Binara Full Moon Poya Day on Thursday:

Developing an insight to see life in its true perspective

By Lionel Wijesiri

Impermanence or change is a fundamental concept in Buddhism. Without a realisation of it, there can never be any true insight through which we can see things as they really are.

What does it mean “We see things as they really are?” The answer cannot be put directly into words because words cannot convey the depth or the transient nature of the experience itself. It would be somewhat like trying to describe the taste of a strawberry to a person who has never tasted it. You have to taste it yourself to understand it truly.

Bodhisatva

According to the Buddha’s teaching, this liberating insight awakens one to a deep understanding of the three characteristics of conditioned existence which are anicca, Dukkha and Anathma. To begin with, the term ‘conditioned existence’ generally refers to the world of time, space, and form. It is the world in which everything that exists is depending on certain conditions for its existence. It is the world with which we are most familiar and some people believe that it is the only world that exists.

Anicca or impermanence is sometimes stated as “the inherently changing nature of all things.” But this definition does not go quite far enough. Impermanence implies not only that reality consists of things that are always changing; but it also means that change itself is the essential nature of conditioned existence. In other words, the universe is not a big machine which is constantly changing; the universe is more like a symphony, which is nothing but a stream of ever changing vibrations emerging and disappearing into a background of silence.

Transience of life

The disappointment, despair and frustration in our daily life often stem from ignorance of the law of nature, which is change or impermanence. It is, therefore, indeed very important for everyone of us to understand the nature of change or impermanence to face problems courageously in our daily lives. It helps us learn how to compromise with one another. It helps us reduce unnecessary tensions in our relationships. It helps us to be in harmony with nature and live a happy life.

Buddhism deals with the problem of impermanence of life in a very rational manner. Impermanence was the Buddha’s first teaching and also His last. The first thing He taught His Five Disciples was impermanence, the fact that everything is changing from moment to moment, and nothing remains stable. And He demonstrated this as His last teaching by Himself leaving His body, showing that even the Buddha is impermanent.

The fact of impermanence has been recognised not only in Buddhist thought, but also elsewhere in the history of philosophy. It was the ancient Greek philosopher Heraclitus who remarked that one could not step into the same river twice. This remark which implies the ever-changing and transient nature of things is closer to Buddhist viewpoint.

Understanding impermanence

The ordinary understanding of impermanence is accessible to all of us; we see old age, sickness and death. We notice that things change.

The seasons change, society changes, our emotions change, and the weather changes. Sometimes, realising that an experience is impermanent, we can relax with how it is, including its coming and going. Seeing that change is inevitable and it helps us to let go of clinging to how things are or resistance to change. And sometimes recognising that we are all equal in being subject to aging, sickness, and death is the basis for compassion.

When we were young, we were taught that we are going to die someday, but we live our lives as if we would live forever. Wisdom can come as people age, not just from life’s experience, but also from increasing awareness that our lives will end. It gets harder and harder to avoid this realisation when what remains of our expected lifetime gets shorter. This often encourages people to look closely at their priorities and values. Therefore, opening to impermanence in a deep and profound way can bring tremendous wisdom.

Beyond the ordinary experience of impermanence, Buddhist practice helps us open to the less immediately perceptible realm of impermanence, i.e, insight into the moment-to-moment arising and passing of every perceivable experience. With deep concentrated mindfulness, we can see everything as constantly in a flux, even experiences that ordinarily seem persistent.

Deeper experience

In this deeper experience of impermanence, we realise that it doesn’t make sense to hold onto anything, even temporarily. There’s nothing that we can hold on-to because everything simply flashes in and out of existence. We also realise that our clinging and resistance have very little to do with the experience itself. We mostly cling to ideas and concepts, not things or experiences in and of themselves. For example, we don’t cling to money, but to the ideas of what money means for us. We may not resist aging as much as we resist letting go of cherished concepts of ourselves and our bodies. One of our most ingrained attachments is to self, self-image, and self-identity. In the deeper experience of mindfulness, we see that the idea of self is a form of clinging to concepts; nothing in our direct experience can qualify as a self to hold onto.

As we see impermanence clearly, we see that there is nothing real that we can actually cling to. Our deep-seated tendency to grasp is challenged and so may begin to relax. We see that our experiences don’t correspond to our fixed categories, ideas, or images. We realise that reality is more fluid than any of our ideas about it.

Five states

The Buddha explained that while we may think of ourselves as single objects of existence, in fact humans are made up of a collection of five conditioned, impermanent states: body (Rupa), sense contacts and sensations (Vedana), perceptions and conceptions (sagnna), volitional actions and karmic tendencies (Samskaras) and basic consciousness (Vigñana). These collections (Skandhas) are the true nature of the person and they are constantly changing. The body grows old, becomes ill and dies. Sense contacts lead to perception and conception and these are constantly changing. Our karmic activities never cease and underlying all these is the basal consciousness, which at death also disappears with all of the other Samskaras.

The Buddha taught that we should not become too attached to our bodies and their sensual experiences and thoughts that arise from them, because the attachment to our bodies and to life causes us great Dukkha , suffering and misery. Sense contact brings us sense experiences which we then term as desirable or undesirable.

From this judgement arises the desire to re-experience similar sensual experiences, which lead directly to attachment. This attachment then leads to a great thirst or craving for the experience. Soon we are entrapped in the need to continue such experiences, for we feel we need or want them. But all experience is very momentary.

Hardly have we grasped onto one, when it disappears and a new attraction grabs our minds.

Soon we are enmeshed in a great, complex web of desire, all of which is very transitory, and thus unsatisfactory.

The Buddha advised us that to become free from the constant round of rebirth and suffering, we would need to realise the changing nature of things in its true perspective, so that we could free ourselves from the need for certain experiences, attachment to self and to the illusion of permanence.