Not wailing, burning a few sheets of joss paper, and sending me off with leftovers.

Death has taught me that all glory and all suffering return to dust.

Because I recognize death's inevitability, I will not grovel before glory, nor panic before suffering. Everything has an end; why rejoice or grieve over it? I will simply live the present well, neither regretting the past nor fearing the future, at peace with every state of being. This equanimity was taught to me by death.

Death has also taught me humor.

As you know, no matter how outstanding or great a person proclaims himself—or is praised by others to be—his end is no different from an ant's.

Before death, all beings achieve true equality. So all the arrogance and self-righteousness in the world can be taken as a joke—including my own various absurd, self-important thoughts, which can also be taken as jokes.

With a joke, of course, one need not be too serious. An interesting life requires a sense of humor.

Without death, I would endlessly inflate and aggrandize myself, knowing nothing of humility. Because of death, I have acquired a bit of self-mockery and self-deprecation.

Death makes suffering bearable. "Through the ages, the hardest thing has been death alone; and who, besides Lady Xi, has grieved over it?" However hard life is, once death exists, it has an endpoint. Once one thinks of suffering as having an end, suffering stops seeming so monumental.

I am an optimist, but even a non-optimist, after witnessing many deaths, stops taking the world's so-called sufferings too seriously. Beyond cold and hunger, if there is trouble, it is mostly self-inflicted.

Death is not a frightening process. In the final moment, no one knows exactly when they will die; after death there is no sensation; the instant of dying is very brief. I have witnessed the deaths of my own kin and of countless patients; to me now, death is a thoroughly ordinary thing.

We cling to life and fear death so excessively that, when death approaches, our hearts tremble. In fact, from birth onward, one should gradually understand that death is unavoidable and perfectly normal.

Death can also make us live more interestingly. There are always foolish children who do not know that death must come, who feel they can squander their lives endlessly, doing things against their own hearts, wasting their lives.

If, from childhood, they were told: you will die sooner or later, so while alive you must enjoy life's pleasures—then I think they would not be hijacked into living lives they dislike.

I praise death because it is as beautiful as life. It gives the soul a time of eternal rest; it frees the sick body from all torments. When we are exhausted, it turns us into soil and returns us to nature. It is Heaven's final mercy to us; there is no need to loathe it.

Having been baptized again and again by partings of life and death, I have completely let go of my attachment to death. If one day another loved one leaves this world, I will no longer grieve, but silently remember him or her in my heart, recalling the good times of his or her life.

In this way I bid a final farewell to his or her body, not to the spirit. Her spirit will live on in my mind until the day I myself leave this world.