Anityawada: 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 are now 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 Katulkar is a Research Scholar in social science.