Life is impermanence
Many Western critics see the Hindu-Buddhist idea of the impermanence and transitory nature of the world as a gloomy, pessimistic and almost nihilistic doctrine. For example, Schopenhauer argued that if the present moment is transitory, then it is also not worth any effort, “that which in a moment ceases to exist, which vanishes as completely as a dream, cannot be worth any serious effort”.
But as Alan Watts argues1, this is a misunderstanding of the concept.
Transitoriness is depressing only to the mind which insists upon trying to grasp. But to the mind which lets go and moves with the flow of change, which becomes, in Zen Buddhist imagery, like a ball in a mountain stream, the sense of transience or emptiness becomes a kind of ecstasy.
Heraclitus understood this, and so did Nietzsche whose analysis of Heraclitus2 on this matter is worth quoting in full:
The everlasting and exclusive coming-to-be, the impermanence of everything actual, which constantly acts and comes-to-be but never is, as Heraclitus teaches it, is a terrible, paralyzing thought. Its impact on men can most nearly be likened to the sensation during an earthquake when one loses one’s familiar confidence in a firmly grounded earth. It takes astonishing strength to transform this reaction into its opposite, into sublimity and the feeling of blessed astonishment. Heraclitus achieved this by means of an observation regarding the actual process of all coming-to-be and passing away. He conceived it under the form of polarity, as being the diverging of a force into two qualitatively different opposed activities that seek to re-unite. Everlastingly, a given quality contends against itself and separates into opposites; everlastingly these opposites seek to re-unite. Ordinary people fancy they see something rigid, complete and permanent; in truth, however, light and dark, bitter and sweet are attached to each other and interlocked at any given moment like wrestlers of whom sometimes the one, sometimes the other is on top. Honey, says Heraclitus, is at the same time bitter and sweet; the world itself is a mixed drink which must constantly be stirred. The strife of the opposites gives birth to all that comes-to-be; the definite qualities which look permanent to us express but the momentary ascendency of one partner. But this by no means signifies the end of the war; the contest endures in all eternity. Everything that happens, happens in accordance with this strife, and it is just in the strife that eternal justice is revealed. It is a wonderful idea, welling up from the purest strings of Hellenism, the idea that strife embodies the everlasting sovereignty of strict justice, bound to everlasting laws.
In other words, life and the world are not a thing but a process, a never-ending dance of opposites. Life is impermanence and to seek permanence is to seek death.
(Alan W. Watts, The Way of Zen)
(Nietzsche, Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks)