The End of Times or the First Day

I went to an art gallery to forget about the decaying world. But it was there that Jim told me about Buddhism’s decay itself.

Earlier that morning, I had planned a family trip, tended to my shrub rose, paid a semester’s worth of tuition, and prepared a sign for a Pride parade I was set to march in. Up until that point, most of my summer days had steered toward tomorrow—actions concocted for things to bud, for floats in procession, for vocational training, for familial connection. With so much of my energy spent planning for the future, my time with friends had grown more sporadic, and so I wanted to catch up with one. In the atrium of the Memorial Art Gallery, Jim said to me, “You know about this Buddhist term, right, Mary?”

Jim serves as a longtime practice leader at the Greater Boston Zen Center. We were discussing some community groups we belonged to and how they were becoming contentious. Then our talk shifted to the complexities that arise when a family member is dying. In the bare atrial space, we talked a lot about Buddhism, somehow reaching a profound topic I wasn’t versed in.

“The Buddha told his followers how one day the dharma will die out—probably five hundred years from his death, give or take. The main core of his teaching was that in this moment, we so luckily can witness the dharma,” Jim said slowly, “it’s available to us now.”

“Witnessing,” I pawed at the word, like a cat would a toy on a string.

“Witnessing, yes, Mary.” Jim then labeled the Buddha’s legacy in demise, “mappō.”

My eyes darted to the water fountain on my left; it gleamed underneath the skylight, which framed a playful blue sky, like so many artworks throughout the gallery. I wrote Jim’s words down in a small notebook. While doing so, some pages I had written before distracted me briefly: a scribble of the Buddha’s final shared wisdom, on how all living systems will decay, and to diligently strive for the path. For me, the act of writing things down signifies their importance. Part of me wondered how I could know the Buddha’s radiant wisdom of approaching the disappearance of all living things, and yet still lament in my relationships to seasons, local communities, governments, protective policies. “Jim, isn’t this idea similar to anicca?”

“Ah! Yes! Impermanence,” Jim said. His voice echoed Dogen’s teaching on how impermanence itself was buddhanature.

I’ve overcome some traumatic experiences in my life. Finding the right language was a key factor in the empowerment I gained through my healing. I could finally accept what was troubling me within, and what changes could unshackle me from this trouble. I’m a trans woman; I’ve witnessed language used to abuse and segregate. I’ve seen it alienate and make one’s rightful territories out of reach. Contrary to what my friends tell me regarding stoic philosophy, I do believe outer words can become one’s inner words, one’s entire inner dialogue.

Mappō is the Japanese Buddhist term for the “age of decline” or “the latter days of the law,” within Buddhism, deriving from the Chinese source of mo-fa. The word mo-fa was said to have been translated from the Sanskrit term saddharma-vipralopa, while some argue a closer connection to Sanskrit would be pascimakale.

Mappō is the last age of Buddha’s message being passed down—the final conch shell of the dharma, washed away along the shoreline. Our attention is valuable, maybe our only true possession, and yet so fleeting, like dewdrops nearing evaporation as the sun climbs up the sky. Being alive when the dharma existed was such a privilege, once carried down orally. Now AI provides instant summaries on all things Buddhism. I tested this to see what artificial intelligence apps could tell me about mappō. Bullet point lists appeared nearly instantaneously confirming how mappō marked the age of the degeneration of the Buddha’s law. 

The state of the world in Siddhartha Gautama’s time looked somewhat similar to our own: empires at war, towns being annexed, people being displaced by catastrophic weather events, mass inequality, and endemic diseases ravaging populations around the world. But history isn’t what Buddhism wants to zero in on. I visit my Zen center’s library to pore over the wall of Buddhist books. I read pages on kalpas, the giant cycles of time that were formalized in the influential Abhidharmakosa text. Kalpas chronicled the creation and destruction within our oscillating cosmos. As the late professor and interfaith advocate Roger Corless once wrote, “History is non-Buddhist, even anti-Buddhist.” 

When we sat at the Memorial Art Gallery, it was roughly 2,524 years after the Buddha’s existence. So why did Jim say the decline was in five hundred years? A book by Jan Nattier, Once Upon a Future Time: Studies in a Buddhist Prophecy of Decline, outlines the numbers brilliantly: While some predictions had multiplied the timetable considerably, two sutras—the Mahaparinirvana Sutra and the sutra on the Seven Dreams of Ananda—settled on the fatalist figure of 700 years’ time before the dharma’s end. The former, with varying passages, contained one translation that hasn’t left my mind, “Seven hundred years after my death, sinful Mara will gradually ruin my true dharma.”

The stockpile of books upon the furniture guided me to the Kausambi story: a prophecy of the dharma’s end after an invasion from the northwest. Temples and stupas are destroyed. A Buddhist king ruling in Kausambi defeats the invaders but fears his militaristic response has changed his karma. His preceptor encourages a great feast for all Buddhist monks of separate lineages. But then a conflict emerges among the monks and the monks of different sanghas kill one another. The king mourns his well-intentioned actions. I can see this story refracting the hidden conflicts within my own communities. The subdivisions of groups, no longer in the name of accessibility affinity, falling victim to the obsessive force of resentments fracturing communities from within. Jim and I shared the king’s mourning. Organization was the biggest fortification against exploitative forces, and yet the Kausambi tale had the doctrinal warnings of infighting. The “invaders” perhaps came from within our own ranks.

