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buddhism
December 2009 
IMPERMANENCE: EMBRACING CHANGE
Samme
A rose is a rose is a rose. ~ Gertrude Stein
Dharma Quote of the Week
"There is often a big disparity between the way we perceive things and the way things really are. For instance, when we see an object we think, 'Oh, this is the very same object which I saw two days ago.' This is a very crude way of talking about reality. What is actually happening here is a kind of a conflation between an image or a concept of an entity and the actual reality of the moment. In reality, the object or entity that we are perceiving has already gone through a lot of stages. It is dynamic, it is transient, it is momentary, so the object that we are perceiving now is not the same as the one we perceived a day ago or two days ago, but we have the impression that we are perceiving the very same thing because what we are doing is conflating our concept of that object and the actual object. By grasping for permanence, we cause things to appear to us differently than how they actually exist. "It is vital to leave a lot of room for change in one's relations to another person. Change comes about in times of transition, allowing love actually to ripen and expand. Then one is able to really know the other one--to see that person with their faults and weaknesses and going through change, a human being like oneself. Only at this stage can there be true love."--The Dalai Lama --from Impermanence: Embracing Change by David Hodge and Hi-Jin Kang Hodge, published by Snow Lion Publications
IMPERMANENCE:
Embracing Change
by David Hodge
and Hi-Jin Kang Hodge
Impermanence
-- Thich Nhat Hanh
Nothing remains the same for two consecutive moments. Heraclitus said we can never bathe twice in the same river. Confucius, while looking at a stream, said, "It is always flowing, day and night." The Buddha implored us not just to talk about impermanence, but to use it as an instrument to help us penetrate deeply into reality and obtain liberating insight. We may be tempted to say that because things are impermanent, there is suffering. But the Buddha encouraged us to look again. Without impermanence, life is not possible. How can we transform our suffering if things are not impermanent? How can our daughter grow up into a beautiful young lady? How can the situation in the world improve? We need impermanence for social justice and for hope.
If you suffer, it is not because things are impermanent. It is because you believe things are permanent. When a flower dies, you don't suffer much, because you understand that flowers are impermanent. But you cannot accept the impermanence of your beloved one, and you suffer deeply when she passes away.
If you look deeply into impermanence, you will do your best to make her happy right now. Aware of impermanence, you become positive, loving and wise. Impermanence is good news. Without impermanence, nothing would be possible. With impermanence, every door is open for change. Impermanence is an instrument for our liberation.
Impermanence
The Experience of Impermanence through Vipassana Meditation
and the Maturation of Personality
MEREDITH MONK: OF POSTERITY AND IMPERMANENCE
View the mandala construction.
View the construction of the mandala sand painting by the Drepung Loseling monks at the Zimmerli Art Museum:[Windows Media]
[Quicktime Media]
The film website Green Cine has posted a list of
"The Most Spiritually Affecting Buddhist Movies." Here's the list:
- Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter...and Spring (Korean)
- The Thin Red Line
- Why Has Bodhi-Dharma Come From The East? (Korean)
- Revenge of the Sith
- Wheel of Time
- Peaceful Warrior
- The Dhamma Brothers
- The Cup
e it in the past, present, or future, whosoever of the monks or priests regards the delightful and pleasurable things in the world as impermanent (anicca), miserable (dukkha), and without a self (anattaa), as diseases and cankers, it is he who overcomes craving.Source: Samyuta Nikaya, XII.66
he world is a spinning die, and everything turns and changes: man is turned into angel, and angel into man, and the head into the foot, and the foot into the head. Thus all things turn and spin and change, this into that, and that into this, the topmost to the undermost, and the undermost to the topmost. For at the root all is one, and salvation inheres in the change and return of things.Source: Martin Buber's ten rungs, collected Hassidic sayings, p. 69
Remember this now
To save all the trouble
Life is Rainbow
Life is a bubble
Everything changes
Nothing the same
First there is sunshine
Then there is rain
First there are smiles
Then there are tears
It lasts for a while
And then disappears
Remember this now
To save all the trouble
Life is Rainbow
Life is a bubble
Sad becomes happy
It's hard to define
When what I had thought me
Is no longer mine
Life is not good
But life is not bad
Letting things change
I can never be sad
Remember this now
To save all the trouble
Life is Rainbow
Life is a bubble
Arising and passing
They come and they go
To try and hold on
Will only bring woe
At peace when they come
At peace when they go
Awake in the present
Watch it and know
That life is a rainbow
Life is a bubble
Ordinary World
Certificates From The World
From The Golden Words of a Sufi Sheikh, Word#861.
