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Updated: June 15, 2025
The spirit seeks union with nature to pass from the life of vision into Pure being; and nature, conscious that its grosser forms are impermanent, is for ever dissolving and leading its votary to a more distant shrine. "Nature is timid like a woman," declares an Indian scripture. "She reveals herself shyly and withdraws again."
An excited jargon filled the place which, with the air of physical disorder as if the workers were haphazardly improvising their activities, gave the room a vivid though seemingly impermanent life. On the benches against a peeling wall sleepy-faced boys with precocious eyes kept up a lazy hair-pulling, surreptitious wrestling bout.
As you leave the old city on the north, and go down east for three li, there is the rock dwelling of Devadatta, and at a distance of fifty paces from it there is a large, square, black rock. Formerly there was a bhikshu, who, as he walked backwards and forwards upon it, thought with himself: "This body is impermanent, a thing of bitterness and vanity, and which cannot be looked on as pure.
Religion gives life a habitation and a name apparently though it is an illusion. So we are brought back to time and space and illimitable mind as what? And we shall always stand before them attributing to them all those things which we cannot know. Yet the need for religion is impermanent, like all else in life. As the soul regains its health, it becomes prone to the old illusions.
Then, I verily believe, I dozed off, too, bent double on my log with my head towards the fierce blaze. "You know what an impermanent thing such slumber is. One moment you drop into an abyss and the next you are back in the world that you would think too deep for any noise but the trumpet of the Last Judgment. And then off you go again. Your very soul seems to slip down into a bottomless black pit.
Man cannot immortalize the flesh, but, by overcoming the flesh, by relinquishing all its inclinations, he can enter the region of immortality. "God alone hath immortality," and only by realizing the God state of consciousness does man enter into immortality. All nature in its myriad forms of life is changeable, impermanent, unenduring. Only the informing Principle of nature endures.
Shrugging, you will say of sorrow, 'What is it? for you will know grief also to be impermanent. And your inability to be quite miserable any more will assure you that your goings are attended by the ghost of outlived and conquered misery: and I, whom some call Béda, and others call Kruchina, shall be monstrously amused by this."
On the fine forehead was that indefinable touch of peace that comes from identifying the mind with what is permanent in the soul, and letting the impermanent slip by without power to wound or distress; while, from his manner, so gentle, quiet, sympathetic, few could have guessed the strength of purpose that burned within like a great flame.
The facts are that all things are impermanent in the Province of the Gods; that the winters are very severe; and that I have received a call from the great Government college in Kyushu far south, where snow rarely falls. Also I have been very sick; and the prospect of a milder climate had much influence in shaping my decision. But these few days of farewells have been full of charming surprises.
Never again need those moralists point out to you the inherent silliness of your earnest pursuit of impermanent things: your solemn concentration upon the game of getting on. None the less, this attitude persists. Again and again you swing back to it. Something more than realisation is needed if you are to adjust yourself to your new vision of the world.
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