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Law, Tolerance and Society

A Buddhistic Contemplation of Impermanence from Death Row

Shawn Harte on a fleeting dream.

“Everything subject to origination is subject also to dissolution,” warns the Buddha, insightfully foreshadowing the Second Law of Thermodynamics (the ineluctable tendency of a system towards disorder) in a way whose simplicity would impress even a modern physicist. This law of anitya, or ‘impermanence’, proclaims that all contingent existence is transitory. Everything is in an interminable state of flux, continuously transforming into something else, eternally decaying and rearranging, and nothing endures forever. Material objects are merely momentary configurations of causes, effects, parts, processes, conditions, forms, names, functions. Continuously reconfiguring, nothing is in the exact state it was in the previous instant.

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