The Wisdom of Discernment

by Khandro Rinpoche

In the Buddhist Sutras, we find that the Buddha's students requested him not to enter into mahaparinirvana. At that point, the Buddha gave his most essential teaching on the experience of death. The essence of the instruction is this: Everything that is born dies; everything that is generated goes through degeneration and destruction.

We can do no greater harm to ourselves than not to think about impermanence. Where impermanence is not properly understood, everything samsaric becomes important and a seemingly reasonable cause to accomplish, when in fact life is as fragile as a bubble. We cannot really say whether the next moment will bring the experience of the next moment or the next life. In the time between inhaling and exhaling, we cannot guarantee that breath will not stop. The causes of impermanence and death are many; at this very moment, we could do something to cause destruction or death to arise. We cannot really plan ahead as far as tomorrow, let alone the next ten or twenty years.

If the mind is obscured by ignorance at the time of death, it will create more ignorance. If we respond to the experience of impermanence with complete openness and selflessness, however, our understanding will be the foundation of liberation from suffering.

Contemplating impermanence gives rise to the wisdom of discernment. With this we can truly discern between useful activities that bring about genuine goodness and useless activities that are of no benefit to anyone. Seeing the enormous amount of time and energy we spend in useless activities, we can turn our mind toward Dharma, which is an activity that is truly fruitful and beneficial for sentient beings.

In such a fragile and changing existence, what distraction, laziness, or ignorance is important enough to dismantle the awareness needed to rest in your fundamental nature? Contemplating impermanence, focus your mind on this: If death occurs at this moment, what is most essential? What will truly benefit yourself and others? Will any of the concepts, hesitations, or distractions that you allow to rule your life truly make any sense at the moment of death? And if holding on to such things won't help you or anyone else at that moment, why would any sensible human being with such precious endowments continue to be enslaved by them?

At this moment, you have the potential for control. You can take this opportunity to bring your potential to fruition. To do this, you must let go of any stubbornness and grasping at notions of solidity where there is none — and bring whatever arises into genuine awareness inseparable from buddha mind, your enlightened essence.

It is not only in death that we see constant change: time is constantly changing; thoughts are constantly changing. Constant movement prevents the mind from ever coming to rest with complete certainty that it is not subject to impermanence. Nevertheless, we continue to assume that time is solid, thoughts are solid, our movements are solid, and this "self" is solid. Mistaking that which is impermanent to be permanent, we come up with a mistaken view, based on which we try to solidify things that are constantly in flux.

Time is a simple example of this. We usually think of time in terms of past, present, and future time. Each of these notions requires the existence of one moment that stays still. We base our solid sense of time on a single solid moment called present time, and any other moment is past or future. Proving this, however, is impossible, since there is no such thing as "present time." The stream of time is constantly changing and not solid: as soon as we think of the present it is already past.

In the same way, thoughts are constantly in flux. As soon as we think a certain thought — and then busily base our judgements on it — its inner essence has already moved on. The movement of the initial thought creates a second thought; and by the time we recognise it, the second thought arises as a third thought, and so on.

And what about this seemingly solid self? Nagarjuna describes how even the great and massive civilisations of this earth are completely dismantled, changed, and, impermanent as dust particles, blown away by the wind. Whole world systems collide and collapse and become extinct. Compared to that, any arrogance based on the seeming solidity of a single, impermanent self would be quite unnecessary and a mark of ignorance.

But we have come to believe in the solidity of our emotions and to base our judgements on them. From the belief in a solid self — which can't even be posited from the standpoint of impermanence — grasping and the logic of grasping arise. Because we think we have cause for grasping and an object to grasp, endless displays of selfishness and emotions create further distraction from the fundamental ground. We will continue to generate selfishness and unkindness as long as we maintain some cause: jealousy has a cause, hatred has a cause, aggression has a cause. These are the depths of ignorance to which the minds of sentient beings can go.

Although selfishness has no actual cause or location, we still feel that ultimately, somewhere inside, there's a secure storeroom where attachment is quietly hidden and all of the things we want to hold on to are stacked and inventoried. But if everything is in a constant state of flux, what could we possibly find to protect or maintain? And how could we possibly "store" anything? All of the emotional displays that we try to maintain are nothing but suppositions of mind — a mind that hasn't understood change.

Allow your mind to go further into a sense of death arising in each passing moment. Every move you make is an indication of change and impermanence. Each moment you sit in meditation, manifold degeneration, destruction, and change take place. In light of this, any tendency to still feel separate from impermanence and change would be absolute ignorance, which would prevent clear understanding from arising in the mind. Remain in meditation with a genuine awareness of constant impermanence and the urgency arising from this.

If impermanence is true, however, we can actually give rise to positive tendencies. If change is the very nature of all outer and inner phenomena, there is no basis for any confidence in a solid self and no need for any logic to defend or protect it. Why then would we generate anger, for example? Anger is generated solely to protect a self that has to retain its identity and defend its ground — a self that is not really there. Contemplating our various experiences of impermanence, we can understand how unnecessary and useless it is to grasp at a self — at which point genuine selflessness arises.