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Seeing Impermanence

Good evening again. Tonight I want to build a little bit on what I talked about in the guided meditation, which is the changing nature of our experiences.

I'll start here: in the biography of the Buddha, such as it is, there isn't one concise autobiography. Instead, the Buddha used a little bit of his biographical details to make a point. He didn't tell his life story in order to tell his life story; he just used it as examples to help support his teaching.

Some of the passages that are preserved—or that the tradition holds—are stories around the first students of the Buddha. Of course, there wouldn't be any Buddhism unless there were some students who heard the teachings and preserved them. If you know the story of the Buddha's awakening, you know that he practiced with these five ascetics, doing some extreme self-mortification or asceticism, even to the point of starvation. The Buddha discovered that didn't work, and he went off in a different direction.

The First Students

After he became awakened, he wanted to teach them. He wanted to find that group of five ascetics again and share with them what he had discovered and what had helped him become awakened. Of those five ascetics, one of them became awakened. It was his first touch of awakening, or first experience of awakening, when hearing the Buddha teach this. His name was Kondañña^[1].

Right after Kondañña's awakening experience, he exclaims, "Whatever is subject to arising is subject to cessation. Whatever arises passes away." This is the first thing that he said after he had this awakening experience. So clearly, there's some importance there about seeing the arising and passing away.

Interestingly, after teaching the five ascetics, the Buddha then teaches Yasa^[2], who is the exact opposite of the five ascetics. He is a rich merchant living a very opulent lifestyle. The conditions are such that his and the Buddha's paths cross, and the Buddha gives him some teachings. Yasa, just like Kondañña and the other ascetics, has an awakening experience and exclaims the same thing: "Whatever is subject to arising is subject to cessation." So clearly, there's something about seeing this arising and passing.

Another pointer to the importance of seeing the arising and passing is in the Satipaṭṭhāna Sutta^[3]. Some of you may be familiar that this is the primary discourse, the primary teaching of the Buddha, where creating the foundations for mindfulness are discussed, taught, or shared. It's a long sutta that has a number of different practices in it. But there is a refrain—kind of like a chorus, you might think—that gets repeated after each new instruction. In this chorus that gets repeated, I believe thirteen times in this sutta, is the instruction to notice the nature of arising and passing away.

This means we can notice that maybe we don't have to be mindful of every precise moment when something arises, or that precise moment when something passes away. But we can notice, "Oh yeah, this wasn't here a minute ago," or "Wait, this is here, what happened to that?" There can be a little bit of a retrospective analysis, this recognition that things are arising and passing even if we're not noticing the exact, precise moment when a particular phenomenon has arisen or passed away. The instructions are to notice that they have the nature to arise and pass away.

The Benefits of Seeing Impermanence

Of course, if you've been in the Buddhist scene for a while, you'll know that I'm talking about impermanence: anicca^[4]. Generally, when we think of impermanence, we often focus on the challenging aspect of it. That is, that we're apt to lose those things that are important and dear to us. Or maybe when we think that things are impermanent, it implies that they're all going to end at some time.

But there are also some real benefits that can arise when we see the arising and passing away, when we see the impermanent nature of things. Sometimes we might overlook this positive side. One benefit, of course, is that it puts things in perspective. I know for me, when my father died, it put a lot of things in perspective. My priorities shifted, and the way that I thought about things shifted. If you've had somebody in your life die, maybe you've had the same experience. Recognizing the impermanent nature of things can really help us appreciate what we do have, and it can serve as a wake-up call for us to think about our priorities and articulate a little bit more clearly what's important to us.

The Buddha knew about this. There was a time when he was talking to a king, and he gave a simile. When talking to a king, he's not going to give the usual dharma talk that you should meditate a lot and practice renunciation, right? A king isn't going to do that. Instead, he gives this simile:

"What do you think if a person were to come to you from the east and say, 'Great king, you should know this: I am coming from the east, and there I saw a great mountain, as high as the clouds, coming this way. It's crushing all living beings in its path. So do whatever you think should be done, great king.' And then another messenger comes from the south, and then another messenger comes from the west, and then another messenger comes from the north. All of them are saying, 'There is this great mountain, as high as the clouds, coming this way, crushing all living beings.'"

