A philosopher's last lesson

Editor Chen Zimo from Beijing-based CITIC Press Group got to know Zhu Rui's story on the popular lifestyle-sharing platform Xiaohongshu, or RedNote, in a post written by Zhu Rui's student last April.

Chen was immediately touched by Zhu Rui's story. Having lost a beloved family member to cancer, which "dragged me into an abyss", she wondered what drove Zhu Rui to continue working while bearing the enormous pain of his illness.

"How would he explain life and death as a philosophy scholar? How would he spend the last stage of his life? I felt curious, and cherished reverence for these answers," Chen says.

She and her colleague, Han Xiao, attended Zhu Rui's lessons online and offline. The editors' group decided to publish a book about Zhu Rui's life story and ideas.

After Zhu Rui's death, what remained were audio recordings that were eventually transcribed into a manuscript of over 200,000 characters. Chen and Xie spent nearly three months organizing the material. After several discussions, the editors' group distilled Zhu Rui's key ideas from his final course and dialogues with Xie, presenting them across eight chapters. At the end of each chapter, they included excerpts from the conversations to provide readers with a unique reading experience.

Zhu Sumei says that in Zhu Rui's last days, he remained calm, with little anxiety or desperation. She was perplexed by her younger brother's peacefulness.

After his death, she repeatedly read the book and began to gain a deeper understanding of why Zhu Rui was unafraid of death.

Through the book, she learned that he differentiated the concepts of "dying" and "death", pointing out the former as a painful, desperate and lonely process, but the latter as the end of the process.

"The more painful dying is, the more positive death will be, as it ends the pain," said Zhu Rui. "Death is a great invention of life because it offers the world a chance for rebirth; not the rebirth of an individual, but a refreshment for the entire world."