All Created Things Are Impermanent

(Dharma Notes #2)

In the previous (and first) issue of Dharma Notes, I wrote about the practice of generosity and how the expression “all sentient beings rely on food to survive” is related to it in the Ekottarika Āgama. This week, I want to write about the natural insight that generosity brings over time, which is that all created things are impermanent.

---

Sabbe saṅkhārā aniccā. (SN 22.90)

一切行無常。 (SĀ 1.45)

All created things are impermanent.

---

I introduced everyone to Maryetta the Fox Squirrel in the last Dharma Notes essay and to what a joy she and the other squirrels are every day (not to mention the variety of birds who come to eat outside our kitchen window). There is a very real and enjoyable energy that we derive from generosity because it brings us into contact with other beings in a positive way.

However, the practice of generosity is not all cotton candy and sugar plums. It also brings experiences that can be deeply traumatic and heartbreaking precisely because we pay more attention to what is happening around us every day. The lives of most animals are not easy and much shorter than ours, even in the best of circumstances. Practicing generosity over time causes us to witness the misfortune and mortality of other sentient beings.

A couple months ago, Maryetta injured her back in some way. We didn’t see what caused the injury, only that she was crippled when she came to us for breakfast one morning after being missing for several days. She couldn’t sit up on her hind legs, which made eating difficult. She couldn’t hold her food in both hands the way squirrels do. She was also incapable of jumping, which made her very vulnerable. Jumping and running quickly is a squirrel’s main defense as a prey animal. And she was clearly in pain.

We tried to help her, but she was afraid to let us near her. She climbed into one of our little fruit trees and lay on a branch the entire morning. I went out periodically to hand feed her, and she let me do that. At the time, I was convinced she was a different squirrel because she was so distrustful of me. But she knew she was defenseless and didn’t want a giant human trying to grab her. After a few hours of rest and some food, she left.

This was a video I created of Maryetta coping with her injury:

We were naturally worried about her and considered options like capturing her and taking her to a licensed wildlife rehabilitator. It’s easier to think about capturing a squirrel than it is to actually capture one, though. Even with her injury, Maryetta could avoid us fairly easily after a couple days of healing. So, we ended up watching her cope with her injury on her own as squirrels do in the wild.

This story had a happy ending. After about a month and a half, Maryetta had fully recovered, and today she runs and jumps like she did before. The injury turned out to be the impermanent condition in this case.

Events like these are reminders that everything in this life is impermanent. Sentient beings arise and perish like bubbles made by a heavy downpour, as the Buddha teaches in SĀ 1.48. There, he likens each of the five aggregates (or constituents of life) to foam on a river, bubbles forming and bursting in the rain, mirages on the horizon, the plantain tree that lacks hardwood, and an army conjured up by an illusionist.

Life is effervescent. The day will come when Maryetta doesn’t come back again. The day will come when we won’t be here anymore for the squirrels to visit.

---

Over the past year, I’ve connected with other nature and wildlife enthusiasts over the internet. There are social media groups and communities for nearly any interest these days, and so squirrel fans have their online gathering places, too. We share photos, videos, and stories with each other.

But, again, it’s not all roses and boxes of chocolate. We also share traumatic events with each other. People often become squirrel enthusiasts after rescuing orphaned squirrels and raising them. The day comes when the squirrel should be released back into the wild. Rescued squirrels sometimes turn hostile when they reach that age because they know being indoors isn’t natural. They want to be outside in the trees. Squirrels generally can adjust and live normal lives after being raised by humans, unlike some other animals. They regard the human who raised them as they would have regarded their mother. Sometimes a released squirrel returns to visit or lives in a tree nearby. Sometimes they leave the area and don’t return.

The survival rate of young squirrels is not that high. Around half of them don’t make it to adulthood (one year). They are prey; they get sick; they have accidents. People sometimes feel like a family member has died when they witness these things happen. It’s happened before that someone has released a young squirrel in their yard only to see it immediately snatched away by a hawk. They might see a squirrel they’ve known for years killed by a car. Or sometimes someone finds a squirrel that had lived in their tree dead on the ground.

