The title of this work comes from the ‘death poem’ of Tetsugen Doko, a Japanese monk who died on 22 March 1682, aged 53. He had spent his entire fortune, dedicated to the printing of Buddhist texts, on distributing food during a famine that winter, saving the lives of around 10,000 people. When he died, exhausted from his efforts, ‘the sound of the mourners weeping shook the fields and the forests’.