Perspective Changes Everything
Three Marks of Existence: Impermanence
As my spouse and I were driving along a backroad from Asturias in northwestern Spain to Madrid, we stopped the car when we saw this field of sunflowers baked brown by the sun. This vista literally stopped us in our tracks because photos of sunflowers usually show them in the golden bloom of their prime.
Whether we like change or dislike change doesn’t change the fact that everything is always changing and that change is everything. Whew! That’s a lot of “change” in one sentence. And, I hope it hints at the ceaseless flux that life is. All conditioned phenomena—that’s you, me, sunflowers, Volvos—are of the nature to change, decay, and die.
Anicca (Pali) or “impermanence” is the first of the Three Marks of Existence; the other two “marks” or “characteristics” are “suffering” and “no self.” Traditionally in Theravada (“Way of the Elders”) practice, the goal of meditation is to have insight into these characteristics of the phenomenal world. Although in the Zen tradition we don’t usually meditate with such an explicit goal, it’s clear through Ch’an and Zen teachings that “just sitting” IS the realization of this truth.
Since Zen is a body practice, intellectually understanding impermanence or the other marks is not the same as having a physical experience. When we still the body-mind in meditation, especially in long and silent retreats, the concept of “impermanence” becomes a felt sense, an embodied wisdom, of the arising and passing of all compounded phenomena (conditioned existence). If we meditate in the mornings, we hear the sounds of birds chirping or cars honking, depending on where you live. We see the light and shadows shift and slant across the wall as the sun rises. We feel the relative cold or heat on our skin. And, of course, we perceive objects of the mind, aka thoughts. All of this phenomena is passing through us. They arise, persist in flux, and then fade away. Moment after nano-moment.
And, to be clear, the mind that’s perceiving this phenomena is also in flux. So both the objects of perception and the organs that perceive are in a perpetual state of becoming.
When our six sense organs (the mind being the sixth) make contact with their respective sense objects this contact co-arises with the respective sense consciousness—eye, ear, nose, tongue, body, and mind. The gift of meditation is that we gradually start to experience and cognize consciousness as pervading the body-mind. Of course, this is our natural state of being.
Our body-minds constantly perceive sentient and non-sentient beings as we move through our everyday activities, we just are not attuned to this perceptual process. This is partly because many of us are dominated by our thinking mind, which is highly distractible, and because our attention is often on “external” objects, as it needs to be, say if we’re driving a car or caring for a child.
Meditation offers us an opportunity to turn our gaze inward and practice being a body, or just letting the body be, by relaxing into whatever arises. This is how we begin to become more intimate with the transient quality of what’s happening in both the “internal” and “external” worlds—of course, not-one-not two. The more we touch impermanence, the more spaciousness we have to just notice what's arising and not grasp onto it or push it away because we know the experience is transitory.
“When we truly ‘see’ impermanence, egocentric mind does not arise, nor do thoughts of fame and personal benefit. Being anxious that the days and nights are passing quickly, practice as though your head were enveloped in flames. Reflecting on the frailty of your body, practice with diligence following the example of the Buddha.” —Eihei Dōgen Zenji
Cultivating the capacity for our heart-mind-bodies to stay open, relaxed, and attuned amid arising discomfort or stress, the less we are buffeted by and react unskillfully to causes and conditions. We no longer misperceive arising phenomena as permanent and are able to let them pass through—whether they’re pleasant or unpleasant. We begin to feel that we're not in control of what happens and that we can’t make transient things permanent—or if we try, then we notice how we suffer. Letting go of thinking we are in control is a lot less stressful, IMHO, than continuing to (falsely) believe we are in control.
Our embodied realization of impermanence shifts our perspectives and therefore our attitudes in numerous ways. Shōhaku Okumura Roshi addresses these attitudinal shifts in his introduction to Dōgen’s Zuimonki, some of which I’ve listed below:
Giving up worldly sentiments
Having compassion and working for the benefit of others
Not seeking fame, profit, wealth, and material possessions
Being in harmony with others1
Okumura Roshi further states that “Seeing impermanence and parting from egocentric self is the foundation of the practice of the Way shown by Dōgen Zenji. That is also to carry out [these teachings] of Shakyamuni Buddha with our whole body and mind in our daily lives. . . . Precisely since everything is impermanent and changes swiftly we have to value our time. Because of ‘egolessness’ we can work for others.”2
Practicing with impermanence leads to embodied wisdom and transformative insight because we are touching reality—“seeing things as they is,” to quote Suzuki Roshi. My experience is that surrendering and embracing the transience of life alleviates suffering. This shifts our perspective from one of denial and resistance to one of acknowledgment and acceptance, akin to exhaling after holding our breath (and our gut!) for a long time.
As I tread on the arid earth between the rows of desiccated sunflowers, I was delighted to stumble upon one with its crown of ray florets still yellow, though drooping a bit; its stem a straw color; and its leaves holding fast to green as they fade into flaxen, fawn, and brown.
Perhaps the attitude of this sunflower shows how we can simultaneously bow to and be upright with beauty and decay.
"That everything changes is the basic truth for all existence. No one can deny this truth and all teaching of Buddhism is condensed within it. . . . This teaching is also understood as the teaching of selflessness. Because all existence is in constant change, there is no abiding self." —Shunryu Suzuki Roshi
Tune in next Sunday to learn more about the Third Mark of Existence: the not-self characteristic. What? There’s no self? Yikes! Who am I? More than you think.
Eihei Dōgen, Shōbōgenzō-Zuimonki. Translated by Shōhaku Okumura. Tokyo, Sotoshu Shumucho, 2015.
Ibid.