impermanence

Nothing lasts forever. This is one of the most basic teachings of Gautam Buddha: impermanence.

It is in the nature of everything, everything in the manifest world, to be impermanent, to come into being, to last for a while, and to pass away. It is evidently true. You can see it in things that last a short while. A flower blossoms, and in a few days it has withered and died. It has served its purpose. Its life is over. Whilst it was here, it was beautiful. And now it is gone. It is not permanent. It is not meant to be permanent.

And so it is with all living things. Even an ancient tree which might have lived for hundreds of years will come to the end of its time. It will die. And of course we humans too. One day we will finish, be gone, dead. It’s difficult for us to grasp, but why? It is such a simple fact of life: the impermanence. Life is transitory by its very nature, here for a while and then gone.

And it is not just living organisms that pass away. Even a rock, a boulder, is being eroded and worn away by time, and one day will be gone, dispersed far and wide as grains of sand, as pebbles, as dust. And a mountain, it may last for thousands of years, it may live for millions of years. But one day it too will be flattened. Nothing lasts forever. Astronomers, cosmologists tell us that even stars are born, live their life and die. So even the so called fixed stars are impermanent.

This impermanence not only holds true for objects, but the abstract things that our mind is so attached to, are also impermanent. A relationship: even relationships come into being, have their natural life span, and pass away. Anything, anything you can think of is impermanent.

And if you look closely, things are always changing. So, this impermanence is really from moment to moment, and certainly day-to-day. You’ll see something which you experienced yesterday, which you are perhaps expecting to experience in the same way today, feels different. Something has changed, in the outer world and in your inner world too. Things are always in a state of flux, changing and passing away.  And this is one of the central teachings of Gautam Buddha: that nothing is permanent. And if we realise this, then our tendency to become attached to things diminishes. And in the end, even that tendency can pass away.