There Is No Such Thing as an Absolutely Incurable Disease

Just over a week ago I was on a business trip in Kaihua, Zhejiang, where I met an old friend of Master Buyi, once quite influential online. I spoke with him about Master Buyi, who had recently left the monastery and married. From him I learned that Master Buyi's original surname was Wu and that he was from Kaihua. In his youth, because he was always eager to test his martial arts against others, he sustained internal injuries all over his body and nearly died of illness; the doctors were helpless. Buyi therefore chose to become a monk and retreated to the mountains to cultivate the Way.

When Master Buyi went up the mountain he was barely breathing. In solitary practice he worked out a method of self-massage using a wooden staff, and by it he saved his own life. After treating himself with this staff method for a time, when Buyi came down the mountain he could already carry a full load of luggage without the slightest strain. Master Buyi later promoted his staff method online; there was much debate about him on the internet, and I cannot easily judge the rights and wrongs of those disputes. But the fact remains that Master Buyi succeeded in saving his own life.

Today Master Buyi makes his own guqin zithers and runs an e-commerce business, which does quite well. People continue to seek him out at the Jishang Thatched Hut on Pan-tao Mountain in Kaihua to learn from him. On my last day in Kaihua I had planned to call on Master Buyi, but unfortunately the weather turned bad and it rained, and I was also pressed for time getting back to Beijing. I shall have to wait for another karmic opportunity to visit him on the mountain.

In Kaihua I was also fortunate to meet the poet and painter Lao Lang, whose real name is Zhang Anjun. He has been a kidney-transplant patient for over thirty years and is the longest-surviving kidney-transplant recipient in China. His kidneys are still failing, yet he has insisted for many years on not having another transplant. His tenacity is striking; for years he has poured himself into calligraphy and painting, and his work carries considerable influence in the field. When I visited his home, he kindly gave me a copy of his collected paintings, Buddhist-Daoist Zen Heart. The eminent Buddhist masters Xingyun, Mengcan and Yicheng, on both sides of the Taiwan Strait, each wrote inscriptions for the volume, showing how deeply his work is recognized by eminent monastics.

A single fatal illness led Master Buyi (now the Hermit Buyi Shanren) and the painter Lao Lang to live out another order of being: not only did they tenaciously conquer disease, they also cultivated an uncommon spiritual realm.

Kaihua has another remarkable character, in late-stage cancer for whom seeking help everywhere had failed. He then tried all manner of Chinese medicine, consulting several TCM physicians for formulas and also taking folk remedies on his own. As he went on taking them, his cancer was cured: all the tumors on his body vanished. He himself could not say which physician's formula or which folk remedy had done it. According to him, the Chinese medicine he took would have needed two or three truckloads to carry. Originally my Kaihua friend had planned to take me to meet him, but time was too tight; I can only hope that next time I will be fortunate enough to meet this cancer-fighting hero in person and ask, to his face, about his experience in beating the disease.

The Chinese have a saying, life appears from the brink of death. Whether a person at the end of his road has truly walked into a dead end, or whether there is yet a way out within that dead end, is hard to say. The power of the human will to survive is enormous. Though these three tough cases from Kaihua—ordinary folk beset by stubborn ailments—each involved an element of luck, their conquest of disease and survival to this day owes a great deal to their tenacious will to live. They fought the disease actively the whole while, and at the same time changed their attitudes and ways of life; in their struggle against illness, this mattered more than luck.