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Chapter 6 attacks the mistaken apprehension of impermanent things as permanent by pointing out the impermanence of the human body. The first half of the chapter concentrates on the need for developing an awareness of impending death; the second half concentrates on another troubling aspect of death, namely grief over the death of loved ones. Candrakiriti criticizes Brahmins’ idealized views on family life and paints a dismal portrait of family men afflicted with domineering wives and ungrateful children. He concludes that the fear of death should motivate people to renounce lay life and adopt the religious life of a monastic.

The Buddha's teaching of no-self, impermanence, and especially of the extinction of the self (nirvana) have historically been all too susceptible of construal as nihilism. Modern scholarship, however, has done much to restore a positive sense to them: the Buddha insisted that his work was to teach liberation, and his negations are not metaphysical but psychological, an alarm-call to ethical and meditative action to free oneself from greed, hatred, and delusion. Insofar as the Sinitization of Buddhism affected the apophatic elements of the tradition, three major trends may be noted: the influence of Taoist apophasis, and greater stresses on kataphasis and on phenomena. This chapter turns to the Mahayana and especially to the work of Nagarjuna. But first, since it has been already noted that the Buddha's concern was soteriological and therefore practical and not primarily philosophical, this chapter pays more attention to the meditative tradition that lies at the heart of Buddhist practice.

Dogen's basic presentation of the Buddhist Way is entirely orthodox. He intends the practitioner to cease grasping and clinging to phenomena and to concepts, and sees the way to achieving this detachment as being through an understanding of impermanence and emptiness. Similarly, he shares the traditional concern to guard against a nihilistic understanding of impermanence and emptiness. In avoiding both these extremes, he points out the Buddhist Middle Way. In his writings, the major themes of ineffability, nondualism, and emptiness address these fundamental issues. Dogen was able to resolve the issue of original versus acquired enlightenment through the notion of actualizing Buddha-nature in this-moment, but also provides the practice ‘just sitting’, in which that actualization occurs. This chapter deals with the use of affirmative speech, the constant work of ‘going beyond Buddha’, the existential application of negation, and the stance of non-thinking. It examines Dogen's apophasis and his version of the familiar nondualism of Buddhism.

What, if anything, is the bearing of flux, or impermanence, as found in this world on the case for the Jewish-Christian God? This chapter argues that the bearing is positive rather than negative, given the redemptive character and aims of this mysterious God. It proposes that a distinctive agape struggle involving humans and God is an elusive indicator of permanence in connection with this God. Philosophers of religion typically have neglected this important lesson, often as a result of looking for permanence in the wrong places. It identifies the upshot of this lesson for human knowledge of God. The chapter offers a rather broad vision of such knowledge on the basis of plausibility considerations that would receive more elaboration and analysis in a larger project. Such a vision opens up some new prospects in the philosophy of religion.

The life story of Orgyan Chokyi contains ten chapters. The first one is concerned with the suffering which arose in her youth. The second is about her time as a goatherd and how that time was sorrowful. The third chapter details her cutting her hair, her time herded horses, and how the feeling impermanence arose. The fourth chapter is about her request for religious teachings and her studies of stillness and movement. The fifth one details her pilgrimages to Kathmandu and Tise to offer prayers. The sixth is about a time when she worked in the kitchen at the temple and felt a great deal of mental anguish. The next chapter describes her quitting herding and turning to meditation and reciting oṁ maṇi padme hūṁ. The eighth chapter is all about how she lived in solitude and the joyous experiences of that time. The nineth details how she preserved her commitment and vows. Finally, the last chapter describes how she further saw impermanence through death.

This chapter relates how impermanence arose when Orgyan Chokyi herded horses. One day, as described in this chapter, she went to sell horses at the meadow of Dechen Thang near the Cholung Bum Monastery. She spent a few nights in the temple, during which time a foal was born to a golden mare. Fifteen days went by, when one night a leopard came from nowhere and killed the foal. The mother let out a great cry of anguish. Chokyi came to the door as she neighed loudly, causing a commotion in the meadow. She continued to neigh, so on the following morning Chokyi went out to search for the corpse of the foal. Chokyi found it above a spring, carried it back, and set it down on the meadow above the monastery. For Chokyi, great impermanence arose from this event, the likes of which she had never known, and she wept a great deal.

This chapter relates the joyous experiences which dawned upon Orgyan Chokyi when she lived in solitude. Having been through great impermanence, Orgyan Chokyi avoided the problem of cause and effect. She chose virtue and shunned sin. She contemplated the meaning of hearing the Dharma. Hearing, contemplation, and meditation were a necessity for Chokyi. In gaining independence, self-serving and self-empowered, she has escaped people. She attained autonomy. She felt that she had found happiness. In her rocky cave, Chokyi was not bothered by snow and rain. She did not hear the noisy sounds of birds and bees. Her rocky cave was not lit up by the kitchen fire. Chokyi felt that there was no rock like this one in the meditation cells of Tadru.

This chapter examines the politics of impermanence and mobility in rural Sierra Leone. It attempts to provide a better understanding of the different social networks and imagined socialities by analyzing the smaller objects or enclosures within larger spaces. It discusses the formation of gendered perspectives on and strategic positions on the “extended household”. It investigates what accounts for the range of residential arrangements grouped under the single category of the big house and presents a biography or social life of the Kamara big houses in Kpuawala.

This chapter describes a Tibetan Buddhist analytic meditation that has been adapted for Christian prayer, followed by a commentary that explains the Buddhist goals for and principles underlying the meditation, and the reasoning behind the adaptations made. Impermanence—the idea that nothing is permanent and everything changes moment by moment—is one of the fundamental truths of Buddhism. This meditation addresses a fundamental delusion in how we see the world and ourselves. It aims to develop the recognition that things are in a constant state of flux, to accept the fundamental truth that impermanence is the state of all things.

