Thoughts on Impermanence

There are five things which no one is able to accomplish in this world: first, to cease growing old when one is growing old; second, to cease being sick; third, to cease dying; fourth, to deny dissolution when there is dissolution; fifth, to deny extinction.

All the ordinary people in the world sooner or later run into these facts, and most people suf­fer in consequence of them, but those who have heard the Buddha’s teaching do not suffer because they understand that they are unavoidable.

Most of us really don’t want to grow old or for things to change. We want to remain young and stay with our loved ones forever. We want them, and ourselves, always to remain healthy and happy. We don’t want them to become sick, and we certainly don’t want to lose them to death. Yet, the reality of our existence is that many of us will become ill; all of us will grow old and all of us will someday die. While that reality is hard for us to face, our failure to face it makes that reality even harder to bear.

This reading I began with comes from the Teaching of Buddha; it is a vivid reminder of nature’s fundamental lesson of impermanence. This is the first principle of Buddhism, the doctrine of Impermanence. Without an awareness of this fact of nature, there can never be any true insight through which we can see things as they really are.

The Buddha teaches that we can only understand our suffering through the understanding of impermanence. It is the knowledge of impermanence that heals suffering.

Another way to say this is that Buddhism is the path that allows us to overcome the suffering attached to old age, sickness, and death. It does so by making us look directly at the transient nature of our existence and at our attachments to things.

A lack of this understanding will certainly result in finding oneself viewing the world with a perverted perception of reality, polluted thoughts, and tainted views.

Unnecessary disappointment, despair, and frustration in our daily life often stem from our ignorance of the law of nature, which is change or impermanence. It is therefore very important for each of us to understand the nature of impermanence so that we may face problems courageously in our daily life, so we may accept things that we cannot change, and be in harmony with nature and live a happy life.

And when tragedy, illness, death, personal setbacks, and other unfortunate events do occur unexpectedly in our lives, they present opportunities for self-reflection. From self-reflection we consider what is really important to us, and aspire to understand and seek ultimate truths which remain constant in spite of ever changing conditions of our mundane world.

It was twenty years ago that I suffered a hemorrhagic stroke and every day I am reminded how fragile my life is. Every day I monitor my blood pressure before I go to bed and when I get up in the morning and twice a day I take my medication to keep my hypertension under control. The left side of my body is a constant reminder how close I was to having a major stroke.

Change may bring encouragement or discouragement, it may create happiness or unhappiness, it may give us joy or anxiety, it may open doors or it may close them. In any case change is change. It is reality.

Namo Amida Butsu