Anyone can build a house of wood and bricks, but the Buddha
taught that that sort of home is not our real home, it’s only nominally ours.
It’s home in the world and it follows the ways of the world. Our real home is
inner peace. An external, material home may well be pretty but it is not very
peaceful. There’s this worry and then that, this anxiety and then that. So we
say it’s not our real home, it’s external to us. Sooner or later we’ll have to
give it up. It’s not a place we can live in permanently because it doesn’t
truly belong to us, it belongs to the world. Our body is the same. We take it
to be a self, to be ‘me’ or ‘mine’, but in fact it’s not really so at all, it’s
another worldly home. Your body has followed its natural course from birth, and
now that it’s old and sick, you can’t forbid it from being that. That’s the way
it is. Wanting it to be any different would be as foolish as wanting a duck to
be like a chicken. When you see that that’s impossible – that a duck must be a
duck and a chicken must be a chicken, and that the bodies have to get old and
die – you will find courage and energy. However much you want the body to go on
lasting, it won’t do that.
The Buddha said:
Aniccā vata saṅkhārā
Impermanent, alas, are all conditions,
Uppāda-vaya-dhammino
Subject to rise and fall.
Uppajjitvā nirujjhanti
Having arisen, they cease.
Tesaṃ vūpasamo sukho.
Their stilling is bliss.
(Ajahn Chah)
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