The Paradox of Impermanence

Open Wide For Some Buddhism

In “The Present Moment and the Illusion of Time,” dated September 2012 and published in volume one of Beginning Our Day by the Abhayagiri Buddhist Monastery, Ajahn Yatiko writes, “When we see clearly, we know that there’s only the present moment. That’s all there has ever been.”

One thing I keep running into, and often saying to myself as a mantra, is some variation or another of “only the present moment exists.”

Yet there is another concept, foundational to Buddhism, known as anitya in Sanskrit or anicca in Pali, translated as “impermanence.” Everything is in constant flux, and everything changes. There is only change and solidity is illusory. Nothing is stable.

So we have what appears to me to be some kind of paradox, if not a contradiction: There is only the present moment (however you want to call it), which suggests that “the now” is eternal — as I stumblingly explicate in my previous post.

A helpful pointer is the distinction between “the now” and “the present,” which is just as unreal as past and future. The Now, for lack of a better word, both transcends and includes past, present, and future. It is non-dual, after all.

Even so, how can there only be this constant, ongoing now when everything arises, abides, and passes away? Is it the observer or witness that each of us calls our own POV? But if that is only our ego, that too is illusory and part of samsara.

Yes, I do recognize that I am trying to use the thinking mind to deconstruct that which was created by thought. The master’s house truly cannot be taken apart with the master’s tools.

My temporary conclusion from the preceding is to say I am only grasping, and that my attachment to the Truth About Time is causing me suffering. Probably right. Maybe the key is to do the simplest, and most difficult, thing: Let it go.