Where Is the Way Home? Long Pavilions Follow Short Pavilions
Level woods spread far, mist woven through; / the cold hills stretch a wistful blue. / Dusk settles on the high tower, / and someone on the tower grieves. / On jade steps she stands in vain, / roosting birds fly swiftly home. / Where is the way back? / Long pavilions follow short pavilions.
—Li Bai, "Bodhisattva Barbarian" (Pusaman)
Beyond the long pavilion, by the ancient road, / fragrant grass runs green to the sky's end. / Evening wind stirs the willows, the flute fades; / the sunset lies beyond beyond the hills. / At heaven's edge, at earth's corner, / my dear friends are half scattered. / A jug of coarse wine spills our remaining joy; / tonight's parting dream is cold.
Beyond the long pavilion, by the ancient road, / fragrant grass runs green to the sky's end. / Tell me, when will you come again? / When you come, do not linger. / At heaven's edge, at earth's corner, / my dear friends are half scattered. / Rare in life is a joyful gathering; / only partings are many.
—Li Shutong, "Farewell" (Songbie)
I wonder whether, having read Li Bai's "Bodhisattva Barbarian" in the Dictionary of Song Ci before bed last night and been infected by its melancholy, that is why in the small hours I dreamed I was back in my home village, watching my uncles and aunts carry a large wooden frame past my door. I asked Fourth Uncle, who was also carrying it, what they were carrying. He said it was the wooden bier that had carried the coffin of my cousin, who died last year; following custom, they were taking it to an open spot in the village to burn it.
I hurriedly joined the procession. When we reached the site, I found a stage had been set up; the villagers had spontaneously hung many banners bearing words of remembrance for my cousin. In the dream I wept from grief. On waking I realized it had all been a dream—only the tears on my cheeks remained.
Not long before, when I returned to the village, it was in the midst of a huge building project, raising a new auditorium. I looked around the entrance; according to the plans, the auditorium was expected to cost about three million yuan, and the village committee was fundraising throughout the village. While Fourth Uncle was helping me repair the steps in my courtyard, someone phoned to invite him to a meal. On his return he said it had been a lunar-June-six gathering with a few village cadres and his mahjong friends; he had taken the opportunity to press for a minimum-living-assistance allowance for my cousin's children.
A dream is, after all, a dream, and reality remains reality. The world today is different from when I was a child; human warmth has grown much thinner. The young and able-bodied have all left the village, leaving almost only the elderly and children, so naturally no one would organize a memorial for my cousin. Worse still, a year after his death, the minimum-living assistance for his underage children still had not been processed. The village committee cared more about the village's image projects than about the villagers' actual hardships.
My cousin had served as the village doctor for many years; nearly every household in the village had consulted him. He was a kind man who charged very little and often took pity on the village's old and young patients. Villagers often fell behind on payments, so over the whole year he earned very little, barely enough to feed his family. That forced him, a few years earlier, to leave and work elsewhere to support them. He reportedly held several jobs at once: besides seeing patients, he worked in a factory and also picked up fares on the Didi ride-hailing platform.
After he left, the village had no doctor at all, and villagers' access to care actually became much less convenient. A village doctor treats mostly minor ailments, but in a village with nearly a thousand left-behind elderly and children, minor headaches and fevers occur every day. Almost everyone in the village had his phone number; if someone in the household came down with a fever or cold and took to bed, they would call him to make a house call, so he was busy from dawn to dusk. His clinic often had patients sitting on IV drips, and he himself rarely had a free moment; between drips he still had to run from one house to another to see patients.
We were both cousins and childhood playmates; he was only half a year older than I. Most of my cousins were overly serious; only he and I were somewhat more lively. Before we married, we often went together to watch operas, movies or temple fairs. In the countryside, operas and films were watched in front of a large open-air stage. The young men and women who attended such events shared an unspoken understanding: they went for the excitement and to meet the opposite sex.
When my mother and aunt were alive and saw us setting off together for such entertainment, they never failed to tease: "Remember to bring us back a daughter-in-law and niece-in-law!" We were really only talking big; when actually faced with a girl, we behaved more shyly than the girls themselves.
I remember the year I finished the national college entrance exam (1998), when our village staged a community opera. A girl of the same age from the neighboring village, nicknamed Jian'er ("Foundling"—said to be so named because she was abandoned at birth and picked up by her adoptive parents from the roadside), came to watch. She was poised and at ease; when the young men of our village struck up conversations, she laughed and talked with us. Everyone jeered and bet that I did not dare to chat her up. How could I be that timid? Unable to bear their goading, I took advantage of the laughter and said to Jian'er: "Little sister, after the opera I'll walk you home!"
To my surprise she readily agreed, adding: "You must keep your word, brother!" Once she said that, I was committed with no way out. After the opera, my cousin and I walked her and two other girls from her village home. Along the way, the two girls and my cousin, hoping to see whether Jian'er and I would make a further move, deliberately kept their distance from us, giving us a chance to be alone.
But from start to finish I kept several meters away from her, speaking loudly, deliberately talking along with the companions not far off rather than conversing one-on-one. Back in the village, my cousin teased me mercilessly, saying I had missed a wonderful chance to spark something with the girl; afterwards he often used the story to mock my timidity and shyness. Now, in middle age, having tasted much of the world's pain, I actually hope for a chance to see that girl from the neighboring village again, to sincerely beg her forgiveness for the frivolity of my ignorant youth.