We also witness horrible injuries and diseases that squirrels and other wildlife suffer. Sometimes they survive; sometimes they don’t. But they definitely suffer greatly when it happens.

This is the context in which we practice generosity. In the beginning, modern people are often naïve about the reality that exists around them because our lives involve comparatively little trauma. At first, our generosity can be a self-centered hobby or practice. We get a short-term jolt of happiness from connecting with an animal. We get a kick out of having a squirrel take a nut from our hand. It can be intellectually stimulating to learn about their ecology, the different species, and their behaviors. They are entertaining and cute animals that are naturally delightful to many people.

Over time, however, our generosity forces us to witness the suffering and impermanence of life, and then the act of giving takes on a different meaning and a different effect. We aren’t simply entertaining ourselves or feeling virtuous. Instead, we find ourselves developing compassion and wisdom. We find ourselves focused as much on the welfare of others as ourselves. We aren’t alone in life, and we aren’t the center of the universe. This change in orientation, I’ve become convinced, is a key milestone on the spiritual path.

---

It’s not the generosity itself that brings about this type of insight into the impermanence of things, but it helps motivate us to observe and give it close attention over time. I often say, “Wisdom comes to those who pay attention.” For that to happen, we need something to keep our attention, and compassion is one way to motivate ourselves to pay attention. When that happens repeatedly, a number of things begin to occur to us that make us dig deeper into the nature of life. At least, this has been my experience.

In early Buddhist texts, we find these observations repeated over and over without much real world context. The Buddha consistently warns us about attachment to the delights of the five aggregates because it leads to suffering. The five aggregates seem to mean both ourselves and the things that we consume and accumulate, which are divided into five categories: Physical form, feelings, concepts, actions (or choices), and awareness. If we don’t maintain some distance from desirable things and experiences, we expose ourselves to the risk of suffering when those things change or disappear. Then we feel their loss and grieve over it.

One way this deeper understanding is expressed in early Buddhist texts is to analyze things in five ways: Their arising, ceasing, enjoyment, trouble, and escape. The first two, arising and ceasing, are understanding the reason something comes into existence and why it ceases to exist. Their enjoyment is the understanding of the joy and pleasure that can be derived from something. Their trouble is the distress caused by the impermanent and changing nature of conditioned things. The escape is the understanding that this problem of distress and pain has a solution, which is to be mindful of their impermanence and detach ourselves from them.

A good example of this is found in SĀ 1.175 (SN 22.1). In this sūtra, a elderly man comes to visit the Buddha. He is frail and suffering from physical ailments. When he asks for a teaching, the Buddha tells him,

“Elder, you should always train your mind not be troubled by pain even as your body is troubled by pain.”

After the Buddha was finished with his Dharma talk, the elderly man went and met with Śāriputra, one of the Buddha’s great disciples. Śāriputra asked him what the Buddha had taught. When the man didn’t know how exactly to interpret the Buddha’s advice, Śāriputra helped him with his own explanation:

“Foolish, untaught men don’t truly understand the formation, cessation, enjoyment, trouble, and escape from physical form. Not truly understanding it, they delight in form and say, ‘Form is my self, form belongs to me.’ And then they take and accumulate it. If that form should become ruined or different, his mind and awareness develops along with it, and distress and pain arises. Distress and pain having arisen, he is frightened, blocked, expectant, saddened, and bound to his fondness for that form. It’s the same with feelings, concepts, actions, and awareness. This is called the pain and trouble of body and mind.

“How is the mind not troubled by pain even as the body is troubled by pain? A well-taught noble disciple does truly understand the formation, cessation, enjoyment, trouble, and escape from physical form. Having truly understood it, he does not delight in it or see form as his self or something that belongs to him. If that form should change or become something different, his mind doesn’t develop along with it, nor does distress and pain arise. Because of that, he isn’t afraid, blocked, expectant, or bound to his fondness for that form. It’s the same with feelings, concepts, actions, and awareness. This is called the mind not being troubled by pain even as the body is troubled by pain.”

