vinasp wrote:Hi Ron,
Quote: "Any attachment /clinging to that which is impermanent will lead to suffering."
Could you please explain, briefly, what you mean by "impermanent"? Thanks!
Regards, Vincent.
All people, places, and things, including all of the Khandas/aggregates:
What we conventionally call a 'person' can be understood in terms of five aggregates, the sum of which must not be taken for a permanent entity, since beings are nothing but an amalgam of ever-changing phenomena… [W]ithout a thorough understanding of the five aggregates, we cannot grasp the liberation process at work within the individual, who is, after all, simply an amalgam of the five aggregates."
khandas defined here:
The five khandhas are bundles or piles of form, feeling, perception, fabrications, and consciousness. None of the texts explain why the Buddha used the word khandha to describe these things. The meaning of "tree trunk" may be relevant to the pervasive fire imagery in the canon — nibbāna being extinguishing of the fires of passion, aversion, and delusion — but none of the texts explicitly make this connection. The common and explicit image is of the khandhas as burdensome (§22). We can think of them as piles of bricks we carry on our shoulders. However, these piles are best understood, not as objects, but as activities, for an important passage (§7) defines them in terms of their functions. Form — which covers physical phenomena of all sorts, both within and without the body — wears down or "de-forms." Feeling feels pleasure, pain, and neither pleasure nor pain. Perception labels or identifies objects. Consciousness cognizes the six senses (counting the intellect as the sixth) along with their objects. Of the five khandhas, fabrication is the most complex. Passages in the canon define it as intention, but it includes a wide variety of activities, such as attention, evaluation (§14), and all the active processes of the mind. It is also the most fundamental khandha, for its intentional activity underlies the experience of form, feeling, etc., in the present moment.
source:
http://www.accesstoinsight.org/lib/study/khandha.html" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
They are all dependently arisen, which is to say that they are results, which have underlying root causes. For example our fabricated bodies, are constructed of atoms, molecules, macromolecules, cells, organs, subassemblies, and etc., which are constantly changing through the process of birth, aging, disease and death...therefore impermanent. Mental factors such as thoughts, feelings, emotions, perceptions, views, opinions are also dependently arisen, arising, dwelling for but a time and then passing away, and therefore impermanent.
None of these can be said to be a permanent self, are therefore each not-self, and in them no permanent self can be found. Transient phenomena and constantly changing processes can be found but no permanent self,and no permanent thing for that matter anywhere to be found in this samsaric universe built itself upon and dependently arisen from impermanent sub-processes all the way down to the level of energy, as in E=MC2.
Hope this helps.
Ron
Others, please feel free to jump in and clarify.