David Hinton on impermanence

And the same as a mountain rage grinding up out of the ground, soaring into the sky, and then disappearing grain by grain as erosion erases it back into nothingness. The thought comes and goes in five seconds, and the mountain range takes 500 million years to rise and fall, but it's the same movement.

It's simple enough to say this, of course, but actually inhabiting that truth is difficult. That's what Chinese culture was all about: the difficult trick of living inside constant change and identifying with it. Well, at least, that's the start of it. The depths begin there.

- The Sun, January 2015 issue