Simon reflects on impermanence and non-self in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic.
I felt a dilemma when our editor Pat Simmons asked me to write an article for this issue of New Chan Forum. Should I write about how our lives and practice are affected by the current COVID-19 pandemic – clearly a major topic – or should I write on a more traditional teaching theme? How could I consider not writing about COVID-19 when it has had such major effects on our lives, yet how could I write about it given the longish lead-time for publication of New Chan Forum and the likelihood of the situation changing significantly between writing and it going to print? By the time of publication will the first wave have ended or be ongoing, or will we be experiencing a second wave? What will be the economic, societal and political fallout by this autumn? How can we know?
I’m also aware that each of us is having a different experience of this COVID-time. Some have experienced significant personal illness, and for some there will have been death or near-misses very close to home, perhaps within their own family. Most have experienced disruption to their routine, and for some this might have brought catastrophic financial and social difficulties whereas for others it is really just a minor inconvenience. And then there are those who are enjoying lockdown and the opportunity for quiet time undisturbed by visitors, catching up with their gardening, DIY, and household chores.
After some distraction and procrastination, I arrive at early June with my duty to write this piece still hanging over me. As it happens, this morning the news headlines are not about COVID-19 but about “America on Fire”, the widespread protests across the US following the death of George Floyd. Is this just some recurring local news topic on a different continent from myself and the majority of our readers, and which will fade in a few weeks like previous sad stories of deaths at the hand of US police or of US school shootings? Or maybe this is the event which will finally trigger change for good, change for true equality and justice. Or is this the beginning of something potentially even larger than COVID-19, the beginning of the end of the American Experiment, the trigger for a world war as the American government flails around in an election year seeking someone to blame for its ills? How can I know? I cannot know. You cannot know.
We are uncomfortable with not knowing. We feel unsafe. We want to fix it. We cling to small knowings, such as assuming that things will likely carry on as they are, or that patterns will repeat themselves. But even when reassuring ourselves in these ways we do not find ease because we also know that things may change instead of continuing, and that the repetition of patterns is variable and unreliable.
So much of our time and mental energy is devoted to managing our lives and our personal world, to the extent that we think we can manage them, in the hope or assumption that we can manage them to our advantage. But we can never be sure of how well this will work or whether it will all go wrong. In a world where (or so it appears) cause and effect rule supreme, surely we can cause the effects that we want? But there is so much that goes on not only outside our control but also even beyond our knowledge which acts as causes for future effects which impact on our lives. We cannot even predict what is going to happen and much less can we control it.
I’ve heard some saying of COVID-19, “this is a great lesson in impermanence”. On one level that is so. It has been shocking how suddenly and by how much the situation can change for all humans in this planet with the arrival and spread of an essentially untreatable and unvaccinatable viral infection, including the societal changes and restrictions imposed and adopted to try to manage this new situation.
But to focus on the fact of change alone is to miss an important part of the situation. Of course impermanence is so and we hardly need reminding of that. More significant, I think, than the fact of impermanence is our relationship to it – that is what is worthy of our investigation and what is prompting our current reactions.
What is your relationship with impermanence? Do you welcome it or regret it? Do you accept it or deny it? Is it more complex and nuanced than that for you? Even to ask such questions indicates a misunderstanding, a belief that impermanence is somehow optional.
Change or impermanence is the essential characteristic of all phenomenal existence. We cannot say of anything, animate or inanimate, organic or inorganic, “this is lasting”; for even while we are saying this, it would be undergoing change. All is fleeting; the beauty of flowers, the bird’s melody, the bee’s hum, and a sunset’s glory.1
Impermanence is inconvenient. Change intrudes on and thwarts our plans. In relation to our own lives, and the lives of those we love, impermanence is frighteningly unavoidable yet we often seek to avoid facing the reality of death.
Even as we grudgingly concede some positive aspects to change (the joys of autumn and spring, the beauty of a baby growing into a child and maturing into an intelligent caring adult) we continue to resist it. The impermanence of life itself casts long shadows into our minds and dominates our relationship to impermanence, casting impermanence as a negative phenomenon. But do you think permanence would be any better? John Crook liked to demonstrate graphically, by freezing midsentence, that permanence means being eternally, permanently frozen on the spot with no prospect of ever moving. Is that better than impermanence? But, again, we are not in fact offered a choice. We don’t have a choice of either impermanence or permanence. Nor do we get to choose impermanence for aspects of our life that we don’t like and permanence for those that we do like. “Change or impermanence is the essential characteristic of all phenomenal existence.”
