Life is short, art is long!

Life is short, art is long!

How should a man live, if he knows his life is short?

We all know intuitively that human life is short, at least when we get older and have to recognize that we have significantly less time ahead of us than behind us. Physicians are also aware of this and try to do their best to make their patients’ lives as long as possible. It is a great physician, a contemporary of Socrates, Hippocrates, who first expressed his idea:” Life is short, art is long!”
It’s easy to understand the first sentence, the second half of the aphorism is justifiable, and what does it mean to say “art is long”? Perhaps art requires a considerable time to achieve competence in it. Here it takes so much time for Hippocrates to learn how to master the art of medicine to cure patients, compared with the brevity of life!.

We can apply this aphorism into our modern life: life is short, let…!
Actually time is just time, neither short nor long, we can measure it by second, minute and hour or even so called life. Time is a concept which is projected by thought, the thought creates a sense of shortness or length of time dependent on one’s emotions. Imagine that you have been waiting so long for the person whom you fall in love with, how long time it is, it seems not to matter to you, you would joyfully say that you could have spent your life, willingly just waiting for your lover, because it is a kind of psychological time, but what happens if that is the person you hate, will you wait for? Absolutely, no! Therefore, time really only exists parallel when thought is there: No thought, no time!

So how a man should live, if he knows his life is short. I remember a saying of Confucius “生不知, 死何帰” it means to live (you) do not know, to die (you) go to where? When you live you really don’t know your living, and if you die now how can you know where to go? He placed an emphasis on the way that you are living now, rather than you are having worries about your death. It means exactly how you live and you will die! Turning to the aphorism, life is short we all know, but the art of living is long to achieve!

If a man does not recognize the value of time to lead a “right” life, we can see how carelessly people spend their time, being constantly busy is what makes their lives slip through their fingers, but not only for them, life is in fact short, and precisely because they themselves make it so short. Even no matter how long their lives are they do not know how to live with it, useless! I tell you a true story of my friend who was studying Ph.D in Taiwan, on his summer vacations he visited his home, at about 9 pm, a thief intruded in his room through a window and stole his laptop, at that time he caught the thief and by instinct he chased after him to get back the laptop, his house was located at a little bit high mountain, unluckily, he fell from a not too high steep cliff and he got a stroke of heart then died away there. I got this message from a friend when I was in Burma for an intensive retreat of meditation course with a broken heart! Nobody knows the reason why he died of, it’s just a laptop? No, not really! I thought it would be his documents that he had accumulated and stored in it, and maybe his not finished Ph.D writings. (sleep well!, I told my friend): life is short in deed! He got attached to his studies, but he didn’t know about it even until he gave out his last breath, is it worth costing such a young life? We all fairly have just a short life: choose it wisely, friends!

For the wise, they spend their precious life-time as profitably as possible, by making use of every day as though it were the last. They fully live in the present moment with alert and awakening mind, a mind shines brightly within and without, not remember the past, or chase after the future. He fully lives with an in-breath, he clearly knows an in-breath breathes in, short or long. And he fully lives with an out-breath, he clearly knows an out-breath breathes out, short or long til he can achieve his pointed mind with composure and calm. Leading such a life is no need to worry about anything, one thing that he needs to care with heed for this present moment and this moment only, there is no future moment, if there were a future moment that comes to right now and also becomes this present moment. this is beyond life!

Thanks for your corrections!