Impermanence

Summer was ending, and the sun had lost its sharpest heat. Beside the porch stood a rose bush that Grandma had planted long ago. This morning the child came out to water it and found the ground beneath it covered in fallen petals. Yesterday the rose had still been a deep, bright red. Now it lay on the earth.

The child crouched down, very sad. "Grandma, why does a flower this beautiful have to fall? What a waste."

Grandma was sitting on the porch step. She smiled gently, reached out, and picked up one petal.

"Sorry for it, child? So am I. But it is because the flower will fall that it is so beautiful."

The child looked up, puzzled. "Why is that, Grandma? Once it has fallen, there is nothing left."

Grandma drew the child down to sit beside her. "Let me tell you something very old. The Buddha called it vô thường."

"What is vô thường, Grandma?"

"It means that everything in the world changes. Nothing stays still forever. A flower blooms and fades. A stream flows past and is gone. A baby grows up, and grandparents grow old. Even this child, this morning, is a little different from the child of yesterday."

The child looked at one hand, thinking.

"The Buddha taught that whatever is born will one day pass away. Cold and heat, joy and sorrow, none of them stays forever. People of old counted vô thường as one of the three most basic truths he pointed out. Together they are called the Tam Pháp Ấn. The three are impermanence, suffering, and non-self, which means there is no one self that stands still forever."

"That makes me sad, Grandma. Everything just passes away."

Grandma shook her head, and her voice grew warm. "Here is the best part, so listen closely. Vô thường is not meant to make us sad. Think about it. If everything passes, then sadness passes too. When a child falls and it hurts, the hurt ends. When two friends quarrel, the anger fades. However cold the winter, spring comes back."

The child blinked. "Oh. So vô thường can be happy too?"

"Both sad and happy, child. A fading flower is sad, truly. But because the flower knows how to fade, a new one opens next year. If a bloom opened and then never changed, it would no longer be a living flower. It would be an object."

Grandma held the petal closer so the child could see it. "There is an old way to picture this. Look at the oil lamp in our house. The flame we see now is, in this picture, a new flame every moment. It flares up and goes out, flares up and goes out, so fast that our eyes take it for one. Yet we still call it the same lamp. Our lives are like that. New a little at a time, and still ourselves."

The child listened, eyes brightening a little.

Grandma went on, her voice slowing. "Let me tell what the Buddha said last of all. When he was about to leave this world, in a faraway forest called Câu Thi Na, the place English calls Kushinagar, his students gathered around him, all of them grieving. He looked at them and said one short thing."

"What did the Buddha say, Grandma?"

Grandma paused for a breath. "He said that all conditioned things are impermanent, and that they should keep striving and seek the way to peace and joy. That is, everything will change, so let no day go to waste. Live fully each day we have."

"Those were really his last words?"

"Yes, the last. He did not tell his students to be sad. He told them to strive, and to cherish what they still had. Because we know everything passes, we know to love what is still beside us."

Grandma pointed toward the house, where the ancestors' altar stood. "Our people live with vô thường in this way too. Every full moon of the seventh lunar month, in the season of Vu Lan, the whole family lights incense to remember grandparents and ancestors."

Vu Lan is a Buddhist festival when people show gratitude to their parents.

"Anyone whose mother and father are still living pins a red rose to the shirt. That red rose reminds us how fortunate we are. If there are still people to love, then love them as much as we can, today."

The child looked at the rose bush, then at Grandma, and without quite meaning to, shifted a little closer.

"So it is because the flower knows how to fall that we treasure it while it blooms, Grandma?"

Grandma nodded, her eyes smiling. "That is right, child. Treasure what we have. Do not cling to what must change. And see the beauty of the flower exactly because it was willing to bloom in the middle of this life."

She laid the petal gently in the child's palm.

"Look. It has fallen, and it is still soft. Still fragrant. This petal has lived the whole of its flower's life."

The child lifted the petal close and breathed in. It was true, still fragrant. A soft, warm scent, with nothing sad in it at all.