The Sufis, in their nonordinary states of consciousness, seem to be aware of the interpenetration of space and time at a macroscopic level. Thus they see the macroscopic world in a way which is very similar to the physicists’ idea of subatomic particles. For the Sufis "all compounded things are impermanent" - fanah.
“Let me see,” he replied, “what sort of person he is, whether he has reached such a degree that he can know me and praise me. If he knows me by what I have said, he does not know me because words are impermanent, sounds are impermanent, lips and mouths are impermanent. They are all incidental. If he knows me by what I have done, the case is likewise. If, however, he knows my essence, then I know that he is capable of praising me and that the praise belongs to me.”
–Mawlānā Jalāl-ad-Dīn Muhammad Rūmī (Rumi)
(مولانا جلال الدین محمد رومی), Fihi ma Fih No. 4 (ca. 1270 CE)
Listen to the Exhortation of the Dawn!
Look to this Day!
For it is Life, the very Life of Life.
In its brief course lie all the
Verities and Realities of your Existence.
The Bliss of Growth,
The Glory of Action,
The Splendor of Beauty;
For Yesterday is but a Dream,
And To-morrow is only a Vision;
But To-day well lived makes
Every Yesterday a Dream of Happiness,
And every Tomorrow a Vision of Hope.
Look well therefore to this Day!
Such is the Salutation of the Dawn!
He kindly stopped for me --
The Carriage held but just Ourselves --
And Immortality.
We slowly drove -- He knew no haste
And I had put away
My labor and my leisure too,
For His Civility?
We passed the School, where Children strove
At Recess -- in the Ring --
We passed the Fields of Gazing Grain --
We passed the Setting Sun --
Or rather -- He passed Us --
The Dews drew quivering and chill --
For only Gossamer, my Gown --
My Tippet -- only Tulle --
We paused before a House that seemed
A Swelling of the Ground --
The Roof was scarcely visible --
The Cornice -- in the Ground --
Since then -- 'tis Centuries -- and yet
Feels shorter than the Day
I first surmised the Horses' Heads
Were toward Eternity --
From Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, 1594:
JULIET:
'Tis but thy name that is my enemy;
Thou art thyself, though not a Montague.
What's Montague? it is nor hand, nor foot,
Nor arm, nor face, nor any other part
Belonging to a man. O, be some other name!
What's in a name? that which we call a rose
By any other name would smell as sweet;
So Romeo would, were he not Romeo call'd,
Retain that dear perfection which he owes
Without that title. Romeo, doff thy name,
And for that name which is no part of thee
Take all myself.
CONTEMPLATE IMPERMANENCE
The permanence of impermanence
7,000,000,000
I believe that love will never end.
Access: Public
“Let no moment escape you.” ~ Buddha
“Let your life lightly dance on the edges of time like dew on the tip of a leaf.”
~ Rabindranath Tagore
Between Nothingness and Eternity
Barren of events,
Rich in pretensions
My earthly life.
I am all alone
Between failure
And frustration.
I am the red thread
Between
Nothingness
And Eternity.
My eternal days are found in speeding time;
I play upon His Flute of rhapsody.
Impossible deeds no more impossible seem;
In birth chains now shines Immortality.
I feel in all my limbs His boundless Grace;
Within my heart the Truth of life shines white.
The secret heights of God my soul now climbs;
No dole, no sombre pang, no death in my sight.
~ Sri Chinmoy
Samme you are such an artist. Thank you so much for sharing the beauty.
love,
j
1
OR, from that Sea of Time,
Spray, blown by the wind—a double winrow-drift of weeds and shells;
(O little shells, so curious-convolute! so limpid-cold and voiceless!
Yet will you not, to the tympans of temples held,
Murmurs and echoes still bring up—Eternity’s music, faint and far,
Wafted inland, sent from Atlantica’s rim—strains for the Soul of the Prairies,
Whisper’d reverberations—chords for the ear of the West, joyously sounding
Your tidings old, yet ever new and untranslatable;)
Infinitessimals out of my life, and many a life,
(For not my life and years alone I give—all, all I give;)
These thoughts and Songs—waifs from the deep—here, cast high and dry,
Wash’d on America’s shores.
