Dwelling Peacefully on a Lonely Isle, Reverencing the Emptiness Lord

On the weekend, after my midday nap, I walked along the Third Ring Road toward the Renmin University area, then followed South Zhongguancun Avenue to Zizhuyuan (Purple Bamboo Park), passing the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences, Beijing Institute of Technology, Minzu University of China, and the National Library. Everything along the way already looked different.

The people coming and going were, the great majority, wearing masks. Most were still rushing about; Beijing remained a busy city. It is just that the various little shops along the road were no longer as bustling as before, and there was an extra security check at the library entrance; without a reservation you cannot now enter the National Library. Only in Zizhuyuan Park was it still crowded with people.

I had not walked this route for a while, although it is close to my home. A whole year of lockdown life in Beijing has let everyone adapt to a new way of life. Posters of normalized epidemic prevention are pasted up everywhere, reminding people that we cannot return to our former life for now.

The island effect of the city has been magnified in this era. Greetings between relatives and friends all travel through the internet; family and lovers separated by distance can no longer meet regularly as they once did. People have grown apart because of the virus, and too many people need to adapt to a new state of life.

As the year draws to a close, this kind of stroll leaves me a little melancholy. There are people I very much want to see and long-distance journeys I want to take, but the virus has blocked everything. This year our family answered the government's call to stay put for the New Year, not wanting to add trouble to the country or to our families.

I have not visited my mother's grave for two years, and I miss her greatly. After this year of 2021, my mother will have been gone from this world for ten years. In the years since my mother died, I have been dealing with patients suffering from cancer just as she did. This group may be one of the most suffering groups in the world, and the work I do is to do my best to ease their physical and mental pain.

From time to time I ask myself: How am I doing in this work of mine? Have I eased the physical and mental suffering of my patients and their families? I am always anxious about my own inadequacy, and occasionally I have had a bit of friction with some patients or their families. I often reflect afterward: if my inner composure were a bit better, my communication with patients and families a bit more skillful, and my own heart a bit more tolerant, would these frictions have occurred? My inner answer is yes.

In the year ahead, I want to try living a life of vegetarianism, chanting the Buddha's name, and keeping the precepts. Although I do not accept many things in Buddhism, I sincerely admire the wisdom of the Buddha. Many things in Buddhism were not created by the Buddha himself but by the professional Buddhists who came after him to make a living, so one cannot blame the Buddha.

While my mother was alive, I once lived for a period on a vegetarian diet, chanting the Buddha's name, and keeping the precepts, reading Buddhist scriptures morning and evening. But because my own wisdom and composure are limited, I was far from reaching the state of the four elements being empty and of boundless loving-kindness. Sometimes I wonder: if I had cultivated to a true state of boundless loving-kindness, would I have no friction with patients and their families at work? No one can give me the answer to this; as soon as medical work is involved, things become quite complicated. That is why the Buddha, in the Sutra of the Buddha's Bequeathed Teaching, even forbade monks from undertaking medical work; among the 250 precepts monks must follow there is a clause forbidding preparing medicines.

Sometimes, beneath news reports of attacks on or killings of doctors, some people blame the doctors for poor medical ethics, as if that is why patients or families hurt them. A rhetorical question I often see is: if doctors treated patients well, why would patients beat and curse them? Unless they are crazy.

Such replies make me laugh. What laypeople call crazy refers to patients with mental disorders. Where do these people most often turn up? In hospitals. Who has the most contact with patients with mental disorders? Doctors. So it is not that if doctors have noble ethics there will be no friction at work; when we encounter a patient or family member with a paranoid personality or a mental disorder, friction is unavoidable.

Our country has nearly 100 million people with mental disorders, and only a tiny fraction receive proper treatment. Most people with mental disorders are constantly in and out of hospitals yet do not receive proper treatment. Chinese people carry a stigma about mental illness; if a person is diagnosed with a mental disorder, not only the patient but their family members face discrimination.

In our customs, people are even unwilling to enter into marriage with a family that has a history of mental disorder, so most families with such a history work hard to hide it, and some even abandon their mentally ill family members.

Of course, a doctor who is more patient, more composed, more compassionate, and more tolerant will encounter far less friction when dealing with such people, so doctors also have an obligation to cultivate their own character. Personally, I feel that friction with the mentally ill is not the real issue; most doctors can accept the various behaviors of the mentally ill, since after all these behaviors are beyond their own control. What doctors truly find hard to accept may be people who have no mental illness but harbor ill will.

There are indeed some black sheep in the medical profession, but most doctors are conscientious; yet conscientious attitude alone does not necessarily make a good doctor. The patients we face are the multitude of living beings, and since they are the multitude, there will inevitably be both good and bad people, both the mild-tempered and the rough.

I used to think I should identify those with nasty dispositions and be on guard against them, but now I feel that idea is also problematic. First, a doctor's duty is to rescue the dying and heal the wounded and should not pick and choose among patients; second, identifying the nasty-tempered from among the multitude is itself very difficult. So what doctors really need to do is improve their own self-cultivation, accept and help all patients. It is enough to take measures to restrain those who genuinely have violent tendencies or already show signs of medical disturbance—and that, in fact, requires the power of the law.

So there is a gap between reality and the ideal. The best doctor may be one who can attend to both reality and the ideal; I do not think I have reached that state yet. Beyond professional medical knowledge, I need to improve both my ability to read people and my cultivation of compassion. If in five to ten years I have made good progress in both, I may be a bit more satisfied with myself.

So I want to take advantage of these years of social isolation, when everyone is forced to hold fast to their own lonely isle, to study diligently under the Buddha. The Buddha, this Lord of Emptiness, recognized through wisdom that the four elements are empty, yet untiringly pursued the state of boundless loving-kindness. Although some scholars (such as Ji Xianlin) believe the Buddha himself did not reach the ideal realm he advocated, to have such an aspiration is already remarkable.

Life has no end; we must only keep advancing.