Buddhist Commentary

Few nights back I was reading the central Mahayana text of the Shurangama Sutra.
The sutra describes the teachings of the Buddha in the city of Shravasti where the King Prasenajit holds a feast to honour the Tathagata.
The Shurangama Sutra forms the core of Mahayana Buddhism and I was amazed when in Volume II of the sutra I came upon this conversation between the King and the Tathagata.
I found the answer to what has intrigued myself for very long.

In the sutra the King Prasenajit requests the Buddha to explain the ground of the original mind that which is never born and never dies.
The Buddha asks the King since he is not dead how does he realize that he will ever die. The King explains that since his childhood through his youth and now in his maturity he has witnessed the changes in himself which signifies decay. The changes are ceaseless and continuous and this is how he is certain that these ceaseless changes must lead him finaly to Death.

The Buddha told the Great King, "By watching the ceaseless changes of these transformations, you awaken and know of your perishing, but do you also know that at the time of perishing there is something in your body which does not become extinct?"

King Prasenajit put his palms together and said to the Buddha, "I really do not know." The Buddha said, "I will now show you the nature which is neither produced and nor extinguished.

"Great King, how old were you when you saw the waters of the Ganges?” The King said, "When I was three years old my compassionate mother led me to visit the goddess Jiva. We passed a river, and at the time I knew it was the waters of the Ganges." The Buddha said, "Great King, you have said that when you were twenty you had deteriorated from when you were ten. Day by day, month-by-month, year by year until you reached sixty, in thought after thought there has been change. Yet when you saw the Ganges River at the age of three, how was it different from when you were thirteen?"

The King said, "It was no different from when I was three, and even now when I am sixty-two it is still no different." The Buddha said, "Now you are mournful that your hair is white and your face wrinkled. In the same way that your face is definitely more wrinkled then it was in your youth, has the seeing with which you look at the Ganges aged, so that it is old now but was young when you looked at the river as a child in the past?"

The King said, "No, World Honored One."

The Buddha said, "Great King, your face is wrinkled, but the essential nature of your seeing will never wrinkle. What wrinkles is subject to change. What does not wrinkle does not change."

What changes will perish, but what does not change is fundamentally free of production and extinction. How could it be subject to your birth and death?

I felt very peaceful and reassured with the profound wisdom of the Tathagata and remembered his beautiful poem about the ephemeral nature of our reality;

"And so he should regard the ego's temporal world -

'As a falling star or Venus chastened by the dawn,

A bubble in a stream, a phantom dream,

A candle-flame that flickers and is gone.'"