The study begins out of a concern to understand the religious world of followers of a certain faith when they are terminally ill with cancer. The investigation was carried out on Buddhist disciples who were admitted to the hospice ward of a hospital established by a Buddhist organization in eastern Taiwan. Our bodily mechanisms can spilt our world into two divides. For cancer patients in their terminal stages of life, one part of their body remains within the normal world that can be understood and perceived by healthy people, while the other part lies in a world of imagery that is beyond common perception and hence incomprehensible. When a person has been following a certain faith for some time, s/he holds the worldview of that religion. However, when s/he falls ill, the body’s decline causes her/him to fall into a world of imagery. At that point, things will happen between the disciple and her/his fellow disciples who still belong to the conventional religious world. How do people in the ordinary world react to the realm of a religious person? We discover that through interactions with the outer world, the patient gradually reveals the base-tone of an imagery world that represents the space where the patient gathers and stores her emotions. From her description of her background, religious encounters, and relationship with others, we understand how the patient interprets and creates Tao. When she is finally able to accommodate her body and her disease, we see how she adapts to living in this reality through her imagery one. Through this rare glimpse of the base-tone of the imagery world, the author tries to describe and gives voice to the patient's ground of living experiences and the other point of views, so as to reveal her path of religious development.