We spent the happiest stretch of our lives together; now he is in another world, and if I want to visit him I can only go to the family graveyard to find his headstone. We were brothers of an age, now separated by yin and yang—how could I not miss him? The pain of parting is one he cannot feel in his grave; only I, outside it, know it firsthand.
"Rare in life is a joyful gathering; only partings are many." When Li Shutong composed "Farewell," he must have been influenced by Li Bai's "Bodhisattva Barbarian." Li Shutong and Li Bai lived in different eras more than a millennium apart, yet the emotions they express are so similar, even the imagery of their verse identical. It shows that human joy and sorrow can sometimes be shared; even across time and space, our feelings at parting and death are the same. As we stand in the gathering dusk, beyond the long pavilion, gazing at the rolling distant hills and thinking of old friends, that desolate state of mind cannot differ much.
The sentimental Li Shutong ultimately chose to shave his head and become a monk, emerging as Master Hongyi, one of the four great monks of the Republican era. All the pain of his first half of life made this richly emotional, erudite scholar feel boundless compassion for all living beings. He believed the Dharma could "benefit and delight all beings" and help them "leave suffering and attain joy," so he spent his later years devoted to propagating Buddhism.
I am a little different from him. From first grade onward I was steeped in the Buddha's teachings; under my grandmother's sweet coaxing and snack bribes, I used Chinese pinyin to teach her to recite scriptures. My elderly grandmother's memory was not as good as mine; often, once I had memorized a passage perfectly, I still had to teach it to her again and again.
Grandmother also often, together with several elderly women of the village, invited monks from a nearby temple to come preach scriptures and perform rituals; sometimes I lent a hand on the sidelines. Most childhood memories have vanished like flowing sand, but the basic principles of conduct that grandmother and mother earnestly instilled were deeply engraved in me—patience, forgiveness, compassion, truthfulness, simplicity, and perpetual sympathy for the suffering of kin and of all living beings. Together these formed the foundation of my character.
These are, in fact, traditions that have circulated for thousands of years in rural China. Seventy or eighty percent of children raised in the countryside are cut from much the same mold, sharing common values; it is precisely these shared values that have maintained rural China's long centuries of stability. Dynasties have risen and fallen, yet the character of the vernacular China Mr. Fei Xiaotong described has remained essentially unchanged; the deep rural bonds forged in the fields and furrows have been sustained by these common values—truly no small achievement.
Not only the great philosopher Bertrand Russell, after visiting China and witnessing the peace of its rural world, deeply envied the harmony and contentment of China's country people; even the renowned scholar Xu Zhuoyun, who journeyed across mountains and seas from China and lived most of his life in the United States, in his declining years sighed with longing to return to the warm, human-centered well-field society of old China.
Emotional needs are always humanity's deepest needs, and the pain of parting from or losing kin and loved ones is among life's greatest sorrows. Last night, besides the Dictionary of Song Ci, two more books lay by my bed: one was the doorstop-sized DSM-5-TR (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, 1,103 pages), compiled by the American Psychiatric Association; the other was Chen Yuezeng's General Biology. I like reading several books in different directions at once, because works from different disciplines carry us through different domains of human thought and emotion; this both prevents us from sitting in a well and regarding the sky as round, and keeps learning from being tedious.
This reading habit also lets me think about life from multiple perspectives. We humans, as one branch of the living world, are a lineage that primitive cells developed into over billions of years of evolution on this planet; like all other organisms, we cannot escape the fate of death. By the law of conservation of matter, after death the molecules and atoms that compose us will exist again in nature in another form. If one could fundamentally see through all this, life and death would be no great matter—but most people cannot.
We will die eventually, of disease, disaster, war or old age; however we die, we leave more or less grief to those close to us. This grief, mixed with physical illness and family and social problems, breeds many mental disorders; in the end, all living beings, without exception, experience various pains at some point in life. Writers, with their rich emotions and superb command of language, have created countless works that resonate with us, allowing our repressed feelings to be released at certain moments—this too is a way of healing our physical and mental ailments.
The World Health Organization advocates that humanity value the "social-psychological-biological" medical model, yet physicians who can truly elevate medicine to this height are rare worldwide. It requires not only erudition spanning many specialties, but also rich emotional expressiveness and strong empathy. Saving others' lives sometimes depends on a scalpel, sometimes on pills, sometimes on language; the hardest and most momentous matter in the world is none other than this.
Each year I experience many "farewells"; sometimes I am saying goodbye to my own kin, sometimes to patients I have known a long time. The scene Li Bai and Li Shutong described—beyond the long pavilion, in the gathering dusk, gazing from a high tower at the distant hills and remembering old friends—is deeply familiar to me. I also know that on the day I leave this world, someone will probably remember me in the same setting—perhaps my relatives and friends, perhaps my readers or patients.
Whoever it is, at the moment they remember me, I too would like, in another world, to comfort them, to help them let go and accept the natural order, without grieving. Because emotion is so precious, none of us wishes those emotionally connected to us to suffer on our account; we only hope that, after we are gone, they can remain as happy as possible and live out the rest of their days.
Alone, do not lean on the railing; parting is easy, meeting hard. Whenever you happen to miss someone, I hope each of us has the courage to look forward, and not let past pain destroy the happiness and joy of the years to come. This life is short and gone never to return; do not waste the time.