One Ferry Crossing After Another in Life

In my 2016 annual plan, one project fell through: writing a novel called Shi Du (Ten Ferry Crossings).

In summer I felt a strong urge to write this novel.

Shidu is a famous scenic spot in Beijing; along both banks of the Juma River, mountain after mountain, water after water, one ferry crossing after another, forming a beautiful landscape gallery of mountains and rivers.

This landscape gallery is like a human life: each time you cross a ferry, the scenery that appears is completely different from the one before.

It was precisely this beauty that moved me, making me—who had put literature down for years—want to write a novel again, to express my feelings about life's unpredictability.

In the Diamond Sutra, the Buddha says: "The mind of the past is unobtainable, the mind of the present is unobtainable, the mind of the future is unobtainable."

A person, in the here and now, always feels that present joy and sorrow are so profound, so hard to let go of; but as time passes, one no longer feels that way.

Before one sees through everything in the human world, no one is unchanged. So the Buddha also says: "Do not trust your own thoughts; your thoughts cannot be trusted. Only when you have attained Arhatship may you trust your thoughts."

An Arhat is the highest fruition in Theravada Buddhism. Theravada holds that in the world there is only one Great Enlightened One—the Buddha—and no one else can reach the Buddha's stage. Mahayana Buddhism adds two more fruitions: Bodhisattva and Buddha. A Bodhisattva, also called "he who bears the Tathagata's burden," is one who takes on the Tathagata's work and liberates all beings.

But in the Diamond Sutra, the Buddha also emphasizes that beings can only liberate themselves; no Buddha or Bodhisattva can liberate a single being. So the Bodhisattva's vow to liberate all beings ultimately comes to nothing, and after the beautiful vow fails, he becomes a Buddha who "follows conditions."

This sounds especially like a tongue-twister, but it is not.

All living beings, including Bodhisattvas, have the beautiful wish to perfect themselves, change others, and change the world. But this wish can only be a supreme pursuit of the human spirit; until the day humanity perishes, this wish will hardly be perfectly fulfilled, because humanity's inherent flaws determine that a perfect world can never appear.

Mandela once said a classic line: "Once I thought I could change the world, but in the end I found I was only changing myself."

Everyone needs to test their wishes in practice. Through practice, one finally becomes like the old man in Hemingway: every time he goes out fishing he catches a great fish, but on the way back, the fish's flesh is eaten by sharks all along the route, and by the time he reaches shore only a skeleton remains.

That is the essence of life; in fashionable terms, it is "de-bubbling the ideal." An Arhat who sets out on the Bodhisattva path, finding that the vow to liberate all beings is also an illusory dream, becomes a Buddha who pursues self-perfection and guides beings according to conditions. He no longer speaks of liberating all beings; "guiding" means giving a hand when someone needs it and standing aside when they do not—everyone must reach shore by themselves in the end.

You do not know how hard something is until you have lived it. Once you have tasted the difficulty of some matter, you have entered the next ferry crossing of life; the scenery you see at the next crossing differs from what you saw and heard at the previous one.

And life has endless next ferry crossings.

The Book of Changes has sixty-four hexagrams; the sixty-third is "Ji Ji" (After Completion), symbolizing an ideal already fulfilled. After Ji Ji comes "Wei Ji" (Before Completion), symbolizing what is not yet perfect. Life has no true end; any endpoint is a new starting point.

The more ferry crossings you experience, the richer the scenery you see, and the calmer your heart becomes, until one day nothing external can move you, and in any situation you can, as the Sutra of Forty-two Sections says, "be unmoved by the sights": while the storms outside never cease, the waves within stay still.

I have not yet reached this state, but I am not far from it. Society seems gradually to be drifting away from me; I think I have basically detached from this society, and its ongoing developments and changes no longer affect me in the least.

If I had not married and had children when young, I think I would now be living in a hut deep in the mountains, studying books, farming to feed myself, practicing medicine, contending with no one and bearing grudges against no one.

On New Year's Day, when my wife was watching a New Year program on some TV channel, she smiled and asked me: "You used to write the scripts for these kinds of programs; does it feel like a loss now?" I felt nothing at all.

Relying on my wide reading and good writing, in my early twenties I had written my way into China's center of power; I think few writers in China reached that height. Later I went into business, dealing with clients in over a hundred countries around the world, chasing wealth, rising and falling several times.

Now, having treated disease for many years and seen much of life and death, looking back on the political and business past I experienced in the capital, I feel it all like a dream, a bubble, a phantom shadow.

When the glamour fades, one realizes how tiny this body is, how brief this life; wealth, rank, fame, and gain are but passing clouds. I used to think one should live boldly, sword in hand, charging freely across the world and achieving great things. Now I feel those past ambitions are laughable: humans are like ants; we cannot even control our own life and death, so what meaning is there in all vanity?

So-called prosperity, success, and prestige are merely an empty shell with little to do with happiness; they are useless. As Du Fu wrote: "You and your name will both perish, unheeding the eternal rivers that flow on." A hundred years pass easily; youth is cruelly short. To live too tiredly is only to make things hard for oneself; what else is there?

Now, having treated cancer for ten years, I have saved many lives and also watched many die, helpless to intervene. In the medical profession I have tasted all the sweets and bitters; I am no longer the naive calf who knew nothing.

