Anityawada: The Theory of Impermanence

By Ratnesh Katulkar*

The Buddha brings us a fact that nothing is fixed, nothing is unchangeable,

nothing is permanent but every thing is changeable. Yet, for most of us, Buddha’s
theory of impermanence has no meaning as the prevailing religions, believes, customs
and more than this, our own understanding enforces us to believe in permanent entity.
Some of the most common accepted permanent entities in human societies are the god
and soul. While in our day-today life, we often believe in permanency of our beauty,
power, relations etc. as fixed and unchangeable.
The reason behind our belief in fixity of every thing is our deep adoration with
our self and our relations. This strong feeling of attachment makes our mind to think
of our position, power and relations to be unchanging thus with this wrong notion we
develop a thinking for ourselves as some one special. However in reality leave apart
the visible and sizeable things of this world, even an atom is not fixed, it is also
disintegrates into small fragments and it is continuously changing. It is the nature of
every being to produce and disintegrate; this is the law of nature. If we look to
geography, we find the same, large mountain range of Himalayas where the longest
peak Everest is located was once a deep sea called Tethis. The Aravali ranges which
are now smallest mountains were once the highest mountains of India. Even in our
lifetime, we see such changes for instance many villages, which were once populated
are now abundant, and undeveloped areas near cities are developed into multiplex
complexes. The clean cities of past are now crowded and filled up with pollution. To
notice the change more clearly, if we look at our own writings of childhood or
adolescence, we find it so different that often it is impossible to attests those views as
our own. We may find some of the innocent children of our time have turned into
criminal or vice-versa. Thus, we have to accept that with the passage of time, change
occurs in mind to such an extent that a person from his childhood until adulthood or
old age becomes a very new person. Thus, whether we believe in the Buddha’s theory
of impermanence or not it is so universal that every thing is bound to change. The
belief in the permanency of our power, position, beauty, health etc make us proud that
results in developing superiority complex which make us egoist but in reality as
mentioned above, none of position is fixed and permanent and these could be lost at
any time of our life. For instance, old age and diseases could take away our health and
beauty while loss of job and position may lead us to helpless condition. Proud in
material things also brings sorrow, as they are not permanent. Yet ignorance or
avoidance of this truth and our belief in fixity of things and views, led to the
development of much false arrogance such as casteism, racism, gender superiority etc
that directly results in to injustice and inequality.
Further, by fixity of opinion we usually bonded in our own attachment with the
romantic ideas of god and soul as a permanent entity and developed a feeling of
craving for our material assets such as proud in our position, power, health, beauty
etc. Belief in god leads to superstition and dependency that make us puppet in the
hands of so-called supreme power. Moreover, this concept creates an idea of giving
credits to all our achievements to gods and on the other side; our failures are treated
as God’s wish. Thus in both cases our own efforts become secondary therefore
ultimately we loose our confidence and ability. Moreover, this belief is harming our
society very much as rightly pointed out by Dr Ambedkar that ‘belief in god gives rise
to the priest class, which is responsible for the origin of all kinds of superstitions and
divided society into sacred and profane’ thus it prepared a way to social norms such as
caste and untouchability. While belief in soul creates much more superstition as it
give not only life long surrender to priesthood but it even went ahead to surrender
oneself for so-called coming lives. Therefore, in order to achieve better life in our
next life one is bound to follow all the rituals to satisfy the priests.
 On the other side the Buddha’s theory of impermanence, gives courage
and confidence to those who are unfree, needy, weak, poor, dull and unsuccessful to
learn and struggle hard as with this efforts one day they may raise their status and
achieve success in their life. Thus, the Anityawada is not only universal, scientific and
rational theory but it is also a key to establish egalitarian and progressive society.
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* Ratnesh is a Research Scholar in social science.