And then the Buddha asks the king, "So what would you do if you received these four different messengers that were saying this?"

The king replies, "If such a great peril should arise, such a terrible destruction of human life, what else should be done but to live by the dharma and to do wholesome deeds?"

This is very different for a king who, the commentary says, before receiving this teaching from the Buddha, was busy sentencing criminals and doing things that are not usually what we think of as wholesome deeds or living according to the dharma. Even this king recognized that these great mountains are death, or time, in some way we might understand it.

Recognizing impermanence has another benefit: it allows growth and development to happen. If everything was perfectly static, there would be no ability to practice, to gain some skills, to learn, and to gain expertise. On some level, this seems so obvious and maybe it shouldn't even be stated, but it's fundamental to human growth—this quality of impermanence.

One more thing that I'll say here about a benefit is that the fact that things change prevents life from becoming stultifying or static. We might feel like we want some security, we want some stability, we want things to finally settle down and be stable. But we often discover that when we do manage to find some temporary security, steadiness, or stability, before too long that very security might become claustrophobic, kind of a prison, stultifying, or stifling. Then we might suddenly be desperate to escape from it. If things were always the same, always the same... well, impermanence brings some freshness, energy, and dynamism into our life and experience.

Deeper Levels of Impermanence

But maybe the greatest benefit arises from seeing impermanence, seeing anicca, on deeper and deeper levels, where some great wisdom can arise. What does it mean to see impermanence on deeper and deeper levels?

What I was just talking about is what we might see in our daily life. It certainly doesn't require any meditation practice, and it certainly isn't unique to Buddhism to recognize the changing nature of our experience. But just like Kondañña and Yasa, the first students of the Buddha, if we sit with our experience and we begin to examine it, what we start to see is not just the content of our experience—the agitation, the settledness, the sadness, the excitement, the longing, love, or happiness that flows through our experience. Not only do we start to see the content and the details, but we also start to see the underlying quality, as I was talking about with the instructions in the Satipaṭṭhāna Sutta.

If we can rest in this space of awareness that knows the play of experience, but we're not lost in our experience or constantly reactive to it—instead of, "I like this, I don't like that," or "I need more of this, I need less of that." Not because that's wrong, particularly, but because that's not where freedom lies. Instead, we're just getting pushed around as things are changing, and it puts us at odds with the way things are. If we're always trying to grasp for more or push things away, we suffer, because the way things actually are—if you pay attention—is that they are arising and passing away. Our experience can be like a river of things moving through. As opposed to grabbing on, pushing away, or pulling closer, we can see this as a flow of experiences.

Often we can see that in daily life, and maybe we can see that in our meditation. But in our meditation practice, we might start to notice when things arise. With the Satipaṭṭhāna Sutta, the discourse on the establishing of mindfulness, the instructions are to notice the arising and to notice the passing—both arising and passing. It's very common in the beginning that what's most predominant is just to notice what's new and what's fresh. Like, "Oh, that pain in my knee!" It just grabs our attention and becomes compelling. Part of the reason why it becomes compelling is because it's new, it's just arisen, and it's uncomfortable. New things tend to grab our attention. In the same way, when we open up our awareness to paying attention to the experience of sounds, it's the new sounds that grab our attention.

At the beginning of practice, we just tend to avoid or simply not notice the endings of things, the way things are passing away. Yes, sure, things are arising, but of course things are passing away also, and they just escape our notice. It's a little bit out of sight, out of mind, or we're so busy with what's new and distracting that we don't even notice the endings.

Even with experiences in daily life, you might think, "Well, okay, driving my car I see that the visual field is changing, but that mountain over there isn't changing." But of course, if we think about it, every time any being walks on the mountain, the dirt and the gravel are only going one way: downhill with gravity. So of course there's a way in which mountains are also ending. Even those things that might feel really stable and don't catch our attention because they're not newly arising—we might not even think that they're ending, but they are ceasing.

As part of our meditation practice, to counter this unbalanced view where we're only seeing the beginnings of things, we can intentionally set the intention to also see the endings, to see the passing away. We might not see that precise moment when it's passing away, but we can see maybe just a few moments later, "Oh yeah, it's no longer there." With a little bit of memory, we just notice retrospectively, "Oh yeah, this used to be here, and it's no longer here."

