Permanence of Objects and Impermanence

 

During Chinese New Year holidays, I stayed in Hong Kong and did not have any special arrangement.  I tried to finish the few books that I began but failed to finish last year.  It turned out that I did not show much improvement in the New Year.  It took much endurance to finish a boring book, especially the one that you were not interested in finding out what the story was going to happen.  My mind drifted, from what had happened in the past year to what is going to happen in the coming year.  That was too wide a scope even for mind-drifting.  So I tried to narrow the scope to a month’s time.  That was: what to write for the Editorial of the News in February.  Even that was not easy.  It did not mean that nothing worth to be discussed.  On the contrary, there were too many happenings from the Council of HKMA, to the Medical Council, to the medical profession, and, to Hong Kong.  However, most of them were depressing and might not be a good topic to start a new year.  It is time to talk about weather.

The beauty of Chinese New Year is that you would see relatives whom you might seldom see otherwise.  I played with two 7-month-old babies during the holidays.  In return to my lai-see, they gave me their intestinal viruses.  I got gastro-intestinal upset for two days, though I still managed to attend barbecue gathering and hot-pot dinner.  Well, this part is irrelevant.

One of the small tricks I liked to show the non-medical relatives was the demonstration of sense of object permanence.  Babies like to grasp objects, swing them, and then hit against the table, and then against their heads.  Common objects include ceramic spoons, mobile phones, and every valuable and fragile thing they can get hold of.  My way to confiscate the object so as to protect the baby was to cover his eyes with my one hand, and then quickly seized it from him.  Paediatrics teachings from the old days told me that at the age before 8 months, most babies did not have the idea of permanence of objects.  That meant when the object disappeared from his visual field, it was gone, and was never there.  There was no cause-and-effect relationship for the past, the present and the future of an object.  After some time, when the circuit in the brain developed, and from learning through daily experience, the baby grasped the “reality” that objects would remain there for a considerable period of time.  This is called permanence of objects.

Another regular function of my Chinese New Year holidays is to visit Po Lam Monastery in Lantau Island with my classmates from Buddhist Studies.  This year, after I played my usual trick of object permanence with the two babies, I went to Po Lam the following day.  While having vegetarian lunch, I recalled the teaching of the Buddha.  The 3 marks of existence are: suffering, non-self, and impermanence.  Not only that all conditioned things are impermanent, their mere existence are doubted and negated.  It is through the delusion of the existence of a “self” that we grasp on all these in-fact-impermanent things.  As an unavoidable consequence, we would suffer loss, because things will perish, including ourselves.  Thus, we suffer.  The Buddha has claimed that his teaching covers only sufferings and the cessation of sufferings.  He has come to the real understanding of existence and he points out the way to the cessation of the inevitable sufferings.  However, it is not easy to achieve.  It might take the whole life time to practice diligently, or some might rarely get sudden enlightenment on the special teaching by a Zen master.   

But wait, how about the 7-month-old babies?  At that point of time, they know the presence of an object.  However, they do not have the sense that the object is permanent, at least for the period of time concerned.  It is only through observation day in and day out that they get the impression of persistence and permanence.  Of course this sense is essential for our daily living.  Otherwise, we cannot even identify our parents and look after our own belongings.  Separation anxiety in fact might be one kind of pathological conditions where the sense of permanence fails to develop and to mature.

The above was the irony that I came to after the holidays.  Life is like this.  We learn, we gather, we collect, and we treasure many things and phenomena so as to adapt ourselves to living.  We treat these as “realities”.  However, these might be the source of suffering especially when we face losses.  Even with the right view and practice, it is difficult to remove the hard-learnt and deep-seated experiences.

(Source: HKMA News February 2014)