The Great Healer Is Content in Poverty, Devoted to the Way, and Rescues the Dying
In Jin Yong's wuxia novel "The Return of the Condor Heroes," Jin Yong has Guo Jing voice the idealistic value that "the greatest xia (chivalrous hero) acts for the country and the people." The great heroes in Jin Yong's writing — Guo Jing, Yang Guo, Xiao Feng — are precisely those who practice this value. Jin Yong admired wuxia, and the divine physicians in his works all have eccentricities of one kind or another — Ping Yizhi, Hu Qingniu, the Poison-Hand Medicine King, and the king-of-Hell-foe Physician Xue — all unreasonable people. I do not know whether Mr. Jin Yong did this inadvertently or held a prejudice against doctors.
The great healer is actually no different from the great heroes in Mr. Jin Yong's writing: he too is a mainstay delivering the common people from distress. A person who has been a doctor for a long time develops a chivalrous instinct deep in his bones, because the people a doctor meets are mostly unfortunates in need of rescue.
In peacetime the great hero has little use, but the good doctor is indispensable, for war and widespread suffering are uncommon, whereas the multitudes plagued by illness are common. The ancients said: he whose virtue is not close to that of the Buddha cannot be a doctor; he whose talent is not close to that of an immortal cannot be a doctor. The healer holds the office of overseeing life and death; only someone with both virtue and talent and a heart of compassion can be a good doctor.
No one understands the patient better than the healer, and no one sympathizes with the patient more than the healer; the healer is even more considerate of the patient than the patient's own family. In my practice I have encountered patients abandoned by their families, and in the end it was the healer who generously opened his purse to help them through the hardest days of their lives. For only the healer knows what a hard road the patient is walking, and only the healer knows what a heart-rending disaster the patient is enduring.
The great healer is content in poverty, devoted to the Way, and rescues the dying. What is lamentable is that in this age great healers are rare, and the environment in which true doctors practice is extremely harsh. Patients are on guard against doctors, and acts of harming doctors occur from time to time. Those in distress belong to society's vulnerable groups; extreme emotions and extreme acts on their part are sometimes understandable. Yet for doctors, this high-risk daily life is often terrifying.
Having practiced medicine for a long time, my original idealism has gradually faded under the influence of reality, yet it remains very hard to change my original intentions completely. I can only follow the classic Buddhist phrase, "Do your best on the cause; leave the fruit to conditions," in my beloved medical career. Whether patients come and go or treatment succeeds or fails, I can only adopt this attitude of doing my utmost and accepting whatever comes with equanimity. Otherwise, one inevitably ends up like the saying, "deep feeling does not last long."
I have not for a moment dared forget the ideal of becoming a great healer who is "content in poverty, devoted to the Way, and rescues the dying." Though I have not, like Gou Jian, slept on brushwood and tasted gall, whenever I see a patient at the end of the road, compassion still wellsps up uncontrollably.
Perhaps it is simply human nature!