Inconstancy and Concepts

As the mind starts to settle and get even more quiet—perhaps being on a retreat, perhaps having experienced some concentration—we notice something else as our recognition of impermanence gets even deeper. We might notice that things are inconstant, as well as being impermanent. I understand impermanent as meaning things are going to end, but inconstant means that they're not steady. There's a flashing in and out of experience. There's a fluttering, there's a flickering.

With a really steady mind, we can start to see how things are arising and passing, arising and passing. Nothing is as solid as it might seem to the ordinary, non-meditative mind. This word anicca, which often gets translated as impermanent, could just as well be translated as inconstant, seeing the lack of stability or steadiness in all of our experiences.

In some way, we could understand that all objects can be classified as experiences, because how would we know there's an object unless it was being experienced? Either through the visual field, or maybe it's experienced as a thought or an idea. When there are uncomfortable bodily sensations, the encouragement is to bring our attention to them and notice: Is it stabbing? Is it throbbing? Is it cold? Maybe it's hot? And exactly where is it? The area in which those experiences are arising—is it getting bigger? Is it getting smaller? Or does it have really precise boundaries?

We might notice as we look into this experience of pain, it's not so easy. What at first seems like a really dull throbbing sensation, when we really rest our awareness there with a little bit of inquiry, we realize, "Oh, it's not as solid." There are some areas of the body that aren't throbbing right there, and maybe some areas that are. And maybe it's not quite so clear exactly the circumference, the perimeter of where that experience is. When we try to pinpoint it with real precision, it might seem kind of slippery. Like, "Oh, it's here... oh no, it's over there. Or it feels like this... but wait, it's like that."

As our mind starts to settle, we start to see that actually all of our experiences are like that. That there's some flickering, or flashing, or maybe even pixelating. It's not the solid and stable way that things are experienced with our ordinary mind when we are just going around the neighborhood.

With deeper recognitions of impermanence that really support wisdom, we recognize that all these experiences are flickering. They're not as solid as I was thinking they were when I tried to pinpoint them. So what is solid? What is steady?

We might discover that it's only concepts. It's only ideas that are steady, solid, and stable. It's only our ideas about experiences, the concepts and labels that we put on them, that are stable. A good example is this word "pain." It's the same word, no matter the inflection, but that word gets placed on top of such a broad range of experiences, and the experiences themselves aren't steady. It turns out that this is true for all of our experiences. When the mind is really settled and quiet, we can see that it's only our concepts that are steady.

Concentration, Well-being, and Freedom

Usually, when the mind is this quiet, it means that there is concentration. And when there's this level of concentration, there's also a sense of well-being. They go together. You can't have this level of settledness in the mind—I'll use this word concentration, samadhi^[5]—unless there's also a certain amount of well-being, happiness, equanimity, and ease. When there is that level of ease, well-being, and settledness, it's only under those conditions that we can start to see how things are really not as stable.

This is part of the reason that some well-being is an integral part of meditation practice, so that seeing the unsteady nature of our experiences is not disturbing or uncomfortable. We see it with a mind that has some understanding and can take it in as wisdom. That can really support us on our way to greater and greater freedom, because it becomes so clear: "Oh yes, if everything is changing, flickering, flashing in and out of experience," we might have to see this ten times, a hundred times, a thousand times in a concentrated mind. If things are not as steady as we think they are, then it just doesn't make sense to hold onto them. It just doesn't make sense to be clinging, grabbing, or attached to them, because they're changing.

And then it's just natural that there's a letting go. With this letting go, there's greater freedom. The more the mind is able to let go, the greater and greater freedom there is, until there's the complete letting go that is awakening. Then, like Kondañña and Yasa, the first Buddhist students, we can say, "Oh, everything that is subject to arising is subject to cessation."

So whether you see impermanence in your daily life, whether you just see the arising of things, or maybe sometimes just the passing of things, or maybe you start to see in deeper ways with a quieter mind that might not be available until you have some opportunity to do extended practice—may it be an opportunity for you to notice that it just doesn't make sense to hold onto those things that are changing, and for us to let go. And to feel the freedom that arises when we let go.

Thank you.