Refusing eternal life can bless the land and make it evergreen

Evidence

Instead, Ural-Batyr turned and spat the water out — over the land, the mountains, the forests, and the living world all around him. ‘Let me not live forever while everything else must die,’ he said. ‘Better that I die like all things, and that the world I love be made evergreen.’ And so Ural himself grew old and died as men do — but the land he blessed turned green and deathless in its way, the rivers ran, the forests rose. When the people buried their hero, the earth heaped over him grew so vast it became the Ural Mountains, which carry his name to this day, and from his body, the Bashkirs say, came gold and silver and precious stones. — , A Year of World Stories, 11509

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to Gilgamesh and Kai Khosrow mortality/immortality quests in the epic tradition, and to Christian and Buddhist traditions that renounce personal immortality for the sake of life. — connects to: Navajo theology holds that Old Age, Cold, Poverty and Hunger serve necessary purposes — , A Year of World Stories, 9927; Andean ethics require reciprocal exchange with the earth as a living mother — , A Year of World Stories, 10689; Directing religious expectations toward earthly life can make culture cease to oppress — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 151 (+1 more)