Liberating the Experience of Impermanence

Impermanence has been at the forefront of insight meditation and Buddhist philosophy all throughout the religion’s long and diverse history. Like mindfulness of the other two “marks” of existence (nonself and suffering), meditating on impermanence has proved to be profoundly liberating for practitioners across Buddhist traditions. Although Buddhists in all eras seem to agree on the efficacy of that practice, there has nevertheless been considerable disagreement throughout Buddhist history about the kinds of liberation that meditation on impermanence can produce.

One way to understand these disagreements is as a difference between dualistic accounts of liberation—those imagining the Buddhist ideal of nirvana as altogether beyond this impermanent world—and nondualistic accounts of Buddhist liberation—those that picture liberation as an enlightened, more skillful way of abiding in this impermanent world. Dualistic versions focus on the incomprehensible difference between an impermanent worldly life in samsara and an unchanging, unconditioned realm of nirvana. Nondualistic accounts, by contrast, focus attention on liberation within this conditioned, impermanent world, sometimes denying that there is anything unconditional and permanent to attain. There are, of course, many experiences of liberation described between and around these two poles, but these diametrically opposing positions are always somewhere near the surface. Both kinds of Buddhist practitioners meditate extensively on impermanence but do so for very different reasons, envisioning quite different outcomes.

Although there are certainly differences of view in the earliest Buddhist sutras, they tend to lean heavily toward an otherworldly conception of nirvana. Unlike virtually everything else, nirvana was thought to be asamskrita—“uncompounded” or “unconditioned”—and therefore altogether beyond the processes of birth and death that define the impermanent, unstable world in which we live. The crucial point here is that what many early Buddhist monastics sought to cultivate by meditating on impermanence was disillusionment with the world rather than interest in it. And sometimes, beyond disillusionment, a whole range of responses to the world were sought from dispassion and disregard to disgust and loathing.

The most ardent early practitioners undertook this meditation in charnel grounds, the graveyards of death, rather than in places of peace and beauty—beside a lake or in a shady garden—to accentuate displeasure with the world and turn their minds away from it. They sought to undermine “delight in existence,” knowing that the impermanent world of samsara is fiercely seductive even though laden with discontent and pain. They understood how the flashing movements of this world seduce us into attachments and misconceptions that tragically prolong suffering, death, and rebirth. Early meditations on impermanence were meant to redirect practitioners away from this unreliable, unconstrained world of coming and going and toward the unchanging calm of nirvana.

While not advocating for disillusionment, many contemporary Buddhist teachers and writers recognize that certain qualities of detachment from the pull of the world are required for profound practice—stepping back in the service of mindfulness without the need for rejection. In one way or another, these practitioners meditate on impermanence nondualistically. Here is Susan Murphy emphasizing the nonduality of impermanence when she writes: “Samsara and nirvana . . .  are unopposed . . . ” such that “the sacred order of things manifests not in some safe elsewhere but in impermanence itself” (“Why Love What You Will Lose,” Tricycle, March 20, 2025).

Just by virtue of opposing each other dualistically, dualism and nondualism can’t help but be nondual, inevitably entangled with each other.

This reimagining and revaluing of impermanence is not altogether new. Adopting several nondual inclinations in early layers of Buddhist experience, some Mahayana sutras and practices identify nirvana with samsara. Nirvana is not a static realm beyond this world of movement and interdependence. Following these potent insights, Chan/Zen adepts then drew on the worldly tendencies in Chinese culture to give the theoretical nondualism of South Asian Mahayana a deep grounding in ordinary life, while, in their own way, Tibetan tantric practices leaned in a similar direction. All these extensions of nondual Buddhism occurred, of course, right alongside various otherworldly, transcendent ways of envisioning the goal of practice. Just by virtue of opposing each other dualistically, dualism and nondualism can’t help but be nondual, inevitably entangled with each other.

Standing back to get perspective on this long history, one thematic way to picture the entire history of Buddhism is as a gradual and very complex journey from dualism toward nondualism, from awakening from this world to awakening in and to this world. If we contemplate the impermanence embedded in the historical movement of Buddhism, we can notice that what Buddhists have been doing ever so gradually throughout the long course of Buddhist history is liberating the contemplative experience of impermanence from its otherworldly implications by meditating on constant change and movement to more deeply understand themselves and the world, to live more skillfully in it, and to learn to love it in the most appropriate ways.

These meditations on impermanence reveal to us the dynamic complexity of our world and the always changing interconnections between all dimensions of it. They open our minds to the delusions of “separation” and “static isolation” that run through our ordinary assumptions. They allow us to viscerally sense the proximity and kinship that we could be experiencing with the rich diversity all around us. Although we have been moving toward a more comprehensive and more profound understanding of nondualism in all spheres of culture from science to politics, this vision is still filtering its way down into our everyday experience, gradually teaching us the two ethical poles of impermanence that we’ve learned from Buddhists—letting go and compassionate involvement, nonclinging and openhearted generosity. By liberating the awareness of impermanence from its role as something that we must strive to resist and overcome, we are freeing it to more thoroughly play the role that it has played throughout the extraordinary history of Buddhism—as a meditative catalyst for a more profound awareness of reality as it is.