What’s Constant, What’s Not

The Pali term anicca is often translated as “impermanent.” And I’ve had people ask me, “The Buddha says that if things are impermanent, they’re stressful, they’re suffering, but is that always the case? The fact that an illness is impermanent, that’s good. The fact that a bad situation is impermanent, that’s good, too. So why is impermanence necessarily associated with suffering?”

Partly it’s a problem of translation. Anicca is the opposite of nicca. Nicca means constant. Anicca, the negative, means inconstant. That’s where the suffering is: You want to rely on things, but they’re unreliable.

Or as the Ajaan Chah used to like to say, things are not for sure; things are uncertain. We have to live with a lot of uncertainty. We like to have things nailed down, but we find that some situations are really bad, and they last a lot longer than we’d like them to. Some situations are good. We’d like to have them last long, but they don’t, which means we can’t plan without allowing for other contingencies. That’s the inconstancy we have to live with.

As with the future: You’re meditating right here, right now, and there are two ways you can drive yourself crazy about the future. One is that you look at how much has to be done, but you also have a strong sense that you don’t know how much time you’ll have to practice. It makes you nervous. It makes you concerned. The opportunities, the openings that you have to practice may close down at any time. So you can suffer because of the thought that the future may provide too little time.

Then there’s the other side. You realize this is a long practice we have, and you wonder if you’re up for it. Are you going to have the stamina? Will you last? Will you have the endurance to see it through? That’s a future with too much time for you to bear.

So you can suffer from a sense of too little time. You can suffer from a sense of too much time. In both cases, it’s uncertain. The person who’s thinking, “I have only a little time,” may have a lot of time. The person who thinks, “I have a lot of time,” may not have much time at all. So it’s good not to pin your expectations on what you think will happen in the future. Focus on right here, right now—and you’ll find something that’s actually constant right here, right now.

Here again, Ajaan Chah: He notes that the principle of cause and effect is constant. Skillful intentions lead to good results; unskillful intentions lead to bad results. That principle is constant. So pin your hopes there. You have the opportunity right now to do something good with this breath, with this moment of intention. Foster good intentions. Stay with your breath. Observe your breath. Be as sensitive as possible to your breathing. Get the mind to settle down and engage in all the aspects of the practice: virtue, concentration, and discernment, based on generosity.

If you trust in the principle of causality, this is where your certainty lies. You put good causes into the system, and good things will have to come out. As for how soon they’ll come out, or how strong the good results will be, that’s something you can’t plan ahead of time. But you know that good in, good out, at some point. That’s enough certainty to work with. Focus right here, right now on putting good things into the present moment. Whether the future is long or short, at least you’ll meet with good things in the future by doing good things now.

So you have to ask yourself: Which do you have more confidence in? Your anticipation for the future, or your trust in the Buddha’s awakening? After all, this is the message of the Buddha’s awakening: that human action does make a difference. When he discussed the different teachings that were available in his time, he was always very critical of those that said that your actions make no difference, that action is unreal, or that everything is predetermined from the past. His awakening showed that that wasn’t true.

I’m reading a book on time right now. The author is trying to make the case that time is reversible. Given the laws of physics, time could run backwards, and in fact it probably does. But there’s something wrong about the way we perceive things that makes us think that it goes in only one direction.

Yet if that were the case, there would be no path to the end of suffering. So there’s something wrong with that deterministic, materialistic worldview. Even though it claims to be scientific, it’s based on some assumptions, like the idea that physical laws have to be totally predictable and are totally determinative. I don’t know if they are. But the Buddha is saying something else can be predicted: You put good things into the system—especially skillful intentions—and good results will have to come out. You put unskillful intentions in, bad things will have to come out. That’s something you can rely on—because as the Buddha saw, it is possible to put an end to suffering. There is a path of practice that does end suffering and it does make an irreversible difference. So have some trust in that, more than you trust your fears for the future, your anticipations, your hopes for the future. Place your hopes in your actions right here, right now.

Someone once said that there is no word for “hope” in Buddhism. That’s not true. There are actually two words: āsā and paṭikaṅkā. But they’re not idle hopes, just sitting around hoping that somebody will take care of you. They’re more a sense of hope that your faith in the Buddha, your trust in the Buddha, will pay off when you act on the principles of his teaching. That’s well-grounded hope. There are many people in the past who’ve said, “Yes, it’s true what he said, and if you work on his path, you’ll be able to test it for yourself and see that it’s true for you, too.”

The important thing is that you place more faith in the principle of causality that he discovered than you do in your anticipations for the future, your fears for the future. Those anticipations, those fears, are really uncertain. The certainty lies in the principle of causality that the Buddha discovered, that you do have freedom of choice. There is a pattern by which actions and their results play out, but it’s a pattern that can be manipulated so that it leads to good results.

That’s something you can do. And you do it by focusing on what you’re doing right here, right now, not concerned about the future, confident that if you put good causes into the system right here, right now, the future will have to come out good at some point. Don’t pin your hopes on its coming out good at any one particular point in time, though, but what else is there to hope for? If you spend the present moment putting bad causes in, you’re certainly not helping the situation. You put good causes in; good things will come out well. When? You don’t know. But put more faith in the goodness than in the when. Put more faith in the Buddha’s awakening than in your anticipations for the future.

Have a good sense of what you can and cannot trust, of what’s constant and what’s inconstant. Cause-and-effect is a constant principle. It was true in the Buddha’s time. It’s true now. And it’s a cause and effect that has room for free choice. That’s where your hope lies.

So make good choices right now. That’s what you can put into the system. That’s all you can put into the system, but it’s plenty.