What
Buddhists Believe
Venerable K. Sri Dhammananda Maha Thera
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Everything
is Changeable
What exists is changeable and what is
not changeable does not exist.
Looking
at life, we notice how it changes and how it continually moves between
extremes and contrasts. We notice rise and fall, success and failure, loss
and gain; we experience honor and contempt, praise and blame; and we feel
how our hearts respond to all that happiness and sorrow, delight and
despair, disappointment and satisfaction, fear and hope. These mighty
waves of emotion carry us up, fling us down, and no sooner we find some
rest, then we are carried by the power of a new wave again. How can we
expect a footing on the crest of the waves? Where shall we erect the
building of our life in the midst of this ever-restless ocean of
existence?
This is a world where any
little joy that is allotted to beings is secured only after many
disappointments, failures and defeats. This is a world where scanty joy
grows amidst sickness, desperation and death. This is a world where beings
who a short while ago were connected with us by sympathetic joy are at the
next moment in want of our compassion. Such a world as this needs
equanimity. This is the nature of the world where we live with our
intimate friends and the next day they become our enemies to harm us.
The Buddha described the
world as an unending flux of becoming. All is changeable, continuous
transformation, ceaseless mutation, and a moving stream. Everything exists
from moment to moment. Everything is a recurring rotation of coming into
being and then passing out of existence. Everything is moving from birth
to death. The matter or material forms in which life does or does not
express itself, are also a continuous movement or change towards decay.
This teaching of the impermanent nature of everything is one of the main
pivots of Buddhism. Nothing on earth partakes of the character of absolute
reality. That there will be no death of what is born is impossible.
Whatever is subject to origination is subject also to destruction. Change
is the very constituent of reality.
In accepting the law of
impermanence or change, the Buddha denies the existence of eternal
substance. Matter and spirit are false abstractions that, in reality, are
only changing factors (Dhamma) which are connected and which arise
in functional dependence on each other.
Today, scientists have
accepted the law of change that was discovered by the Buddha. Scientists
postulate that there is nothing substantial, solid and tangible in the
world. Everything is a vortex of energy, never remaining the same for two
consecutive moments. The whole wide world is caught up in this whirl and
vortex of change. One of the theories postulated by scientists is the
prospect of the ultimate coldness following upon the death or destruction
of the sun. Buddhists are not dismayed by this prospect. The Buddha taught
that universes or world cycles arise and pass away in endless succession,
just as the lives of individuals do. Our world will most certainly come to
an end. It has happened before with previous worlds and it will happen
again.
'The world is a passing
phenomenon. We all belong to the world of time. Every written word, every
carved stone, every painted picture, the structure of civilization, every
generation of man, vanishes away like the leaves and flowers of forgotten
summers. What exists is changeable and what is not changeable does not
exist.'
Thus all gods and human
beings and animals and material forms -- everything in this universe -- is
subject to the law of impermanence. Buddhism teaches us:
'The body like a
lump of foam;
The feelings like a water bubble;
Perception like a mirage;
Volitional activities like a plantain tree;
And Consciousness like jugglery.' (Samyutta Nikaya)
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Source: Buddhist
Study and Practice Group, http://www.sinc.sunysb.edu/Clubs/buddhism/
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Layout: Chan Duc - Nguyen Thao
Update : 01-11-2002
