Reflections After Visiting the West Hill Ash Grove

In the morning I took my child to school. After dropping him off, I wanted to go out for a walk, so I rode my electric scooter toward the Western Hills. After wandering around in circles, I reached West Hill Forest Park. Because of epidemic prevention requirements, entering the park required showing a health code and having one's temperature taken. The procedure was too cumbersome, so I did not go in. I walked up a deserted mountain path outside the park, and as I walked, I inadvertently entered the Western Hills Ash Grove.

All around was a vast emptiness, the wind howling. Beneath the blue sky and white clouds, as far as the eye could see, there was no sign of human habitation. Standing at the entrance of the Western Hills Ash Grove, I felt an inexplicable, strange sensation in my heart.

When a person is alive, there are a thousand kinds of thoughts; after death there is only a handful of ashes, buried in the soil, becoming nourishment for the plants of the mountains, becoming part of the grass and trees, day and night keeping company with the blue sky, white clouds, bright stars, and the moon. Is it better to be born human and fully enjoy the seven emotions and six desires, or to turn into earth and keep watch over this mountain forest? It is truly hard to say.

Most people in the world cling to life and fear death, and they are too attached to the "countless forms of living beings." They always feel that being "human" is the best way to exist and cannot accept transforming into another form. So when ordinary people come to a place like an ash grove, they feel more or less creeped out. But what joy is there in life, and what pain in death? A stinking skin bag must ultimately return to the great void. If one can penetrate life and death, making no distinction between self and things, regarding life and death as one, living according to nature and dying according to nature, then what is there to worry about or rejoice over?

I remember when my mother was about to pass away, my maternal aunt cried and asked me: "Nephew, what on earth are we going to do?" At that moment I was actually able to calmly comfort her: "Before a person dies, they do not know when they will die; after a person dies, they have no consciousness and do not know that they have died. The sorrow lasts only an instant. Do not make too much of that instant. Live well while you are alive, and once you are dead, it is all over."

Although I was also overwhelmed with grief for a while after my mother died, when she was about to leave the world and I knew that medicine could do nothing for her, both my mother's state of mind and my own were peaceful.

I am an atheist, but my mother was a theist. I do not draw a sharp line between life and death and can calmly accept death. My mother, because of her religious faith, was convinced that after death she would be reincarnated and could reunite with her beloved family, so she had no fear or sorrow. Standing from a humanitarian standpoint, whatever one's faith may be, as long as it is beneficial to a person's body and mind, it is a good thing.

My father was different from both me and my mother; he was an agnostic caught between atheism and theism. Sometimes he believed in ghosts and gods, and sometimes he did not. He was neither as completely skeptical as I was nor as completely believing as my mother. But he had his own attachment to traditional funeral rituals; if there were no coffin after death, he would feel that something was missing. So in recent years he kept thinking about preparing a coffin for himself.

Recently my father returned to his hometown, and before going he kept muttering that his coffin was not yet ready. After he had been quarantined for fourteen days back home, we spoke on the phone, and I told him that when he had time, he should go to the shop in town to look at coffins, choose one that suited him, and have it delivered to his door, so as to fulfill this wish and stop obsessing over it every time he went out. Then the two of us, father and son, discussed the price of coffins. Both he and I felt that one should generously support one's parents while they are alive and keep the burial simple after death; the coffin need not be too fancy, just serviceable. If there were not a tradition in my hometown requiring a coffin, I probably would not even have bought one for my father.

It is not that I do not love my parents. While they were alive, I did my utmost to make them happier and improve their quality of life. But when the appointed time arrives, human power cannot hold it back. Besides, when a person dies, they have merely changed the form in which they exist between heaven and earth; everything the family does after death is insignificant. Letting nature take its course, moderate grief is unavoidable, and I only do what is unavoidable; everything else is unnecessary baggage and can be dispensed with.

My older brother is a devout Buddhist. When my mother died, he chanted sutras; when my father passes away in the future, he will probably still chant sutras; if I die before him, he may chant sutras for me too. When he himself passes on, what he will most hope for is probably that someone beside him will chant and assist in recitation; his hope is that everyone can be reborn in the Buddha's pure land. Because of his Buddhist faith, he has no attachment to death either.

My own affinity is shallow. Although I began studying Buddhism earlier than my brother, have read more Buddhist books than he has, and have Buddhist ornaments in my home, I have never been able to reach the level of faith in Buddhism and cannot become a devout Buddhist like him. Although my family members each have their own beliefs, we seek common ground while reserving differences, and our family affection has not been affected. This shows that people of different beliefs can coexist harmoniously as long as they do not force others to share their faith.

We are all sentient beings pitiably bound by emotions; life and death are not up to us. Almost everyone needs strength before death to overcome the fear of dying. So it is better to be tolerant and respectful of others' beliefs.

I myself do not want a funeral after I die. After studying medicine, I signed a body donation form. If my body has medical value, it would be best if someone used it. If my son insists on holding a funeral for me, I hope he will bury my ashes shallowly under a tree, without even a box. That way, certain components of my ashes can be absorbed by the tree as nourishment as quickly as possible; I can become part of the tree and return to nature in the form of "tree" life. Would that not be a joy?

I often advise some patients and their families not to become too tangled up over life and death. The best approach is to follow the Buddhist principle of "do your best regarding the cause, and let the outcome take its natural course." When the body is ill, do your best to treat it according to your own financial means. Medicine is a bottomless pit, and physicians all know full well that treatment is not the more expensive the more effective; there is no need to insist on medical services beyond one's financial means. It is of course good if life can be preserved, but if it truly cannot be preserved, one need not be too attached. Being too attached to life and death makes the final days of life too sorrowful and too lacking in quality.

I recently finished reading Professor Zhang Daqing's "Fifteen Lectures on the History of Medicine." I learned that most ancient European and American physicians practiced in religious settings: on one hand they treated patients, on the other hand they did their best to comfort patients' minds, and at the same time they provided death education to patients and their families so that they could accept death. In modern times, medicine has become increasingly independent as a technical profession that only treats the body's diseases, and as a result medical care has become increasingly cold. Physicians also find it hard to accept the overreactions of patients' families, not realizing that it is precisely because today's medical care has departed from the track it ought to be on.

The statistics Professor Zhang mentions in "Fifteen Lectures on the History of Medicine" show that more than sixty percent of treatments in medicine are ineffective. Too much ineffective treatment, combined with a cold medical model, inevitably leads patients and their families to feel dissatisfied. This is precisely the crux of modern medicine. The medical profession treats the people's illnesses, but how is the medical profession's own illness to be treated?

In recent years, the medical community has begun to recognize that medicine is a comprehensive "bio-psycho-social" discipline, emphasizing that physicians should receive humanities education: they must not only learn the medical skills of treating patients but also possess the ability to provide spiritual comfort and do humanitarian care for patients. In recent years, psychology knowledge has occupied one quarter of the entrance examination questions for American medical schools, showing that we have returned to the medical model that the ancients were exploring.

More than ten years ago, an enthusiastic patient's family member lent me a hand-copied medical book that his ancestor had transcribed. After I finished reading it, I asked whether his family had other hand-copied volumes, and he then lent me the Buddhist and Taoist sutras his ancestor had hand-copied, the contents of which were basically the chants and recitations used in folk funeral services. It turned out that his ancestor was both a physician and someone who performed religious rites for people.

It is clear that from ancient times to the present, what physicians must treat has never been only people's physical illnesses, but also their fragile souls. Ordinary people only have to confront life and death when their closest kin die; only physicians confront life and death every day. So it is indeed necessary for physicians to popularize death education among the general public.