2
Currents of starting a Continent new,
Overtures sent to the solid out of the liquid,
Fusion of ocean and land—tender and pensive waves,
(Not safe and peaceful only—waves rous’d and ominous too.
Out of the depths, the storm’s abysms—Who knows whence? Death’s waves,
Raging over the vast, with many a broken spar and tatter’d sail.)
Don’t Quit
When things go wrong, as they sometimes will
When the road you’re trudging seems all uphill,
When the funds are low and the debts are high
And you want to smile, but you have to sigh,
When care is pressing you down a bit,
Rest, if you must, but do not quit.
Life is queer with twists and turns,
As every one of us sometimes learns,
And many a failure turns about,
When he might have won had he stuck it out;
Don’t give up though the pace seems slow–
You may succeed with another blow.
Often the goal is nearer than,
It seems to a faint and faltering man,
Often the struggler has given up,
When he might have captured the victor’s cup,
And he learned too late when the night slipped down,
How close he was to the golden crown.
Success is failure turned inside out–
The silver tint of the clouds of doubt,
And you never can tell how close you are,
It may be near when it seems so far,
So stick to the fight when you’re hardest hit–
It’s when things seem worst that you must not quit.
- Anonymous -
Rudyard Kipling
If
If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you;
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too;
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or, being lied about, don’t deal in lies,
Or, being hated, don’t give way to hating,
And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise;
If you can dream - and not make dreams your master;
If you can think - and not make thoughts your aim;
If you can meet with triumph and disaster
And treat those two imposters just the same;
If you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to broken,
And stoop and build ‘em up with wornout tools;
If you can make one heap of all your winnings
And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
And never breath a word about your loss;
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
Except the Will which says to them: “Hold on”;
If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
Or walk with kings - nor lose the common touch;
If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you;
If all men count with you, but none too much;
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run -
Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,
And - which is more - you’ll be a Man my son!
.
WOW! :-D
You are just STELLAR, Samme!~~~<3
Change is a wonderful thing. Best invention ever :-D
thank you janie and ariela
Samme
Playing with Time
In 1963 Nabokov’s English translation of Alexander Pushkin’s romantic verse novel Eugene Onegin
was published; the four-volume scholarly work was, Nabokov said, his
“labor of love.” Several translations of earlier Russian works
followed, including The Defense, a novel about chess. Nabokov’s Ada
(1969), an “autumnal fairy tale” whose principal characters are
imprisoned by time, is subject to many levels of interpretation, with its intricate construction of complex allusions, word games, staggering erudition, chronological ambiguities and literary parody. Time in this
novel is blended into a totally free-ranging and distorting present,
what Nabokov called “the essential spirality of all things in their
relationship to time.” The novel is the fulfillment of Nabokov’s theme
from Speak, Memory: “I confess I do not believe in time. I like to fold my magic carpet after use, in such a way as to superimpose one part of the pattern upon another. Let visitors trip.”
[Aureliano II ] had already understood that he would never leave
that room, for it was foreseen that the city of mirrors (or
mirages) would be wiped out by the wind and exiled from the
memory of men at the precise moment when Aureliano Babilonia
would finish deciphering the parchments, and that everything
written on them was unrepeatable since time immemorial and forever
more, because races condemned to one hundred years of solitude
did not have a second opportunity on earth.”
One Hundred Years of Solitude written by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
heart sutra
gate gate paragate parasamgate bodhi svaha.
( Gone, gone, gone beyond, gone altogether beyond,
O what an awakening, all-hail ! – )
.
Love is a rose,
and you are ours, Samme.
Thanks for all the gifts
that beckon more gifts!
Here is a spirit rose that you are;
A gem of a blog! very precious - thank you!
love
Samme thanks for the visual feast and the pervading concept.
Blessings, David
I’m with HummingBird and Dave and Ariela and mary and…I love the gifts of this blog, Samme. And that, is actually permanent. [couldn’t resist!]
Reminding me the book by Osho: ‘A Rose is a rose is a Rose’. We are impermanent, this world is impermanent, and this universe too impermanent. you are reminding us all these. Thanks for all these and the pictorial feast too.
In permanence of love, soul and spirit I humbly bow to you dear friends. Thank you Mary, Anna, David, Meenakshi, and Sanmugan. These are all gifts as you are all also gifts to me and to each other and to the world.
Samme
“No one can ever step on the same river twice.”
~ Heraclitus of Ephesus
God bless and Jah speed your love to me :)