True dharma, or saddharma, appeared to come up in every book I found recounting any academic analysis of Buddhist literature. If the Pali canon spoke of a true dharma, could a crack within sanghas have happened sooner than I imagined? Of course the word dharma carried many meanings, not always exclusive to Buddhism’s way.

One Tibetan text, the Kalachakra tantra, envisioned the calendrical epilogue of the dharma 5,104 years after Sakyamuni’s nirvana. In a preserved Chinese canon, the estimation of degeneration was 10,000 years after parinirvana. Other texts upped the number of years to 12,000. The various numbers in these books resonated a thought Jan Nattier wrote about: how the stories, with their numbers, may be inventions to “convey a truth of another kind.”

I don’t interpret mappō as the story of the world ending, rather the dharma’s illumination would enter a time of darkness and ignorance, which frightens me. My practice of Buddhism has brought so much support to my life. Growing up, I often heard of cataclysmic predictions: from Y2K to the 2012 rapture. While these predictions did not bring about the end of civilization, the last few years really did feel different with the existential risks of AI, nuclear war, biodiversity loss, pandemics, secretive nationalist networks targeting marginalized communities, and the towering threat of autocratic regimes bewildering their way into power. But just then, I noticed the birds outside my window warble in the sweetest of ways. I came back to the present moment, and put the books back on their shelves.

Mappō wasn’t an obstacle to prevent but one to take into practice.

The next morning, I walked across the grass outside my home, the soles of my feet gently pressed upon beads of short-lived dew. I tended to the majestic rose bushes outside, hoping to help them to reach their full bloom of blush white clusters. While my mind was present, my actions were hopeful for tomorrow’s results. One nurtures their roses to later inhale their sweet fragrance; one plans a family trip to experience rest or laugh with their loved ones; one goes to college to graduate; one marches on the streets for a safer future. Mappō wasn’t telling me the world was ending, rather that Buddhism’s ideas would no longer be received. And here I was, in a time when Buddhism felt more trending than ever, and yet the world itself felt as if it were approaching its own death throes. I couldn’t tell if some scream within me was being stifled by self-care and sitting in the zendo. Every week felt like a countdown to a historic and ominous change, one I maybe was postponing reflection on, until mappō shined a light, shining in that characteristic way that Buddhism’s wisdom always has for me.

For all the advancements Buddhist institutions made with inclusion for transgender and nonbinary members, other areas of society were revealing second thoughts or giving in to extremist threats. An attachment for optimism, or maybe even a desperation for it, kept coming up for me.

Days later, I drove my wife and our daughter to a vacation spot at Letchworth State Park. We got soaked by a waterfall, kayaked in deep gorges, witnessed a bald eagle, and hiked among miles of thin, tall trees.

That night, I relayed Jim’s story of mappō to my wife around a fire, with my pacing and inflection in a timbre of millennialism. Our daughter was reading in the cabin nearby. In the silence that followed my talking, I glanced across at other cabins, seeing squares of glowing lights bobbing in the dark. Thumbs reflexively moved above these glowing objects in circular motions, like ferris wheels. The thumbs engaged with screens every few seconds. I felt sorrow stir within, as if the term mappō was hanging over me like an ominous rain cloud. I could grasp an individual losing their awareness, but mappō had me reckoning with the thought of a whole society losing it collectively, when too much was at stake. 

Being a parent stretched the sphere of my anxiety. I couldn’t suppress the truth of the “end times” our daughter might be inheriting, without any clear solutions or path forward. I couldn’t take comfort in a fantasy of everything just burning down. She deserved adults around her fixing their own messes, not leaving her with the biggest ones yet.

“But didn’t the Buddha,” my wife paused, and then resumed, “keep to his practice, Mary?” A fire within me lit a little brighter by my wife’s question. “And the centuries of Buddhists, during the age of decline, too?”

Something in me felt a little clearer then, a gulf of ideas so wide apart finally found a usable bridge. Mappō wasn’t an obstacle to prevent but one to take into practice. This is the practice: the present mind, the advancing decay, and the unexpected blossom. The mind witnesses whatever approaches, with compassionate actions emerging. My body kept trying to find a way out of mappō, or the reminder it served of the polycrises of our times. As fascist groups appeared unstoppable, as the peril of nuclear destruction narrowed, as disinfo denigrated my community, the path of loving-kindness and compassion was a process from which results could manifest. The path wasn’t to be abandoned, even if the dharma itself couldn’t keep going with us. Maybe that was the point here: The path comes first, over any attachments to aesthetics or history. We don’t choose to meditate only when despair is defeated, we meditate so hope can be generated from the process itself.

I was attempting to embalm Buddhism’s teachings; the point I was missing all this time was to take the teachings forward. I cannot look for a world where the dharma is always honored around me, but rather I must honorably become the dharma for my family and my polarized communities, no matter the atmosphere. I don’t have to choose activism over Zen, rather I can take the direct experience of Zen into my activism.

Staying on my compassionate path with my sanghas, I could hope to awaken, or be amongst others that may awaken, to some solution of which to leave with my daughter’s generation. Even the beginning of the Buddha’s enlightenment was surely something else’s end, something else’s mappō.