Impermanence

We usually think of impermanence as bad news, and often it is! But if we step back a bit we can see how impermanence can also provide us with resilience and even joy if we understand it wisely.

My father recently passed away, so I'm thinking about mortality. I'll discuss its centrality to early Buddhist meditation practice as well as its relation to impermanence generally. Then I'll turn to four ways that contemplating mortality…

The Buddha taught that the self was conventional, impermanent, and ever changing. We will look to contemporary medicine, science, and philosophy to find how those conclusions are not only supported, but deepened in surprising and even…

Contemplating the impermanence of the elements helps us to understand their non-self nature. In one early Buddhist sutta, Sāriputta gives an argument as to how the four elements are impermanent. But it's a strange sutta, full of…

The second argument the Buddha uses in his Second Sermon on non-self involves impermanence. I'll look at his argument there and why it seems rather odd to our ears. I'll consider one potential subtext for the Buddha's argument, and what…

Understanding change is difficult, it's more difficult than we may think. Often we consider change to be too obvious to be important. But really change is the deepest insight in Buddhism, and knowing change is central to practice.

Buddhism's three marks of existence are the deepest part of the dharma. We will discuss what they are, and how there are subtle differences between their scope. We'll then look at how they were emphasized in different ways throughout…