Impermanence is not the problem. It is our resistance to change that leads to suffering, unease, stress (dukkha in Pali). Our wish, and even our belief, that we can hold on to some desired things and states, and stop them from changing, inevitably leads to frustration and disappointment. Our attachment to things remaining as they are creates dukkha when we realise or simply fear that they will not so remain. The fact of change is evident to us. The cycle of day and night. The passing of the seasons. The changes of our moods and thoughts. The rising and falling of the fortunes of our lives and relationships. The frailty of human life. Even things which appear stable eventually change. Even solid matter itself changes, with fire, erosion, rot, and with radioactive decay of atoms.
Even so, one of the Buddha’s most fundamental teachings was on impermanence. Given that it is so evident why did he feel it necessary to talk about it? And he was not alone in so doing. Famously, the Greek philosopher Heraclitus, who was approximately a contemporary of the Buddha, said “It is not possible to step twice into the same river”.
Rationally, and experientially, there is change, there is impermanence. Yet emotionally there is belief, or perhaps mere hope or desire, that we can avoid change regarding some desired things or states. The Buddha emphasised the truth of change to challenge this tendency in us. Why? Because this is the key to understanding how we create dukkha for ourselves, through our habit of blinding ourselves to the changing nature of all the phenomena to which we cling, and thereby creating consequent frustration, fear, grief and confusion.
This teaching on impermanence or changeability (anicca in Pali) is also important in relation to the Buddha’s teaching on non-self (anatta). Put simply, the Buddha points out that our sense of self appears to us to be continuous and enduring, and we make life decisions based on promoting and protecting this being which we imagine has the potential to be permanently enduring if we protect it well enough. However the Buddha also points out that there is no permanent self or “self-thing” in the first place, that even we ourselves are subject to change, and however much we hope and aim to protect ourselves we also will not endure. Our ignorance about the impermanent and empty nature of our being leads to dukkha, the frustration and grief and fear that we all experience.
The Buddha presented this triad of anicca, dukkha and anatta as the “three marks” or three characteristics of our existence. Impermanence and nonself are just so. Dukkha is also inevitably so, inevitably our experience, because of our failure to understand and accept the first two. However it is possible, as per the third noble truth, to be released from dukkha if we can penetrate and actualise the teachings. We need to release our deluded emotional attachment to a desired but imaginary and unachievable world where change is not a universal law, where constancy is available if it suits our needs and wants. We penetrate these teachings through hearing, studying, and contemplating them. We penetrate them through our meditation practice which reveals to us that indeed our mind is working in the way the Buddha described, emotionally invested in an assumption and craving of permanence and self-entity.
These characteristics apply to all times. But perhaps changeability is even more apparent in current times of pandemic, of climate change, and of political, economic and societal upheaval. Perhaps the deeper meaning of the Buddha’s teaching on non-self is more readily apparent at a time when the fragility and impermanent nature of our very existence is thrust into our faces by the unseen spread within our communities of a virus which kills seemingly at random. In the face of that, can we still believe our self-story of the permanence and overriding importance of “me”?
In your meditation, don’t seek to exclude unease, fear, grief, or whatever else might arise. Don’t seek to ‘sanitise’ your meditation by creating a false experience of a settled mind. I know that some people are finding it harder to settle in meditation at present, both because of disruption to their routine and also because of a mind unsettled by and ruminating on current events. This mind you have is the mind you practise with. If anything, this may be a better opportunity for meditative investigation than a so-called ‘good’ meditation with a calm settled mind. Stay in contact with the activity in your mind. The very difficulties that are challenging you at present may give you an opportunity to ‘see through’ your deeply held assumptions and beliefs. In ‘normal’ times it is easy to sustain these beliefs of self and permanence without ever considering them critically. In current times it may be impossible to let them slip by unchallenged as your whole life experience is challenging them.
Any time is a good time to practise. This time is always a good time to practise. Perhaps our current “this time” is indeed an especially good time to study and practise the Dharma. The three marks are all much more “in your face” at the moment than is often the case. When life is somewhat easier it is easier to delude ourselves that there is no dukkha, that we are a solid permanent agent in a life of which we are (more or less) in control. But maybe your deluded certainty on these matters is being challenged by current events and a breakthrough is possible.
