"Ask what love is, and you will learn that it is a matter of life and death." It comes from Jin Yong's novel "The Legend of the Condor Heroes".
Li Mochou's sentence in "The Legend of the Condor Heroes", "Ask what love is in the world, it will tell you whether life and death are together", which made many readers and viewers feel pity for this villain trapped by love.
These two sentences are not the original text, but were modified by later generations when they were sung. After the modification, both the upper and lower sentences have seven characters, and the format is symmetrical, making people think they are poems.
The earliest source of asking questions about love directly teaches life and death:
This sentence comes from the representative work "Moyu'er·Qiuyan Ci" by Yuan Haowen, a writer at the end of the Jin Dynasty and the beginning of the Yuan Dynasty. The original text is "Ask the world what love is, and it will teach you life and death."
It is not difficult to see that the biggest difference between Yuan Haowen's original work and Jin Yong's adaptation is the missing word "人". This is because there is a little-known but touching love hidden behind it. Stories have nothing to do with people.