Once upon a time when he went to Ujjaini, the great yogi Sri Gorakhshanatha found the city plunged in mourning. The King’s wife had died. The King was berserk with grief at the cremation grounds. “Bring her back to life,” he kept wailing. Or else he threatened to climb the pyre. At this, the Master picked up a pitcher lying nearby and flung it to the ground, smashing it to smithereens. The Guru then squatted among the pieces; sobbing and lifting up the shards to his forehead, he moaned, “O my beloved pot. O please someone bring it back to me.”

Shocked by the Master’s lila, the King came back to his senses. “Why do you cry?” he enquired with newfound equanimity. “What has been undone cannot be redone.” Just as what is impermanent must not be confused with that which is everlasting, the Master replied. It’s avidya or ignorance which forces us to chase a mirage throughout our lives. Avidya, which is one of the core concepts of Buddhist and Hindu tradition, literally means “not seeing” because it’s supposed to blind you to the root cause of suffering (duhkha). Thus, avidya is synonymous not merely with lack of knowledge but with an almost wilful ignoring of reality. We call it ‘denial’ today. Everyday, for instance as you stand in front of the mirror to shave, you know that you’ve changed overnight!

Yet, in much of our daily lives, we act in ways that seem to be a desperate attempt to deny this inexorable fact of life. When you look at impermanence superficially, it might lead you to believe that it’s negative or inevitably sorrowful. Thus the Five Remembrances of the Buddha (“I am of the nature to age. There is no way to escape ageing” and so on) seem like grim reminders of our mortality. But, in fact, they’re a medicine, perhaps bitter at first, which is a compassionate and truthful reminder of the wonder and miracle of life as it is.

Change is inherently neither negative nor positive. It just is. This is the ‘thusness’ of things as they are that the Buddha points to. Impermanence is not a mere aspect of life, but its very essence. Without change, life would be impossible. “Never changing life” is, and can only ever be, a vacuous concept. The essence of Buddha’s insight is negative only in the sense that we do not exist in the way we imagine ourselves to exist. Thus Masters like Sakyamuni and Gorakshanatha exhort us to use impermanence, the reality of change, as the ground of practice to become happy.