In my twenties, while chasing a career in Beijing, I was tormented by asthma, seeking doctors everywhere. I once lined up all night at Peking Union Medical College Hospital just to register for a specialist; I also turned to the great names of Beijing TCM and even folk healers, all to no avail.

At twenty-five, tormented by coughing and wheezing nonstop whenever I was awake, I despaired of life. One day, standing on a bridge, I desperately wanted to leap and kill myself by jumping. My wife was then pregnant; I felt I had burdened my family for too long and had no will to live. But at the last moment I came to my senses: rather than kill myself, I should save myself. So I studied medical texts hard and kept trying, finally curing my own asthma—and along the way got the asthma of several fellow patients with whom I had sought care under control.

My late mother had long suffered from the aftereffects of a cerebral hemorrhage and from cancer; I took her everywhere seeking doctors, only to be turned away again and again because her condition was too severe. Once, carrying a pile of gifts, I went to a famous elderly Beijing TCM physician's home and asked him to write my mother a prescription. He politely declined.

The old man's meaning was that doctors do not treat those who are certain to die; he thought my mother's chance of living two more months was under one in a million, and urged me to take her home to her roots and prepare for the end. It was summer; when I came out of his house, the world spun, my legs went weak, I could barely walk, and I fell several times along the way.

Later, having run into walls everywhere, I reluctantly treated my mother myself. She did not die within two months; after my treatment she lived nearly two more years. Now I think that if I had treated my mother earlier myself, instead of, in my anxious love, being afraid to experiment on her and running everywhere for doctors, perhaps she would not have died even today.

Because of this personal experience, I never turned away patients who came to me from all over the country. In my hometown there is a temple to the Medicine King Sun Simiao, whose plaque reads "Responds to Every Prayer." For a time I took this as my own principle toward those who sought help, never refusing anyone: those seeking wealth I aided financially, those seeking healing I treated patiently.

But after years of practice I came to taste what the ancients meant by "seeing through the world shocks the gall, reading through human hearts chills the bone." Human complexity does not become simple just because our own wishes are beautiful; ingratitude occurs again and again.

After crossing these ferry points, the mountains and water seen further on differ from those seen at the last crossing.

Nowadays, in my dealings with people, I mostly adhere to speaking little and to the principle that the friendship of a noble person is as plain as water. In healing the sick, I also simply follow conditions.

I have gradually come to understand the meaning of the Huangdi Neijing saying: "The physician is the branch; the patient is the root." This means the physician is only the branch while the patient is the root; resolving the patient's disease depends mainly on the patient himself, and the physician only provides a little professional help along the way, playing no decisive role.

A Korean doctor once said that it is God who saves the patient; the physician merely builds a bridge between the patient and God. Some of my patients have made me understand this truth.

The survival time and quality these patients gained after getting cancer can only be called miraculous. Earlier I could not help being complacent, thinking it was my treatment that achieved it. But after comparing them with other patients with very short survival, I feel that in saving them my own role is only one-third; the patient's own efforts account for one-third, and the other third is luck.

Cancer is a very comprehensive disease: besides organic and functional lesions in the body, there is also what Buddhism calls a "karmic illness."

But this "karmic illness" is not one of ghosts and spirits; it is a health obstacle to the entire mind-body system brought by the patient's own insight and personality. Many cancer patients are quick to anger, quick to superstition, have poor living habits, are on bad terms with their kin, and have chaotic careers and lives; after falling ill they remain tangled in grievances and resentments.

Such a patient, while recuperating, has the willow not stilling while the wind blows on: the terror of illness and bad habits and emotions in life entangle the patient like a tangled ball that cannot be unraveled. None of this is something a doctor can solve.

The patients who survive long-term have walked out of this vicious circle; they face death calmly, have let go of worldly grievances, and live as if transformed. This kind of total personal, heart-washing change is something most patients cannot achieve. So I no longer say lightly that some patient was saved because of my treatment; treatment's role is only skin-deep. So now I always choose to treat those patients who may be curable, and politely decline those who seem not to have enough karmic affinity with me.

If the deaths of so many people still could not bring me to my senses, then I would have lived these ten years in vain. In fact, by the first visit I basically already know which patient can beat cancer and survive long and which cannot; I just stay silent. Because I understand that fate—except for each person himself—no one else can change.

Only by personally crossing one ferry after another of one's own life can one, through the scenery at different crossings, see through everything; no guidance from others plays a decisive role.

Confucius said: "My Way is threaded through with one unity." Zengzi explained the Master's Way in two words: "Zhong and Shu." Zhong means coming from the heart; Shu means "like my own heart." Only by going deep into the heart and questioning oneself can one find the thing called the soul. And only the soul is the most precious thing beneath a person's shell. When floating clouds cover the eyes, everyone has a soul but cannot even see his own; once one can see it, why would one need others to point out the way?

The most important book in life is not written in words; it exists in everyone's heart.

Let me close this essay with a ci poem by Xin Qiji: "In youth I knew not the taste of sorrow; I loved to climb the high towers, I loved to climb the high towers, and to compose new verses I feigned sorrow. Now that I have known the full taste of sorrow, I would speak of it and stop, I would speak of it and stop, and instead say: What a cool, fine autumn day!"