Impermanence is Buddha-nature
Madelon Bolling, August 9, 2026
They never told us . . .
“Impermanence is Buddha-nature.” Dogen
“Death is like the moon in the sky. It doesn’t disappear.
It only changes form.” Ryokan
Case 55: Daowu’s Condolence
Daowu and Jianyuan went to a house to pay condolences. Yuan tapped on the coffin and asked, “Living or Dead?”
Daowu said, “Living I won’t say. Dead I won’t say.”
Jianyuan said, “Why won’t you say?
Daowu said, “Won’t say! Won’t say!”
During their return trip, Jianyuan said, “Heshang, please tell me right away. If you don’t, I’ll hit you.”
Daowu said, “You may hit me if you like, but I won’t say. Jianyuan hit him.
Later after Daowu had died, Jianyuan went to Shishuang and told him this story. Shuang said, “Living I won’t say. Dead I won’t say.”
Jianyuan asked, “Why won’t you say?”
Shishuang said, “Won’t say! Won’t say!” With these words Jianyuan awakened.
There is a story, perhaps apocryphal, perhaps not, of a famous Zen master in the US, having been invited to address a college gathering. As he was preparing his talk, he ran it past one of his senior students, saying: “You all gonna die. . .” The student said, “well, Roshi, it might be better for this audience if you make the opening more friendly, welcoming them to the occasion…” So, beginning his talk, he said, “Hello! . . . You all gonna die.”
Think about what you subconsciously expect from life. From an age before I could articulate it, there was a panorama of possibility . . . If you do this (practice hard, read a lot, get good grades, do as you’re told) then all possible positive outcomes that you can imagine will be yours . . . for the rest of your life. Which to me, meant forever. But they did not tell you that regardless of your behavior, your preparation or practice . . . you will gradually (or suddenly) lose your abilities, your contact with—everything—and you . . . will . . . die.
You cannot stop your life, you know. You are always changing into something else. Always, incessantly. Shunryu Suzuki
That which we expect and look for in life—hardly ever arrives as we might imagine. For instance, a family outing having to do with Dad’s work: as a music teacher, led to listening to what seemed like hours of high school chorus performances (boring to me as a 7 or 8-year-old), followed by terror when we had to perform alone. Or the dance recital – I was a ballerina in blue with white dogwood flowers for a headband. So were the other girls in my dance class. I was not impressed with the costumes or the performance. Mostly what I liked was the fitness that ballet created in me: strong legs! –and so a competitive streak was fueled. But professional sports were not in the picture: the only skill I had was artistic, or so I was told. Besides, there was something my parents valued about music and dance and it didn’t extend as far as sports, which were looked on as a lesser endeavor.
I would have benefited from a lesson in mortality, rather than lessons in pleasing the adults around me. Reading was an escape, though, and that took me to a career including advanced degrees. But there was nothing on the other side of that trajectory. I did not want to be a professor of anything, nor did the doctorate in musicology point toward anything else that interested me. I was interested in horses, animals in general, and plants, and the woods.
In fact, and more to the point, once we were driving down the Oregon coast—which in itself made me happy—the dense coastal forest signaled comfort to me. But then, a deer jumped on a collision course with our car. My dad couldn’t avoid her, and she died rather quickly. This was traumatic for him—a strict vegetarian, and he was the agent of this deer’s death—not only that, but she was also obviously a nursing mother, and her fawn was nowhere in sight. We pulled off the road to recover, trying to understand how this could have happened—evidence of unfairness in the running of the world, I thought. The family—we three kids, Mom and Dad, took a wander off into the woods. I felt the great alders as a presence I could talk with, and I asked, “Why? Why him, who so carefully avoided killing?” but I received no answer. This was just unfairness writ large. But maybe a slight openness was made, then, to the unavoidable. Reminds me of the koan: (case 98 from The Record of Tung-shan):
One time when the Master was washing his bowls, he saw two birds contending over a frog.
A monk who also saw this asked, “Why does it come to that?”
The Master replied, “It’s only for your benefit, Acarya.”
Each moment is all being, is the entire world. Reflect now whether any being or any world is left out of the present moment. (ZenForLife.Com2025/08/04)
Impermanence is Buddha-nature. (Dogen)
Zen masters often speak of mujo—the truth that all conditioned things are impermanent. Flowers wither, seasons change, bodies age and eventually die. Nothing remains fixed or permanent.
I also heard about a young cousin of mine when I was 8 or 9, who had died in a car crash. She was sitting in the front seat, and the story was that she went through the windshield. (This was way before seat belts were required.) We were not allowed to think about it or ask questions. The topic was changed quickly and skillfully, as I recall.
My father was mostly silent about death, but his views were evident whenever we ate. If Mom had engineered a non-vegetarian meal, we were treated to remarks about the “dead cow” or whatever she had put on our dinner table. Unfortunately that and some other habits of punishment and sarcasm set the rest of the family against him. When he was 18, my brother tried vegetarianism for awhile, taking it up along with dad’s non-combatant views on warfare. Still, on the whole, we simply didn’t talk about death, even when relatively simple losses faced us such as the goldfish found floating in the tank, my brother’s lost hamster, an unlucky robin, or when a baby bunny that mom had found and rescued, died.
These designations “lost” or “unlucky”—betray a common cultural assumption about death: that it is more or less the fault of the entity involved. We tend to say, “If only s/he had done something differently,” or moved instead of standing still. . . implying that they would have survived. When my brother died of pancreatic cancer, I immediately had the thought, “Well, his diet was probably to blame” as though it were somehow his fault. Nobody said, “Well, whatever . . . this is going to happen to you, too.” No. As he points out in his wonderful essay “Before tomorrow,” Jim Palmer said, “We keep believing that our real life is waiting just beyond the horizon of the one we are actually living.”
I recognize this attitude and now think it is so deeply woven into our assumptions about the nature of things that breaking free from it seems well-nigh impossible. Yet here I am, criticizing virtually everyone’s assumptions about life, taking my own case as evidence. I may be wrong. Maybe I am just blind to the contrary view of how the world works. And yielding to that impulse, I assume that you all have similar experiences.
“Death is like the moon in the sky. It doesn’t disappear. It only changes form.” — Ryōkan
Form and substance are like dew on the grass, the fortunes of life are like a dart of lightning—emptied in an instant, vanished in a flash.” (https://global.sotozen-net.or.jp/eng/practice/sutra/pdf/03/c01.pdf)
After the loss of his baby daughter, Issa wrote:
The world of dew
is the world of dew.
And yet, and yet ……
How deeply this ephemeral life reaches into us! What pain and anguish does grief grant us, in the presence of love. And these too are of the present moment or one of its possible forms. Life and death are one phenomenon—we cannot have one without the other. To the extent that we can perceive this—however much we may wish things were otherwise, we can rest—a wound open and bleeding is just what it is.
Impermanence is Buddha-nature. Dogen