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The impermanence of phenomena is not only a subject for meditation and one that should incite us to make good use of the time we have left to live. Impermanence is also an essential part of our understanding of reality. It should determine both our vision of the basic nature of the world and our behavior. We must ask, are there or are there not permanent entities in the universe? If nothing is permanent, as Buddhist analysis shows, and physics seems to confirm then how should this knowledge influence the way we live?
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MATTHIEU: In Parmenides' opinion, if things changed, then the appareance of something that previously didn't exist would become possible. But something that doesn't exist can't start to exist. So change is impossible. This viewpoint is typical of philosophy that is rooted in real existence of things. According to this way of thinking, all results must exist already withintheir causes, because nothing new can emerge. Buddhism's answer is as follows (in the terms which was given to Hindu philosophers with similar ideas to those of Parmenides): "If results exist withintheir cause, let them rather buy the cotton grains to wear. If the result was present in the cause and indistinguisable from it but not manifest, with the money you spend on cotton cloth, buy some cotton seeds and clothe yourself with them! They too will serve the purposeof cotton cloth, protecting you from the cold and wind, for, as you maitain, the cloth aspect exists in the seed."
THUAN: Aristotle then incorporated both ideas of change and stability in his cosmogonic system. According to him, change takes placeon Earth and on the Moon, because there imperfection dominates in the form of life, aging, and death. But changelessness can be found on the other planets, the Sun, and the stars, because they are perfect, immutable, and eternal. In the seventeenth century, Newton abolished the Arisotelian distinction between Heaven and Earth with his theory of universal gravitation, according to which the same law of gravity determines the fall of an apple in an orchard and the orbit of the planets around the Sun. So Heaven is as changing as the Earth.
MATTHIEU: However, in his Opticks he defended the idea of permanence at the hearth of reality.
THUAN: It is true that the founding fathers of Western science, from Galileo to Newton and Kepler, all accepted the idea that God the Creator was responsible for a perfect, unchanging and eternal universe. But as science progressed, it revealedthat the universe is constantly changing, and the idea that it is immutable is now untenable. Stars are born, live out their lives by burning up their hydrogen and helium, then die and throw out in space their gases enriched with the chemical elements produced by their nuclear alchemy. Then these gases collapse under the force of gravity, thus giving birth to new generations of stars, and so on. These cycles of life and death last several million or even several billion years. Our Sun, which appeared four and a half billion years ago, or eleven and a half billion years after the Big Bang, is a third generation star. So the galaxies, which are made up of hundreds of billions of evolving stars, must change, too.
What's more, nothing is motionless in space. Gravity sees to it that all the structures of the universe, such as stars and galaxies, attract each other and 'fall' toward each other. These in-falling movements must be added to general expansion. In this way, our Earth is taking part in a fantastic cosmic ballet. First, it pulls us through space at a speed of nearly twenty miles per second during its annual journey around the Sun. The Sun then drags the Earth with it during its voyage through the Milky Way at a speed of 140 miles per second. The Milky Way is falling in turn at approximately fifty-five miles per second toward Andromeda. And there's more to come. The Local Group that contains our galaxy and Andromeda is falling at about 375 miles per second toward the Virgo cluster of galaxies, which is in turn moving toward a large complex of galaxies called the Great Attractor. Aristotle's static, immutable Heaven is dead and gone. Everything is changing and nothing is permanent. There can be no doubt that impermanence is all around us.
MATTHIEU: What are the consequences of this understanding for our lives? Buddhism and physics have different aims. Physics stops at the description of phenomena. Buddhism's purpose is to lessen our attachment to the reality we see before us: beings, events, things, even ourselves. For, if we attach ourselves to things as if they were permanent and solid, we think that they inherently have the power to make us happy or miserable. So it is that we give objects characteristics—such as "mine" or "theirs", "beautiful", "ugky", "pleasant" or "unpleasant"—which are simply conceptual labels. As Dharmakirti explained:
When "self" occurs, so too the thought of "other"
From "self-and-other" both attachment and aversion come.
These two combined
Are source of every ill.
In this context, Buddhism don't want to determine the mass and the charge of particles, but instead to break down the notion that things are permanent and solid, so as to liberate us from the vicious circle of illusions that cause our suffering.
In Buddhism, the next step to incorporate this notion of impermanence into our outlook. The Buddha said: "Of all footprints, the elephant's are outstanding; just so, of all subjects of meditation for a follower of the Buddha, the idea of impermanence is unsurpassed." The impermanence of the macroscopic world is obvious to everyone, but reflection about subtle impermanence has deeper consequences. Phenomena contain the seeds of their own transformation, and the universe can contain no immutable entities. It is the very malleability of phenomena and of consciousness that allows us to undertake the process of transformation that finally leads to enlightenment.