No time to waste: Tony D’Souza’s Thought for the Week

‘You cannot trust your possessions or your plans.’

The old man was dying and everybody knew it. He had been dying for some time. The food poisoning was slowly taking its toll on his frail eighty-year-old body. He lay exhausted beneath two trees as the sun beat down. 

Suddenly, as he sensed his last breath was near, he sat up and addressed the assembled monks: ‘If you have any questions ask them now, as I am soon to pass.’

There was complete silence.

‘It may be that out of respect you do not ask. If that is so, speak to a friend and get them to ask.’ 

Again, they all remained silent. 

Ananda, the monk closest to the Buddha, said, ‘It is wonderful, Reverend Sir! I have faith that in this congregation of monks, not a single one has a doubt or uncertainly in respect to The Buddha, the Doctrine and the Order, the Path or the course of conduct.’

Then the ‘blessed one’ addressed the monks for the last time: ‘Now, O monks, I take my leave of you. All the constituents of being are transitory. Work out your salvation with diligence.’

It was 480 BCE and those were the last words the Buddha ever spoke. They are words of profound significance. Everything is transitory. Everything is impermanent. Nothing lasts, and nothing can be trusted to last. Experience is not a reliable guide. An eighteen-year-old may confidently say, ‘There is a very high probability I will wake up tomorrow,’ but a hundred-year-old man can say, ‘But I have been waking up every morning for ninety-nine years. The sheer weight of my experience gives me a much higher probability of waking up tomorrow.’ 

There is no refuge in evidence, still less in time. I have lived for seven decades but it feels like only yesterday I was playing football at school. Now, I can barely run for the bus.

‘Work out your salvation with diligence.’

‘Everything is impermanent.’

Time seems to run faster the older you get. You think you have time, but you don’t. Time is not a ticking clock. It is not a dripping tap. It is a torrent. It is a foaming white water sweeping us and everything else in its path. Sometimes we cling to a rock, but soon we find it is covered in slime and we can’t hold on. We lose our grip and are swept away.

None of us can know when we are going to die. Jesus warns us in a parable of the rich man who yielded an abundant harvest. ‘I have no place to store my crops’, he thought. ‘This is what I’ll do. I will tear down my barns and build bigger ones. Then I’ll say to myself, “You have plenty of grain laid up for many years. Take life easy. Eat, drink and be merry.”’ But God said to him, ‘You fool! This very night your life will be demanded from you. Then who will get what you have prepared for yourself?’

You cannot trust your possessions or your plans. ‘Work out your salvation with diligence.’ Nothing else matters, because everything is passing away and none of us has any time to waste.

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Comments

Memento mori
Written over old tombs
Nothing to see here

 

By bronxite1910 on 2025 06 26

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