[FN#279] Ki-jin-den.

Most people regard death as the greatest of evils, only because they fear death.  They fear death only because they have the instinct of self-preservation.  Hereupon pessimistic philosophy and religion propose to attain to Nirvana by the extinction of Will-to-live, or by the total annihilation of life.  But this is as much as to propose death as the final cure to a patient.  Elie Metchnikoff proposes, in his ‘Nature of Man,’ another cure, saying:  ’If man could only contrive to live long enough—­say, for one hundred and forty years—­a natural desire for extinction would take the place of the instinct for self-preservation, and the call of death would then harmoniously satisfy his legitimate craving of a ripe old age.’  Why, we must ask, do you trouble yourself so much about death?  Is there any instance of an individual who escaped it in the whole history of mankind?  If there be no way of escape, why do you trouble yourself about it?  Can you cause things to fall off the earth against the law of gravitation?  Is there any example of an individual object that escaped the government of that law in the whole history of the world?  Why, then, do you trouble yourself about it?  It is no less silly to trouble yourself about death than you do about gravitation.  Can you realize that death, which you have yet no immediate experience of, is the greatest of evil?  We dare to declare death to be one of the blessings which we have to be thankful for.  Death is the scavenger of the world; it sweeps away all uselessness, staleness, and corruption from the world, and keeps life clean and ever now.  When you are of no use for the world it comes upon you, removes you to oblivion in order to relieve life of useless encumbrance.  The stream of existence should be kept running, otherwise it would become putrid.  If old lives were to stop the running stream it would stand still, and consequently become filthy, poisoned, and worthless.  Suppose there were only births and no deaths.  The earth has to be packed with men and women, who are doomed to live to all eternity, jostling, colliding, bumping, trampling each other, and vainly struggling to get out of the Black Hole of the earth.  Thanks to death we are not in the Black Hole!

Only birth and no death is far worse than only death and no birth.  “The dead,” says Chwang Tsz, “have no tyrannical king about, no slavish subject to meet; no change of seasons overtakes them.  The heaven and the earth take the places of Spring and Autumn.  The king or emperor of a great nation cannot be happier than they.”  How would you be if death should never overtake you when ugly decrepitude makes you blind and deaf, bodily and mentally, and deprives you of all possible pleasures?  How would you be if you should not die when your body is broken to pieces or terribly burned by an accident—­say, by a violent earthquake followed by a great conflagration?  Just imagine Satan, immortal Satan, thrown down by the ire of God into Hell’s fiery gulf, rolling himself in dreadful torture to the end of time.  You cannot but conclude that it is only death which relieves you of extreme sufferings, incurable diseases, and it is one of the blessings you ought to be thankful for.