I saw this poem on the Shuimu BBS forum, and I must credit the poster by name: topboy. It is a poem by the English-American writer W. H. Auden, translated by Cha Liangyong (Mu Dan):
He was used in a place far from the centers of culture,
And abandoned by his general and his lice,
And in a padded coat he closed his eyes
And departed this life. No one will mention him
When this campaign is organized into a book.
No important knowledge will be lost in his skull.
His jokes were stale, as dull as wartime,
His name and face will vanish forever.
He did not know the good, nor choose the good, yet he taught us,
And like a comma, added meaning;
He turned to dust in China, so that one day
Our daughters might love this human world,
No longer humiliated by dogs; and so that where there are mountains,
Rivers, and houses, there might also be people.
This poem is about a Chinese soldier who gave his life in the War of Resistance Against Japan. Though he had nothing and was too ordinary to be worth mentioning, he was like a "comma" — adding meaning to our future.
The reason this poem came to mind is that it made me think about a person's choices and the meaning those choices represent. Just as Auden wrote, he did not know the good, nor did he choose the good. Perhaps he was conscripted, or perhaps he joined some army simply because he had no food. But in a particular moment, under the breath of karmic winds, his life acquired an eternal meaning beyond itself. A person who was nobody became, through certain events, a person who was somebody. That is staggering.
Had he not found himself in a nation ravaged by a war of aggression, he might have remained a farmer forever. He might have drifted and struggled through life, had good days or bad, encountered accidents large or small, lived a life long or short. But such a life would, in all likelihood, have lacked the meaning Auden spoke of — the meaning that today, his nation and people have earned the right to survive, to be free from colonial oppression.
Put this way, it might seem that such meaning was handed to him for free. But if you look closely at the specific circumstances, you can see the true price of becoming great: it was in battle after battle, under the threat of death every minute and every second, that he chose to fight and be brave — until death — until "warrior" and "hero" became the definitive summary of a chapter of his life. Such greatness is achieved by overcoming the self. No one is perfect. Heroes and saints, seen up close, each have their flaws. But what matters are those specific moments — the choices that make a person this person and not another.
Like my alma mater, Xi'an Jiaotong University — I love my alma mater deeply. A university is, after all, a gathering of people, a gathering of lives. The westward relocation of the 1950s permanently forged the spirit of this school. I've seen the photographs from that era — faces beaming with joy on the train, brimming with vitality. During my time at the university, I also met some of the elderly people who had lived through the relocation. Not every person was perfect in every way, and I suspect not everyone had firmly resolved at the time to dedicate themselves to the nation. But in that moment, that choice carried permanent meaning. Moving from Shanghai to Xi'an meant harder conditions — not unbearable, certainly — but what that choice represented was vitality, a spirit of adventure, an open and unadorned bearing. And in certain moments, the understanding of placing something larger than the self above the self — this understanding approaches the realm of the bodhisattva.
When I watched Interstellar (or was it another film — I forget), I remember a line of dialogue: I am dying for something big. Those seemingly difficult choices are what allow us to merge ourselves into something greater, thereby entering the realm of the immortal. But once we have truly merged into something greater, whether it's immortal or not ceases to matter at all. The Bodhisattva Kṣitigarbha vowed: "I shall not become a Buddha until the hells are empty." He dwells in hell doing the work of liberation — what exhausting work that is! And yet it is precisely in, and only in, such exhausting work that true liberation is found.