This website is the home of The Four Noble Truths on the web.

Impermanence

• ‘My life will come to an end’ is the thought of impermanence.
• We know impermanence. But still we grasp. That is the difference between knowing and practice.
• When you are making long term plans, think that you will not live forever.
• What is laziness? Tomorrow.
• Every relationship is impermanent. Soon we will part.
• Some practitioners are afraid to sleep because they don’t know when they are going to die.The opportunity we have is impermanent.
• When the thought to accumulate comes, think impermanence.
• We don’t have time to sleep.
• We don’t have the leisure to practice at a leisurely pace.
• It is not enough to cultivate awareness of impermanence. Use it to practice dharma.
• Everything composite is impermanent. Birth ends in death. Meeting ends in separation. Accumulation ends in dispersion. Creation ends in destruction.
• The more we investigate impermanent nature of phenomena, the more we see they are without a ‘self’. Habituate again and again.
• Prosperity is brief, and is result of past merit.
• “Maybe I will die there. Not sure I will come back.”
• If phenomena were truly existent, they would not be impermanent. Phenomena are transitory means they don’t truly exist. The meaning of impermanence is emptiness.
• Re: long term planning, we still have to do what is practical. In the sense of, we have to plant the seeds now to have crops in the future.
• It will pass. Time will exhaust.
• The opportunity [freedoms and advantages] is impermanent.
• Realize that this body is something to be left behind. This is the mara of body.
• Happiness is imermanent.
• Even a god will die.
• “This could be my last action.”
• Impermanence pervades on all scales, small and large, animate and inanimate.
• “I am not sure if I will get up in the morning. I am not sure I will go to bed this evening.”