This doesn’t directly address the problem of identifying with another person or anything else to which we might become attached, but it can be extended to those situations easily enough. The trouble arises when we want something to continue to be part of us after we’ve come to feel that it belongs to us.

Returning to the squirrel enthusiasts, we often speak of the squirrels that visit us as “our squirrels.” “I have a squirrel that [fill in touching or entertaining story].” We name the squirrels we’ve learned to recognize and think of them like they are friends or loved ones. All of the human emotions we might have for other people are activated. And this is what causes the trauma when something happens to them. We’ve become bound to our fondness of them.

This process is probably more common with pets than wildlife, but it isn’t that much different than the same attachment we might have for our youthful looks, our careers, our close friends and family, and so on. There is a process of convincing ourselves that these things belong to us and are part of who we are.

These are normal and natural feelings, but if we are mindful that nothing lasts forever and remind ourselves that there will come a time for saying “goodbye,” then we will be better prepared for it when it arrives. We can be even more prepared if we recognize the reality that these sentient beings, whether animals or other people, are not in fact part of us and don’t in reality belong to us. We are in contact with them, we have a relationship for a time, but they will leave us (or we will leave them) at some point, whether it’s by choice or not. We don’t have full control of their lives or our own.

---

This brings us to the axiom that I opened the essay with: “All created things are impermanent.” This axiom appears in a number of Buddhist texts in somewhat different contexts that make “created things” refer to nearly everything.

The usual meaning of “created things” are the things that we encounter in life that are created by a set of circumstances. In SĀ 6.8, a monk wonders to himself while meditating:

“The Bhagavān has taught about three feelings: pleasant, painful, and neither pleasant nor painful feelings. He also teaches that whatever feelings that there are, they are all painful. What is the meaning of this?”

He goes to the Buddha asks him about this. The Buddha replies,

“I teach ‘whatever feelings that there are, they are all painful’ because all created things are impermanent and all created things are liable to change.”

What the Buddha means here is that no matter what kind of feeling we have, the cause of those feelings won’t last forever if it’s something that was created. If it’s a pleasant or neutral feeling that something causes, then we’ll be disturbed when it changes because we’ve lost the source of those feelings. If it causes painful feelings, they were painful in the first place. Though, strictly speaking, it’s a relief when the cause of painful feelings turns out to be impermanent, like Maryetta’s injury ceasing when it was healed.

In the Seven Suns Sūtra (MĀ 8/EĀ 40.1/DĀ 30.9/AN 7.66), the “created thing” is the world itself as it is gradually destroyed by ever increasing disasters in a cosmic cycle of creation and destruction. We might wonder what creates and destroys the world in Buddhist thought, given that Buddhists do not believe in a creator god. It’s in fact the karma of sentient beings. The world is emptied at the end of its lifecycle as sentient beings are born in the heavens. Once it has been emptied, it then collapses in a series of cataclysms. Thus, the Earth is destroyed by the ascension of sentient beings to higher existences. The Earth is recreated when the karma of those heavenly beings runs out, and they begin to fall back to lower realms. Eventually, they fall down to Earth again once it has reformed for them to inhabit.

This mythology is instructive because it shows how central karma is to creation in Buddhism. Created things have a limited life span because the causes that create them have limited durations. Sentient beings themselves have limited life spans for the same reason. A tree squirrel lives at most 15-20 years, a human might live to 100-120 years, and gods are supposed to live for thousands of years, all due to the relative potency of their past karma in Buddhist thinking.

We might conclude that it’s a natural law that all things come to an end, whether they seem good or bad to us. The ending of good things is not as traumatic when we are mindful that it will be coming, and existence of bad things won’t be as intolerable when we remember that it will pass. We might even conclude that all the endings that we experience throughout our lives are preparation for the day when our ending arrives, and we say our final goodbye to this life. In the meantime, though, we can make this world and the lives of others better than it would have been without us.