Chapter 11 Chapter 1 Artificiality and Impermanence-5

Two thousand five hundred and thirty-eight years after Siddhartha stepped out of the palace, millions of people are happily preparing to celebrate and welcome the beginning of the new year, some are praying and praising the gods, some are While buying goods at a discount, the tsunami disaster shook the world.Shocked even the most indifferent person.When the news stories show up on TV, many people hope that Orson Welles will pop up and tell us it's all fake, or that Spider-Man will end the disaster and save all sentient beings. Seeing the victims of the tsunami wash up on the shore, I believe Prince Siddhartha will also be heartbroken.But it may be even more heartbreaking for him to see us so appalled by this happening, because it proves our repeated denial of impermanence.This earth is formed by many types of rock sauce.Every piece of land, whether it is Australia, Taiwan or America, is like dewdrops on the grass, ready to fall at any time.But people never stopped building skyscrapers and tunnels.Our greedy deforestation to avoid washing chopsticks and junk mail only accelerates this impermanent reaction.People should not be surprised to see signs of the end of any phenomenon, but we have a hard time accepting it.Many Chinese believe that the Great Wall will stand forever, just like Indians believe that the Taj Mahal (Taj Mahal) will last forever, and Americans believe that the Statue of Liberty will last forever.

Yet, even with such a devastating warning from the tsunami, death and destruction are quickly buried and forgotten.Luxurious resorts will soon tower over where victims' families come to identify their bodies.People in the world are still obsessed with combining and fabricating various realities for eternal happiness.The desire to "live happily ever after" is but a pretense for permanence.Making up these concepts of eternal love, eternal happiness, and redemption only gets more proof of impermanence.Our intentions (health) and outcomes (bad) are in conflict.What we want is to last forever, but what we do is just leading us to decay.

The Buddha taught us that at least we should keep the concept of impermanence in our mind and not try to hide it.By constantly observing the phenomenon of harmony, we will know the interdependence of causes and conditions.Knowing interdependence, we will know impermanence.And when we know that everything is impermanent, we will not be enslaved by assumptions, rigid beliefs (whether religious or secular), value systems and blind beliefs.Such awareness frees us from being locked into personal, political, and emotional drama.We can also direct this awareness as far as the imagination, down to the atomic level.