The World as Emptiness, Part 8: The Nature of Change

You must understand, as one of the fundamental points of Buddhism, the idea of the world as being in flux. I gave you the Sanskrit word anitya as one of the characteristics of being, emphasized by the Buddha along with anātman, the unreality of a permanent self, and dukkha, the sense of frustration. Dukkha really arises from a person’s failure to accept the other two characteristics: lack of permanent self and change.

You see, in Buddhism, the feeling that we have of an enduring organism—I meet you today and I see you, and then tomorrow I meet you again, and you look pretty much as you looked yesterday, and so I consider that you’re the same person—but you aren’t. Not really.

When I watch a whirlpool in a stream—here’s the stream flowing along, and there’s always a whirlpool like the one at Niagra. But that whirlpool never, never really holds any water. The water is all the time rushing through it. In the same way, a university—the University of California—what is it? The students change at least every four years, the faculty changes at a somewhat slower rate, the buildings change—they knock them down and put up new ones—the administration changes. So what is the University of California? It’s a pattern. A doing of a particular kind. And so in just precisely that way, every one of us is a whirlpool in the tide of existence, and wherein every cell in our body, every molecule, every atom is in constant flux, and nothing can be pinned down.

You know, you can put bands on pigeons, or migrating birds, and identify them and follow them, and find out where they go. But you can’t tag atoms; much less electrons. They have a curious way of appearing and disappearing, and one of the great puzzles is, in physics, ‘what are electrons doing when we’re not looking at them?’ Because our observation of them has to modify their behavior. We can’t see an electron without putting it in an experimental situation where our examination of it in some way changes it. What we would like to know is what it’s doing when we’re not looking at it. Does the light in the refrigerator really go off when we close the door?

But this is fundamental, you see, to Buddhistic philosophy. The philosophy of change. From one point of view, change is just too bad. Everything flows away, and there’s a kind of sadness in that, a kind of nostalgia, and there may be even a rage. “Go not gently into that good night, but rage, rage, at the dying of the light.”

But there’s something curious. There can be a very fundamental change in one’s attitude to the question of the world as fading. On the one hand, resentment, and on the other, delight. If you resist change—of course, you must to some extent. When you meet another person, you don’t want to be thoroughly rejected, but you love to feel a little resistance. Don’t you, you know? You have a beautiful girl, and you touch her. You don’t want her to go, “Bleugh!” But so round, so firm, so fully packed! A little bit of resistance, you see, is great. So there must always be resistance in change; otherwise, there couldn’t be even change. There’d just be a “Pffft.” The world would go, “Pffft,” and that’d be the end of it.

But because there’s always some resistance to change, there is a wonderful manifestation of form; there is a dance of life. But the human mind, as distinct from most animal minds, is terribly aware of time. And so we think a great deal about the future, and we know that every visible form is going to disappear and be replaced by so-called others. Are these others, others? Or are they the same forms returning? Of course, that’s a great puzzle. Are next year’s leaves that come from a tree going to be the same as this year’s leaves? What do you mean by the same? They’ll be the same shape, they’ll have the same botanical characteristics. But you’ll be able to pick up a shriveled leaf from last autumn and say, “Look at the difference. This is last year’s leaf. This is this year’s leaf.” And in that sense, they’re not the same.

What happens when any great musician plays a certain piece of music? He plays it today, and then he plays it again tomorrow. Is it the same piece of music, or is it another? In the Pali language, they say nacha so nacha añño, which means ‘not the same, and yet not another.’ So, in this way, the Buddhist is able to speak of reincarnation of beings, without having to believe in some kind of soul-entity that is reincarnated. Some kind of Ātman—some kind of fixed self, ego-principle, soul-principle—that moves from one life to another. And this is as true in our lives as they go on now, from moment to moment, as it would be true of our lives as they appear and reappear again over millions of years. It doesn’t make the slightest difference, except that there are long intervals and short intervals, high vibrations and low vibrations. When you hear a high sound, high note in the musical scale, you can’t see any holes in it—it’s going too fast—and it sounds completely continuous. But when you get the lowest audible notes that one can hear on an organ, you feel the shaking. You feel the vibration, you hear that music going “dhun-dhun-dhun-dhun-dhun-dhun-dhun-dhun-dhun”, on and off.

So in the same way as we live now, from day to day, we experience ourselves living at a high rate of vibration, and we appear to be continuous—although there is the rhythm of waking and sleeping. But the rhythm that runs from generation to generation and from life to life is much slower, and so we notice the gaps. We don’t notice the gaps when the rhythm is fast.