..續本文上一頁. We are not capable of releasing, and that is why there is no freedom and no happiness. When you know that things are impermanent, you will be able to recognize what is really essential for your life and your happiness, and you will have the courage to let go of other things. When you have the insight of impermanence, you will not wait. You will do anything you can do today to make the person you love happy. Because you don”t have that insight, that is why you don”t do it. And then one day she is no longer there, and you cry, and you repent: "While she was alive I did not do that; now I regret it."

　　Impermanence brings a lot of insight, and you become very wise and you know how to live in such a way that happiness can be possible in the here and the now. I have a short poem that I have shared with so many people, and they like to use it when they get angry at the other person, the person that they love the most.

　　Getting angry at each other in the ultimate dimension.

　　We should only close our eyes and look into the future.

　　In about one hundred years from now,

　　Where will you be, and where shall I be

　　That is the insight of impermanence. When you get angry at her or at him, you want to punish him or her to get relief. That is a natural tendency. But if you just close your eyes and visualize yourself and your beloved one three hundred years from now, you will get the insight of impermanence. Just one in-breath and one out-breath, that is enough for you to get the insight. When you open your eyes, you only want to do one thing. That is to open your arms and hug that person. That is the only thing worth doing, to cherish her presence, because of impermanence. Because you are unaware of the nature of impermanence in everything, you get angry.

　　(Bell)

　　We suffer not because things are impermanent. We suffer because things are impermanent, but we don”t know that they are impermanent. This is very important. That is why it is very helpful to practice mindful breathing, in order to bring the insight of impermanence to ourselves, and to keep it alive. Then we know what to do and what not to do to make life more pleasant. Looking into a flower, looking into a cloud, looking into a living being, you touch the nature of impermanence. How important is impermanence

　　 Without impermanence, nothing can be possible. Don”t complain about impermanence. If things are not impermanent, how could a grain of corn become a corn plant

　　 How could your child grow up

　　 So impermanence is the ground of life. But in spite of the fact that things are impermanent, we are not aware of that nature of impermanence in life. So when you practice looking deeply into things, you should discover the nature of impermanence, and you should make it into a living insight. A living insight means that you carry it in every minute of your life, and then you become a wise man, a wise woman, and you get rid of so much of your pain and sorrow and delusion.

　　Impermanence in the teaching of the Buddha also means interbeing, non-self. Because things change every moment, nothing can remain the same in two consecutive moments. There are no permanent entities; there is no permanent self. You have no permanent self. A flower is made only of non-flower elements. You are made of entirely non-you elements. That is the truth. You are made of ancestors, air, water, education, sunshine, clouds, and so on. You are a formation. You are beautiful, but you are a formation. Every formation is impermanent. That sentence is repeated many times over by the Buddha: all formations are impermanent. We should grasp it, we should touch it with our experience, and not just our intellect.

　　A flower cannot be by itself alone, because it has no separate self. A flower can only inter-be with the sunshine,…

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