/*Ranting below:***/ At this stage (representing only what I knew as of this season, July 11, 2008 CE), a grand declaration (Note: if you disagree with any of the following declarations, please stop reading the “ranting” section, because to you it’s all nonsense):
1.The essential pursuit of life is love — for a related film, see The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
2.Ruthless, infinite life is a process of suffering — see The Mermaid Legend
3.Mortals’ souls do not die after death; memories are wiped clean at reincarnation
4.To attain the Way and become a sage, one must slay the Three Corpses
I finally finished watching the entire Lord of the Rings trilogy, and I came to understand Sargeras’s fall. An extended thought: mortal or not, no one can escape their own suffering. Heaven and earth are ruthless; they treat all things as straw dogs. The ultimate meaning of life is that there is no meaning. It’s probably listening to Keren Ann’s sad songs lately and seeing how nothing in my hometown is the same anymore that has left me feeling so negative.
The essential pursuit of life is love — at birth, human nature is good. People are born with a yearning for beautiful things. When a small child sees an adult who is sad, he’ll want to try giving the adult his toy to cheer them up. Human nature is fundamentally a force of love, and that’s why human civilization has been able to develop to where it is today. Not long ago, during the 512 disaster, the whole nation came together as one to pull through, fully showing that true human love endures. Even when reality buries it, that’s only temporary.
Arwen — the elven princess, willing to give up the elves’ eternal life to marry Aragorn, king of Men. To abandon everything she has for the love of a mortal takes immense courage; I hope Aragorn cherishes that feeling. It reminds me of the Chinese story of the Seventh Fairy descending to the mortal world. Hmm, in a human life, love is the noblest pursuit… Personally, I think Arwen’s was probably an unwise choice — both a blessing and a tragedy. What she gave up was not just her own eternal life, but also her family, her people, her country, her glory… Does anyone realize what a huge blow this was to her father? This, this is selfishness. Ah, love is selfish — what does a country matter? What do the people matter? If it were me, I’d choose selfishness too. Selfishness can only satisfy you for a moment, never forever; the bitter fruit of that selfishness is still to come. A lifetime of happiness will eventually fade; one day, life reaches its end, and true love goes with the wind… Pick up, put down; gain, lose; rebirth, reincarnation — never ending. This is the legendary moth drawn to the flame. Exactly — love is a moth to a flame, and life is a moth to a flame. How many people under heaven can stay together through life after life without parting? Don’t believe what the books say:
“Love, one knows not where it begins, yet it goes deep. The living may die for it, and the dead may live again. If the living cannot die for it, and the dead cannot live again, then it is not love at its utmost.”
Mortals have no way to grasp eternity!
I hate the universe’s design — mortals can’t obtain eternity, while those who attain the Way gain only heartlessness.
The reason a mortal can become a sage and circulate the heavenly circuit is that it’s premised on comprehending the creation of all things and reaching sufficient energy. One who becomes a sage merges with the universe, lives and dies with it (seen as eternity), creates a living environment for all things in the world, and maintains the natural order at a macro level. That is, it’s the Buddha’s Pure Land of Ultimate Bliss, God’s eternal kingdom — the ultimate of all things, perfection, the whole, emptiness, nothingness. But I don’t like it!
Heaven and earth are ruthless; they treat all things as straw dogs. The ultimate meaning of life is that there is no meaning — no matter how splendid a life is, it’s no more than smoke before the eyes, as if we’re all just objects in the universe’s grand program. When your mission is done, your memory is freed and you turn into a soul; when the time comes, your memory block is used to create another object, and the new object has instance attributes almost entirely different from the earlier one. You’ll have a new life, with joy and sorrow, birth and death, aging and illness. And so we reincarnate; we have no meaning of our own, and we never get anything in the end.
And what can heaven and earth do? Heaven and earth are the same — utterly meaningless. Heaven, earth, and humans play this cyclical game together, playing with themselves, fooling around with themselves — and what comes of it? Nothing at all, and it amounts to nothing. In fact, the universe is just like an online game — nothing but a vast system and a bunch of objects amusing and tormenting themselves. (In this online-game analogy, mortals are the players, and a sage who has attained the Way isn’t a GM but the game’s program logic!) So what if you’re mortal or not? Isn’t the universe itself just something being played with?
Sargeras really is a wise one! The meaning of the universe’s existence is destruction — but after the Burning Legion annihilates all things, what then?
Even though I’m still living freely and pushing forward positively in life, I’m utterly disappointed in the universe. Peter Pan once said: “Life is a big adventure.” Enjoy the moment. Live the present well.
/*****Rant over******/