Impermanence: arising through the meeting of causes and conditions
One of the central ideas in Buddhism is "impermanence" (Impermanence). Impermanence can be explained starting with a single flower. As everyone knows, a flower grows from a seed — or, in Buddhist terms, the seed is the flower's cause (Cause). Yet the seed alone is not enough to become a flower; it also needs the cooperation of countless other things — fertile soil, sunlight, rain, and so on — before it can grow into a flower. These supporting factors can be called conditions (Conditions). When cause and conditions are complete, the flower "arises through the meeting of causes and conditions": that is to say, once the cause and the right conditions come together, the effect (Effect) — the flower itself — comes into being.
This may not sound especially remarkable, but think a layer deeper: the flower's own cause and conditions are themselves the effects of yet other causes and conditions meeting. For instance, the cause of one seed is another flower; the conditions of fertile soil, sunlight and rain each have their own causes and conditions behind them — soil is fertile, say, because someone fertilised it; and the fact that "someone fertilised it" has its own causes and conditions in turn; behind those causes and conditions lie still others, and so it goes on, without end…
Seen from this angle, all things are interdependent. As Carl Sagan put it: "If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe." Within such a worldview, nothing in the world is self-sufficient — that is, nothing exists independently without relying on other conditions. So all things are impermanent, because anything that exists in the world must depend on certain conditions, and when those conditions cease to exist, the thing itself disappears. So how do we know these conditions will one day cease to exist? Because these conditions themselves depend on yet other conditions that are liable to change! Every person, event and thing arises through the gathering of fitting conditions, and ceases when those conditions disperse — this is dependent arising and dependent ceasing.
A woman is delighted to receive a bouquet of fresh flowers, yet she is not too pained when they wither, because we can accept the impermanent, fleeting nature of fresh blooms. But what if it is not a bouquet, but the people and things we treasure? From a Buddhist perspective, a major cause of human suffering is that people mistake the impermanent for the permanent. Intellectually, we have long known that people are subject to birth, ageing, sickness and death, to sorrow and joy, parting and reunion; yet deep in the heart, at the level of feeling, we tend to regard those who matter to us as independent individuals who simply ought to exist, rarely considering that they will eventually pass away. And when impermanence arrives and takes from us the people we love, our health, our memories — all the things we took for granted — suffering is born.
The suffering of impermanence, and impermanence as the way out of suffering
Impermanence may seem cruel, but from a Buddhist point of view, it is after all the true face of the world. So to reach a genuine release from suffering, we must accept impermanence — and quiet observation allows us to observe impermanence directly, to experience it for ourselves. For example, when we observe our thoughts closely, it is not hard to notice that feelings and thoughts are constantly changing — this is one way of experiencing impermanence. And when we face impermanence head-on, we may find it has more than a cruel side: it is also an experience with great power to dissolve suffering, for suffering too is impermanent, and negative emotions are likewise in a state of ceaseless flux.
Suffering, too, is impermanent
When someone meets a situation of despair, they may well assume the suffering will last forever, believing that neither the circumstances nor their own feelings will ever improve. It is this sense of hopelessness about the future, rather than the circumstances themselves, that is often the main reason suffering intensifies. But in reality, suffering, emotions and everything else are equally governed by impermanence: they all appear only when certain conditions happen to gather together, and they vanish when those conditions cease to exist. This is one of the pathways by which impermanence dissolves suffering.
In the process of quiet observation, if we observe an unpleasant feeling closely, we will find that its intensity, its emotional tone and its effect on the body are changing from moment to moment — there is no eternal, unchanging suffering. Someone going through a hard time is like a person caught in a downpour, feeling that the rain will never stop; but once we understand how the weather works, we know that the weather is constantly changing, with no permanent state — and emotions are just the same.
Letting go of the assumption that things are "as they should be"
Second, impermanence can help us let go of the insistence that the world "ought to be this way," and so release us from suffering. Impermanence means that everything we possess we possess only because the right conditions are present together; there is no such thing as it being bound to be so, and no guarantee that we will hold on to these things forever. Everything is like a "limited-time" food item. The best thing we can do is to savour them mindfully while they are here. When the "limited-time" item is taken off the shelf, we are naturally a little saddened but not dismayed, because this is, after all, simply how "limited-time" works — with "limited-time" food we can let it come and go as it naturally does. To learn impermanence is to learn to look at the things we cherish through the lens of "limited-time."
Such an attitude towards life is commonly described as "going with conditions." In popular culture, "going with conditions" and being "Buddha-like" are often misunderstood as a passive attitude. "Going with conditions" means recognising one's own smallness: every single thing requires the cooperation of countless conditions beyond one's control before it can come to pass, just as a flower needs sunlight, soil and a carer to water it before it can grow. But once the conditions such as sunlight and soil are all sufficient, doesn't whether the flower grows then come down to whether you water it?
Indeed, many conditions are not within our control; but at the same time, there are also conditions that are within our control. Every decision and action of ours is creating conditions for other things. To others, these are conditions they have no power to control, yet ones we ourselves have the ability to steer. In sum, a person who goes with conditions knows that they are part of a vast web of cause and effect: many things are not within their control, yet they do not overlook the unique position they hold within the whole web.
So, "do your utmost, and leave the rest to fate" reflects the attitude to life that "going with conditions" represents far more accurately than "being passive" does.
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Our own impermanence: seeing pain as an object of observation
We find it easy to accept the impermanence of external things; the impermanence of those around us is not quite so easy. But for some people, our own impermanence is the hardest of all. In Indian philosophy, to realise our own impermanence is not merely to know intellectually that we cannot escape birth, ageing, sickness and death; it also means coming to a felt understanding that we are not an independent, enduring individual.
We have spoken of the mindset of growth, and through quiet observation we discover that our identity is more malleable than we imagine, with greater room for change. Let us think a layer deeper: within the self, is there an unchanging part that could be called the core of the self[1]? If thoughts, emotions and feelings are what constitute "I," then since they are changing from moment to moment, it appears that "I" too am governed by impermanence.
Changing how we understand the concept of the "self" will in turn change how we view suffering. We might understand it this way: negative emotions and physical pain are "pain," but when we take them to be a permanent part of ourselves, regarding such feelings as unacceptable, then pain turns into suffering. It is rather like how feeling heartbroken after a break-up is a natural reaction; but if we force ourselves not to feel heartbroken, then perhaps the greatest suffering is no longer the break-up, but the fact that we cannot drive away the heartbreak.
On the other hand, because no-self shows that pain is not the self, this perspective offers us a choice: to keep a certain distance from the pain and observe it, letting it come as it comes and go as it goes. This shift in perspective, from "I am in pain" to "I am feeling pain," is the key to keeping pain from becoming suffering.
This article is excerpted from Mind Training: A Practice-Based Method for Mastering Your Mind Through Quiet Observation.
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[1] Some other philosophical perspectives, especially in Western philosophy, hold that the self does indeed have a core — for example, the Christian view of the soul holds that the soul is one's own core. If we set out to understand "no-self" from these philosophical perspectives, we can take the individual, or the consciousness, that lies behind and experiences all feelings to be the core of the self. In this way, the discussion above is not incompatible with those worldviews, since the above only discusses whether these observable objects are the core of the self.
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