溫故知新 Old wisdom, today’s insight — ONGO
If the Ancients Called the Dead "Those Who Return," Is Death the Road Home?
If life is a traveler's brief stay on the road and death a return to one's original place, are we not the homeless but those who have a home to return to?
The ancients called the dead "those who have returned." If the dead are the returned, then the living are travelers still on the road.
This question split whether to see death as extinction or as return. Liezi's "Heaven's Gifts" painted life and death as a cycle of going and coming, calmly receiving death as a return to where one came. This runs with the grain of Zhuangzi's thought, which saw death as the scattering of vital breath and its return to heaven and earth. In the West too, Ecclesiastes sang a similar image of return — dust to the earth, breath to its giver. Yet from the other side ran currents that saw death not as cyclical return but as an individual soul's passage or a new beginning, as in Plato's doctrine of the soul and the idea of resurrection. Is death a calm return to where one came, or a passage to a new state — Liezi's "the returned" gave the gaze of return its warmest name.
For us who easily paint death as a strange, homeless loss, Liezi's ancient name — the dead are those who returned — lets us see the end as a homesick homecoming.
Liezi paints death not as extinction but in the language of return.
📝I, Too, Stand Before It
Liezi paints death not as extinction but in the language of return. The ancients called the dead "those who have returned"; then we the living are but travelers still on the road. Life is a brief stay on a journey, and death a return to where one came — in this view death is no strange cliff but an old home. I sense this plain reversal turns the dread of death into a homesick rest, as a traveler long wandering turns toward home. I stand before this question too, quietly retracing whether I have painted my end as a strange loss, or can receive it as an eventual homecoming.
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