‘Where Moth and Rust Consume’: Impermanence and the Gospel

I went for a walk the other day and couldn’t help but notice the signs that the season is changing around me. Gone are chirping cicadas and the sharp smells of high Summer’s grasses, replaced by the honking of geese heading north and the smell of fallen leaves. Change has also been afoot in my city. I found out last week that a staple Bloor Street restaurant had shut down, and it reminded me of all change I’ve seen in my neighborhood in the decade plus I’ve lived here. Of course, even if we are always nostalgic for the version of a city we experienced when we first moved there, it’s true that cities are always changing. And that’s because everything is always changing, whether we like it or not. We saw last week that Buddhism has this truth built right into the simplest distillation of its message, as the second of the Four Noble Truths. But what Christianity?

Impermanence in Buddhism

The Second Noble Truth taught by the Buddha is that the cause of suffering or dissatisfaction is our inability to accept that everything in life is impermanent. The solution to the problem then, as elucidated in the Third and Fourth Noble Truths, is the way of non-attachment grounded in a deep acceptance of impermanence.

Even something we perceive as permanent, like a mountain or continent, is truly not. This is to say nothing of the things we readily see as fleeting, like the weather or our thoughts. As Tarthang Tulku put it, “All the conditions and circumstances we count on, whether internal or external, are even now in transition” (Path of Heroes). He continues:

Impermanence is a function of Time, the monster that eats our moments one by one, stealing our pleasures and consuming our energy. Trying to hold onto even one emotion or state of mind is like hoping to grasp a rainbow: Our mental and emotional states change even before we can identify and respond to them. Again and again, we tell ourselves that what we value—our health, our friends, our youth, our work—will last, but gradually time strips them all away. As the years go by, relationships come to an end, family ties dissolve and take on new configurations, physical vitality declines, and opportunities become more elusive.

This is all simple fact of creaturely existence. But where we run into problems is that we relate to things, ideas, places, and people, as though they were permanent. So we become attached to possessions we think we cannot live without, or people who are themselves subject to changes in the bodies, interests, and values, or circumstances that can disappear with a single piece of bad news. As taught in the Diamond Sutra, life is nothing more than a flash of lightning or a bubble on the surface of a stream. Just as we know not to get attached to such momentary things, neither is it wise to get overly attached to anything in our lives, or even to our life itself. Change is inevitable, so fighting it is pure dukkha, suffering/unsatisfactoriness. For this reason, Buddhism has many traditional practices focused on witnessing or bringing to mind themes of death and decay, such as meditating on death, in ruins, or in the presence of dead bodies, and going to bed reminding themselves they may not live until morning.

Christian Response

Because impermanence is one of those ideas that is grounded in universal experiences of creaturely life, it’s a common theme in philosophical or wisdom traditions around the world. This is certainly true of the Jewish Wisdom tradition, which Christianity has inherited in our Scriptures:

• “In the beginning You laid the foundations of the earth, and the heavens are the work of Your hands. They will perish, but You remain; they will all wear out like a garment. Like clothing You will change them, and they will be passed on.” (Psalm 102.25f)
• “The grass withers, the flower fades, when the breath of the Lord blows upon it; surely the people are grass. The grass withers, the flower fades; but the word of our God will stand for ever” (Isaiah 40.7f)
• “For everything there is a season … a time to be born and a time to die …” (Ecclesiastes 3.1f)

The Ecclesiastes reference is particularly important since impermanence is a major theme of that work. The word most often translated into English as ‘vanity’, which frames the entire book (1.2), literally translates as ‘vapour’ or ‘mist’: It’s saying that all of the things that preoccupy our lives — work, love, play, politics — is ephemeral and insubstantial, nothing more than mist that will soon burn away.

The theme of impermanence is also found throughout the New Testament, with John 2.17 being a representative text: “The world is passing away, along with its desires; but whoever does the will of God remains forever” (cf., 2 Corinthians 4.18). And in the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus teaches:

Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust consume, and where thieves break in and steal. But store up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where moth and rust do not destroy, and where thieves do not break in and steal. (Matthew 6:19f)

But as much as all of these texts from throughout the Scriptures agree with Buddhism about the impermanence of earthly things, they use this not to teach impermanence as such, but to contrast the fleeting and unreliable things of the created world with the enduring and reliable things of God. Here, impermanence is a call to prioritize spiritual rather than earthly matters, and thereby the teaching promotes a life of faithfulness, trust, and hope in God’s promises. In other words, Buddhism teaches impermanence so we can accept how untethered we are in our existence, but Christianity (and Judaism before it) teaches impermanence so we choose to tether ourselves to God.

Conclusion

We’ve seen today that, while Buddhism and Christianity share the same observation about the world, they take it to very different places and put it to very different uses.

But that said, common ground returns in the practical ways the teachings are lived out. For both teachings promote a distrust and lack of attachment to the things of this world which are passing away, and which can be taken from us at any moment. And therein both promote equanimity and from this, a peace of heart and mind. While Buddhist response to losing a $20 bill might be to say “Ah well, I’d just spend it anyway,” and a Christian response might be to say, “God will provide somehow,” in the end, neither are fussed with losing the money.