Buddha's Teaching : What is Dhamma ( Part- V )

5 To believe that all compound things are impermanent is Dhamma.

• This doctrine of impermanence has three aspects.
• There is the impermanence of composite things.
• There is the impermanence of the individual being.
• There is the impermanence of the self nature of conditioned things.
• The impermanence of composite things has been well explained by the great Buddhist philosopher Asanga. 
• " All things," says Asanga, " are produced by the combination of causes and conditions and have no independent noumenon of their own. When the combination is dissolved, their destruction ensures.
• " The body of a living being consists of the combination of four great elements, viz., earth, water, fire and air, and when this combination is resolved into the four component elements, dissolution ensues.
• "This is what is called the impermanence of a composite entity."
• Impermanence of the living individual is best described by the formula—being is becoming. 
• In this sense a being of a past moment has lived, but does not live nor will he live. The being of a future moment will live but has not lived nor does he live ; the being of the present moment does live but has not lived and will not live.
• In short, a human being is always changing, always growing. He is not the same at two different moments of his life.
• The third phase of the doctrine of impermanence is somewhat difficult for a common man to follow. 
• To realise that every living being will die sometime or other is a very easy matter to understand.
• But it is not quite so easy to understand how a human being can go on changing—-becoming— while he is alive. 
• "How is this possible?" The Buddha's answer was, "This is possible because all is impermanent." 
• This later on gave rise to what is called Sunnya Vad.
• The Buddhist Sunnyata does not mean nihilism out and out. It only means the perpetual changes occurring at every moment in the phenomenal world.
• Very few' realise that it is on account of Sunnyata that everything becomes possible ; without it nothing in the world would be possible. It is on the impermanence of the nature of all things that the possibility of all other things depends.
• If things were not subject to continual change but were permanent and unchangeable, the evolution of all of life from one kind to the other and the development of living things would come to a dead stop.
• If human beings died or changed but had continued always in the 'same state what would the result have been ? The progress of the human race would have come to a dead halt.
• Immense difficulty would have arisen if Sunnya is regarded as being void or empty.
• But this is not so. Sunnya is like a point which has substance but neither breadth nor length.
• All things are impermanent was the doctrine preached by the Buddha.
• What is the moral-of this doctrine of the Buddha? This is a much more important question.
• The moral of 'this doctrine of impermanence is simple. Do not be attached to anything. 
• It is to cultivate detachment, detachment from property, from friends, etc., that he said "All these are impermanent."