This chapter describes how Buddhists often talk about impermanence, an idea that covers a range of meanings. They all, however, highlight aspects of reality that an individual must face in order to solve the problem at hand. The composite nature of things entails some harsh truths: Things that are put together eventually come apart. When something is made up of pieces, it is only a matter of time before those pieces go their own way. Part of understanding the composite nature of things means seeing their fragility, their temporary nature. A particularly stark reminder of impermanence is death. Contact with death often prompts revaluation; being reminded that one's time is limited can make one rethink how an individual is spending it. Indeed, impermanence means that death is inevitable. Thus, many Buddhist texts warn against thinking of this life, this body, and this world as a home. It is not just that things will end eventually, someday. Even when they seem to remain, they are in a constant state of flux. One way to understand this type of impermanence is to think about what it means for something to persist through time, to continue, to endure.

The goal of this volume is to reconsider citizenship, integration, and diversity in the context of heightened mobility and permanent impermanence, where large numbers of migrants are long-term partial members of their societies of origin and settlement. Although cultural institutions are often sites where these categories are (re) negotiated, they are often left out of the scholarly conversation. In the first part of this chapter, I explore how one type of cultural institution—museums—are responding to immigration and globalization around the world. I ask if and how they are changing notions of citizenship, nationhood, and pluralism. The second half looks at new forms of transnational social protection that arise in response to the current world on the move.

This chapter works through the color-printing process of the Technicolor Corporation, used in the mid-1940s, to explore the contradictory registers of dream and practicality to which film-watching moments offer entrance. It provides an analysis of a key color effect in Powell and Pressburger’s A Matter of Life and Death (1946), in which a transition from the monochromatic to the vibrantly colorful emphasizes the use of cinematic color beyond the perfunctory. It is argued, with reference to oil painting, that the brilliant and radiant pink of a single rose in this scene represents the potential of color to emotionally penetrate the viewer, not by supplementing the narrative, but by intruding upon and beyond it.

This chapter presents a tourist's guide to reading Shamon Dōgen. It first considers the nature of faith and the role of responsibility in Watsuji Tetsurō's vision of Dōgen's Zen. It then explains the technical terms of Dōgen's philosophy that Watsuji rarely employs directly but whose influence is significant nonetheless. Examples of these terms are body–mind, non-ego, and impermanence. Included in this analysis of terminology is a brief discussion of the role of written language itself in Dōgen's philosophy based on an apparent contradiction: Dōgen, an accomplished poet, spurns efforts at writing poetry. Finally, the chapter examines important beliefs shared by Watsuji and Dōgen, suggesting that perhaps some of the themes in Watsuji's later philosophy first took root as he delved into Dōgen's ideas.

This chapter discusses the method and meaning of self-cultivation according to Dōgen. At the heart of Dōgen's teachings is the manifestation of eternal values. Therefore, the destruction of all worldly values must be the starting point of his project. Dōgen expressed this destruction of worldly values through the traditional Buddhist expression “You should contemplate impermanence.” The destruction of the values of this world is nothing but a reversal of values in order to attain this ideal life right away. This reversal of worldly values gave birth to the search for the eternal value of truth. The chapter talks about Dōgen's advocacy of single-minded zazen as the core of Buddhist practice and reveals that the proper attitude of Dōgen's self-cultivation is strictly defined in terms of self-power and enlightenment. It also considers the difference between Pure Land Buddhism and Dōgen's Buddhism.

This chapter focuses on the concepts of impermanence (mujo) and contingency. Mujo has become a catchphrase used to explain the psychology, the logic, and the sentiments of a nation and an ethnicity. The enormous interest recently shown by scholars in the notion of mujo is directly related to the importation to Japan from the West of existential philosophies, which were challenged by nihilism and skepticism toward the belief that religions and philosophies could save human beings from the crises of the modern world. Meanwhile, guzensei is the Japanese word used today to translate the English “contingency.” The topic of contingency is particularly cherished by thinkers whose knowledge of Buddhist thought had acquainted them with the idea of the impermanent nature of reality.

Chapter 5 connects Frank’s obsession with the fragment to a view of human history as defined by an essential transitoriness. The piles of photographs, letters and souvenirs that the filmmaker returns to again and again operate as enigmatic reminders of what the narrator in Chris Marker’s Sunless (1983) calls “the impermanence of things.” The feelings of loss and estrangement inspired by Frank’s treatment of everyday objects challenge the possibility of providing a full account of either the life or the work. They reveal and, at the same time, hide truth.

This chapter talks about the fragility of the physical bookroll from a Roman poet's point of view. It focuses on the ways in which the poets, even while recognizing material texts as the vehicle for gaining a wide and lasting audience, repeatedly expressed anxieties over the corruptibility and impermanence of the physical text. The image of the bookroll is linked with the ceremonial presentation copy that associates with anxieties over public reception and isolation of the work from the poet's control.

This chapter details the meeting organized between Joseph Beuys and the Dalai Lama, and its aftermath. The meeting took place in Germany during the 1980s by one of Beuys’ contemporaries, Louwrien Wijers. Both her mentor, Beuys, as well as the Dalai Lama, share the same ideals of impermanence and compassion, although the meeting itself had proved inconclusive. Beuys had received no great insight on art and its capacity for social change—the historic event was, in a word, uneventful. Nothing happened and kept on happening, yet within this sphere of nothingness the two men were able to engage in an interhuman intrigue that would affect both Beuys and his fellow Fluxus artists for the years to come. And perhaps Beuys himself had, in some small way, been able to influence the political rift between China and Tibet in the years to come.